The intersection of carbon removal and local air pollution

Last November, I stood in front of an audience of Southwest Louisiana residents who were hearing, some for the first time, about a proposed direct air capture (DAC) hub that the Department of Energy (DOE) was considering funding in their region. Many people in attendance had lived in Calcasieu Parish their whole lives and knew firsthand that when industry and government officials come to town, there’s reason to be suspicious. At the time, I was working on behalf of the Department, and my team and I were tasked with explaining the proposed DAC project, connecting its impacts to the lived experiences of the local community.

What I heard from the audience was concern about food insecurity, dilapidated infrastructure, and air pollution in their neighborhood — issues that have persisted over decades amidst unmet promises of change from the private and public sectors alike. Calcasieu Parish is just a two hour drive from what is known as “Cancer Alley,” a part of the country infamous for its high rates of cancer, asthma, and other pollution-fueled public health issues that disproportionately impact Black residents.

Air quality, health impacts, and carbon removal

Many of the community members I met in Calcasieu Parish knew someone who had cancer, asthma, or seizures exacerbated by poor air quality and pollution. These conditions are unacceptable, leaving generations of families in need of expensive medical care on top of the emotional and psychological harm of feeling that even the air they breathe is not safe.

When they talk about local air pollution, these residents usually aren’t talking about carbon dioxide (CO₂) particles that fuel climate change — rather, they mention pollutants like sulfur dioxide (SO_x) and nitrogen dioxide (NO_x), among others, that create hazardous air conditions with local health impacts. Yet local air pollution is a critical concern that intersects with carbon removal projects, especially direct air capture (DAC), in complex ways.

Removing CO₂ from the atmosphere requires very different chemical processes than removing SO_x and NO_x. Carbon removal companies aren’t willfully opting to ignore these non-CO₂ air pollutants, it’s just a totally different problem to remove them: most DAC companies focus their technology and sorbents — chemically speaking — to be super attractive to CO₂ molecules, specifically.

So when a carbon removal project comes to a community overburdened by poor air quality to build a project that can filter the air, it’s hard for residents to hear that it won’t solve their existing air quality problems. The carbon removal industry needs to be responsive to this dynamic and support local communities and environmental justice (EJ) stakeholders’ efforts to improve local air quality.

At the intersection of these issues is also skepticism — founded or not — about the effect of siting carbon removal projects in parts of the country with historic air pollution issues.

For instance, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) has expressed concernopens in a new tab that carbon removal projects might contribute to cumulative burdens and pushed the administration to curb their investments in carbon removal accordingly. Doing so would put the US — and the world — at significant risk of not being able to mitigate climate change in line with climate science targets which require carbon removalopens in a new tab. But WHEJAC’s concerns underscore how important it is for the carbon removal industry to grapple with non-CO₂ pollutants, and we have some ideas about how that could look.

The role of transparency and data in building trust

As a first step to start building trust, carbon removal companies, those working on DAC technologies in particular, should track and publicly report the non-CO₂ pollutant impacts of their projects. At the very least, companies should transparently prove that direct air capture (or any other carbon removal) projects don’t further exacerbate existing air quality problems.

Companies should work closely with community members and citizen scientists to understand existing efforts towards local air pollution tracking, and where possible, offer their infrastructure — like air quality monitors — in support of those programs. This type of data collection would not only provide a direct benefit to local clean air advocates, it would also create a stronger foundation for the carbon removal sector as a whole to make data-backed arguments about the local pollution impacts of our field.

This work should be led by carbon removal developers themselves — and some have already startedopens in a new tab. Developers should proactively engage with host communities and ask local stakeholders and EJ leaders what local pollutants they are worried about in their community and plan to track those. If this type of transparency becomes an industry norm, there would be real data to underpin the entire conversation about carbon removal impacts on non-CO₂ pollutants, like NO_x and SO_x.

I know firsthand that this data would have gone a long way in creating a more productive dialogue in my engagements in Calcasieu Parish.

Beyond industry leading the way, policymakers can incentivize this type of reporting, too. DOE’s Community Benefit Planopens in a new tab guidance should include the collection and dissemination of non-CO₂ pollutants data in their scoring rubric and criteria, incentivizing carbon removal companies applying for federal dollars to prioritize it. The Carbon Removal Alliance plans to explore programs along these lines, asking offices at DOE like the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) and Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) to start tracking non-CO₂ pollutant impacts for carbon removal projects that they fund.

These policy levers would be a step in the right direction for building trust between EJ stakeholders and carbon removal companies, and supporting efforts to improve air quality in overburdened US communities. Rhetoric about community benefits is not enough. The carbon removal sector must equip itself with data-backed evidence that carbon removal isn’t worsening local pollution and explore pathways to build local infrastructure for tracking and reporting non-CO₂ pollutants. The path toward wide-scale carbon removal deployment is paved by trust. Here is an area where we can do better to build it.

Photo by Kouji Tsuru/Unsplash