International energy company Occidental (Oxy), its carbon capture, utilization and sequestration platform subsidiary, 1PointFive, and agricultural production and resource management company King Ranch announced today a new lease agreement to support mass storage of CO2 from planned Direct Air Capture (DAC) projects.

The deal follows the announcement in August by Oxy and 1PointFive of plans to build the world’s largest to date DAC plant in the Texas Permian Basin, with capacity to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year at launch, and the potential to scale up to 1 million tons.

The new agreement will provide access to 106,000 acres in Kleberg County, Texas, with the potential to remove up to 30 million metric tons of CO2 per year, and capacity to store up to 3 billion metric tons of CO2 in geologic reservoirs.

DAC technology, listed by the IEA as a key carbon removal option in the transition to a net zero energy system, extracts CO2 directly from the atmosphere for use as a raw material or permanently removed when combined with storage. According to the landmark IPCC climate change mitigation study released earlier this year, scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C include carbon dioxide removal methods scaling to billions of tons of removal annually over the coming decades, with DAC positioned to potentially account for a significant portion of the total.

Oxy’s first DAC plant in the Texas Permian Basin is currently under construction.

Vicki Hollub, President and CEO, Occidental, said:

“We believe large-scale DAC, which is an innovative engineered CO2 removal solution, will play an important role in helping organizations and nations reduce their net CO2 emissions and provide the scale necessary to make a difference in addressing climate change globally.”

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