Technology may not solve the climate crisis, but that hasn’t stopped a wide variety of new techno-fixes from appearing in recent years, from carbon capture and storage to solar geoengineering.

One of the latest is direct air capture (DAC) – a technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

There are now 200 such projects in operation around the world now, up from 150 a year ago, and only a handful a decade ago.

“In the last five years, it’s gotten a lot of attention, more attention than any of the other carbon removal solutions,” says Courtni Holness, managing policy advisor at Carbon180, an environmental non-profit that advocates for the use of DAC.

The organization describes direct air capture as “one of the most notable carbon removal pathways today,” though it emphasizes that it is a tool to be deployed alongside – not instead of – traditional carbon mitigation methods such as reforestation.

Unlike carbon capture and storage (CCS), which captures carbon right at the stack where it is emitted, direct air capture is more akin to a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks in ambient air that has only contains 0.04 percent of carbon dioxide. A range of techniques are then used to strip that carbon out of the air by binding it to chemical solvents or sorbents.

Most of that compressed carbon can then be piped and stored deep underground in geologic formations or saline reservoirs.

Smaller amounts can also be sold to be added to beverages, concrete or sustainable aviation fuels, creating a carbon products market that could potentially be worth USD 1 trillion, according to Carbon180.

Who is funding direct air capture?

Government policies and financial incentives are the biggest sources of support and investment in direct air capture.

The European Union, for example, is setting up a carbon-purchasing scheme to help meet its target of removing 50 million tons of carbon annually by 2030, which Holness says “really helps create demand for a lot of the project developers.”

Similarly, the Canadian government is offering a 60-percent transferable investment tax credit, which can be sold on to larger firms looking to reduce their tax burden.

In the United States, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act gave companies a tax credit of USD 180 per ton of carbon captured and permanently stored. This policy has so far survived the Trump presidency’s efforts to dismantle other climate mitigation projects such as solar and wind energy.

How effective is direct air capture?

Despite growing interest and investment in direct air capture, some experts are unconvinced that it’s an effective climate solution.

Anika Juhn, an energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), believes the technology “is not scalable to the degree that would make it meaningful.”

While DAC technology is still being developed and experiments are ongoing, “a lot of what is out there in terms of pilot, small-scale and even medium-scale projects just don’t do that much,” she adds.

DAC sites that are already operational – the vast majority in Europe and North America – don’t actually capture much carbon after accounting for the energy and resources needed to run machines that capture and process this carbon, Juhn explains.

Not only is direct air capture not living up to the bold projections its proponents have made, but it barely makes a dent in global carbon emissions, which amounted to 37.8 gigatonnes in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The 2024 State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report found that out of the 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere annually, “novel CDR methods,” which include DAC, were responsible for only 1.3 million tonnes – less than 0.1 percent of the total.

On the other hand, land use change and forestry activities – primarily afforestation and reforestation – were by far the biggest contributors to carbon removal.

Last year, an article in Icelandic newspaper Heimildin threw some light onto those disappointing figures. The article looked at the two DAC plants installed in Iceland by Swiss company Climeworks, a global leader in the carbon dioxide removal field.

Both powered by geothermal energy, they were supposed to remove a total of 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year but were pulling out far less in reality.

Climeworks co-founder Jan Wurzbacher admitted in a LinkedIn post that the smaller of the two plants, Orca, had only removed 953 tonnes instead of the planned 4,000, and Mammoth – the world’s largest DAC plant, with an annual removal capacity of 36,000 tonnes – just 105.

“The difference between theoretical and actual output is due to various factors such as planned and unplanned down-times, weather, filtering losses, and the deduction of grey emissions and has been documented on our website,” he wrote.

What are the drawbacks of direct air capture?

One common problem appears to be plaguing most, if not all, DAC projects: target removal numbers are high, and they’re not being lived up to.

And despite the criticisms facing its two plants in Iceland, Climeworks is planning to develop large-scale projects in Kenya that it says could launch in 2028 and eventually remove as much as 1 million tons per year.

Meanwhile, Stratos, a project in Texas headed by 1PointFive, a company owned by Occidental Petroleum, promises to capture 500,000 tonnes annually once operational, but its opening schedule has been delayed.

“The technologies are at a very low TRL [technology readiness level],” says Benjamin Sovacool, director of the Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston University. “They have not yet reached megatonne scale, although they’re trying.”

Together with more than two dozen other scientists, Sovacool carried out an expert elicitation exercise based on 125 interviews with carbon removal experts and entrepreneurs, the results of which were published in Energy and Environmental Science last year.

One of the questions they were asked, he says, was when they thought direct air capture would be widespread.

“By widespread, we chose an arbitrary threshold of 20 percent,” he explains. “When will the global energy system see 20 percent of its deployment? And the average answer was 2052.”

Another challenge around direct air capture is its potentially massive environmental footprint.

Sovacool’s team found that if deployed at the projected rate using natural gas, DAC could consume up to 80 percent of global energy demand by 2080.

“That’s a massive number in a world already with energy poverty and energy scarcity. Can we really put 80 percent of energy needs to just capturing CO2, rather than just not emitting it in the first place?”

Companies are still working on finding climate-friendly sources of power to run their facilities, such as wind and solar, but as Juhn points out, these resources could be much better used.

“What if we just use those renewable resources, which are expensive, and put them into the grid, reducing the amount of CO₂ that we’re actually putting into the atmosphere?” she asks.

Even more worryingly, some fossil fuel companies are using DAC for enhanced oil recovery – a method to essentially squeeze out the last remaining barrels of oil from aging wells, thus releasing even more carbon into the atmosphere.

Is carbon removal a panacea, or a distraction?

Finally, there’s the question facing all carbon removal technologies: that of moral hazard. If we can just remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, why do we even need to stop burning fossil fuels?

Direct air capture creates what Sovacool calls mitigation deterrence, “where it deters our innate ability to mitigate because we think we can rely on it later and allows for greenwashing and delay.”

Proponents and critics agree on one point: whether the technology is deployed or not, it’s no alternative to drastically reducing emissions. “They need to go hand in hand,” says Holness.

Policies and funding should be supporting the development and deployment of DAC in the context of safe storage, emissions reductions and transparency, she says – not enabling fossil fuels.

Ultimately, says Sovacool, DAC “is one of the few technologies we have that actually can reverse climate change.

“Unlike many of the others, this can actually draw down CO₂ from the atmosphere in ways that don’t involve things like ocean iron fertilization or sunshades in space.”