Energy Emissions Accounting Methods Can Determine Whether Direct Air Capture with Storage Achieves Net Removal

The voluntary carbon market within the United States has expanded rapidly in recent years and enabled private companies and other organizations to provide revenue streams to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. For a CDR technology to participate in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), the emissions associated with constructing and operating the technology must be less than the CO2 captured from the atmosphere. Assessing the extent to which this is true for direct air capture with storage (DACS), a relatively energy-intensive CDR technology, strongly depends on the accounting method used to assess the emissions intensity of purchased energy. We simulate the hourly weather-dependent operation of sorbent- and solvent-based DACS in California, Louisiana, Texas, and Wyoming, representing a wide range of local weather and electric and natural gas grid compositions. In all cases, the single most important emissions accounting decision is the method used to estimate the emissions intensity of purchased grid electricity, which varies the calculated net removal by -1049% to +108%. All other factors influencing net removal introduce a variation of at most ±14%. No electricity emissions accounting method is universally conservative across all scenarios, and none is objectively more accurate. High-spatiotemporal-resolution, high-quality, publicly available data sets and models for electricity emissions accounting do not currently exist and are urgently needed to enable standardization of emissions accounting methods to more accurately determine the true emissions impacts of DACS and other energy-intensive facilities.