Wyoming will soon have miles of carbon removal

The Future. A direct-air carbon removal project, dubbed “Project Bison,” will be in operation in Wyoming at the end of next year. The goal is to capture millions of tons of CO2 per year and create thousands of jobs in Wyoming that could replace dwindling industries, like coal, in the state. Considering that we emitted over 36 billion tons of CO2 last year, expect more ventures like Project Bison to pop up all over open land in Middle America.

Fields of green
Per Fast Company, Wyoming will soon be the home of the largest carbon-renewal project in the world.

• Project Bison, created by CarbonCapture and Frontier Carbon Solutions, is a field of “dozens of shipping container-sized boxes” that can pull CO2 from the atmosphere, liquefy it, and then store it in wells thousands of feet underground for permanent storage.
• The project, which will be ready to go by the end of 2023, will be able to remove 5 million metric tons of CO2 per year (the amount of emission produced by a million gas-powered cars) by 2030.
• The project will ultimately be funded through a “carbon removal” service,” where customers (especially big corporations) can pay to offset their emissions.

Of course, the entire system also runs on clean energy.

Atmosphere vacuums
It’s astounding that such a large direct-air capture project is set to launch so soon, considering that the first of its kind just opened up in Iceland last year. To start, that facility is set to only capture 4,000 tons of CO2 per year… demonstrating just how fast this technology is scaling.

Project Bison is able to get up and running so quickly because of two factors: a group called Frontier Climate (composed of leaders of major companies like Alphabet and Stripe) has put aside a $1 billion fund for carbon removal from new startups, and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act gave the project a fresh infusion of funds to go into hyperdrive.