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The carbon removal plant proposed for Sweetwater County landed a new customer: Microsoft.
CarbonCapture Inc., the California-based direct air capture developer behind Project Bison, announced the deal Wednesday. But negotiations started about six months ago, right around when the company — and its partner on the storage side, Frontier Carbon Solutions — went public with the project, said CarbonCapture CEO Adrian Corless.
Project Bison is currently the largest planned carbon removal project in the country. (Other direct air capture pioneers may try to compete for that title in the coming years as the technology starts to mature.)
Microsoft, one of the few large U.S. companies with a commitment to advancing carbon removal, “is one of those buyers that is basically setting sort of industry expectations and standards around how they do due diligence and how they measure the efficiency of carbon removal projects,” Corless said. “So having them buy from us is obviously a validation of the kind of work we’re doing with Project Bison.”
The facility is designed to be built in increments, then scaled up as much, or as little, as its site can support. CarbonCapture and Frontier Carbon Solutions are on track, Corless said, to start sucking some carbon dioxide out of the air and injecting it underground next year as they build toward a target of 5 million tons per year — slightly more carbon than is emitted annually by a typical coal-fired power plant — by 2030.
Microsoft has scrutinized the companies’ plans over the last several months. Corless believes the tech giant, drawn to the prospect of scalability, “really bought into the fact that the ingredients were there to make a successful project in Wyoming.” Geology was an important factor, he said, but so were things like Wyoming’s expansive energy strategy and the public’s openness to new energy development.
There’s a new frontier in the world of higher education — artificial intelligence. More specifically, it’s AI that can generate text like ChatGPT. The technology is capable of writing whole essays just by asking it a question or specifying a topic, and can sometimes be hard to detect when it’s used because the AI creates individual responses each time, no two are identical.
“Purchasing DAC carbon removal credits is an important part of Microsoft’s pursuit of permanent, durable carbon removal,” said Phillip Goodman, director of Microsoft’s carbon removal portfolio, in a statement. “This agreement with CarbonCapture helps us move toward our carbon negative goal, while also helping to catalyze the growth of the direct air capture industry as a whole.”
Microsoft’s cofounder, Bill Gates, who stepped down from the company’s board three years ago, has spoken openly for years about his support for carbon removal. He described his personal investments in early direct air capture projects — which he said he supports both because he believes in the technology and because he wants to offset his large carbon footprint — in his 2021 book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”
Gates is also the founder and chairman of TerraPower, the company that aims to build an advanced nuclear reactor in Kemmerer within a decade. Its backers believe such reactors will serve as an important stepping stone as the rest of the country looks to reduce carbon emissions.
Microsoft announced shortly before Gates’s resignation in 2020 that it would capture more carbon than it produced by 2030 through a combination of internal reductions and purchases of carbon credits from entities like Project Bison.
“It’s pretty cool to be part of Microsoft’s vision for basically being a carbon-negative company,” Corless said. He did not disclose any details about the arrangement, such as the number of tons Microsoft will buy or how much it agreed to pay.
CarbonCapture and Frontier Carbon Solutions secured several smaller buyers before finalizing the deal with Microsoft. They are in talks with other high-profile companies, Corless said, and expect more big names to follow.
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A proposed direct air capture facility in Wyoming could bring hundreds of jobs and a new source of revenue, beginning as soon as 2023.
A pair of U.S. technology companies plan to begin operating the first-of-its-kind facility by 2023.
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