Wyoming Dodged A Bullet On Carbon Capture Plant

Direct Air Capture of CO2 was proposed for the state of Wyoming a few years ago, but the deal fell apart in 2024.

An end to subsadies and tax breaks by the Trump administration might just put the final nail in the coffin of this project.

The system would have looked like a giant air conditioning unit. But rather than cooling air, it was supposed to draw air through, capture and store the CO2 it came across, and release everything else.

All of this was supposed to offset CO2 put out by Wyoming's coal and gas power plants in an effort to fight "human-caused climate change."

As it turns out, the system would have never worked, and we don't need to capture CO2 in the first place.

An article in CleanTechnica by Michael Barnard, “Climeworks DAC & Fiscal Collapse & The Brutal Reality Of Pulling Carbon From The Sky“, documents the failure of another anti-CO2 program. The article begins:

In 2024, Climeworks’ direct air capture (DAC) Mammoth plant in Iceland captured just 105 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

That’s not per day, not per week, that’s total, across the year.

For context, that’s less than the annual tailpipe emissions from a dozen long-haul trucks, or roughly one-thousandth of what the company said the plant was built to remove.

In mid-2025, the company began laying off a minimum of 10% of its ~500 staff.

For a firm that raised over $800 million in equity and subsidies, hailed as a pioneer of direct air capture, the numbers are sobering. But they are not surprising.

They are merely the inevitable result of colliding hopeful techno-optimism with the brutal constraints of physics, economics, and scale.

Simply put, the system mentioned in the story and others like it that have been built around the world produce more CO2 than they capture, and at great financial cost.

Add to that, we do not need to capture and remove CO2 from the atmosphere, as the video below explains.