Occidental (OXY) has announced that its subsidiary 1PointFive and ADNOC signed an agreement to commence a jointly funded preliminary engineering study for a 1 million tonne-per-year Direct Air Capture (DAC) facility in the United Arab Emirates. The Joint Study Agreement for the DAC facility, signed at the ADIPEC conference in Abu Dhabi, is the first project announced since the companies signed a memorandum of understanding on August 1, 2023, to jointly explore carbon capture, utilization, and storage projects in the United States and the UAE.
The study will assess the feasibility of building the first megaton-scale DAC facility outside the United States, using the same carbon dioxide (CO2) extraction technology to be deployed in the plant 1PointFive is constructing in Ector County, Texas. The Texas facility, named Stratos, is designed to include DAC technology developed by Canada-based Carbon Engineering and is expected to capture up to 500,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year when fully operational.
1PointFive is marketing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits to assist hard-to-abate industries and other companies in achieving their net-zero targets. 1PointFive announced a 10-year, 250,000 tonne-CDR credit agreement with Amazon in September and a three-year, 30,000 tonne-CDR credit agreement with All Nippon Airways in August. Both agreements call for sequestering DAC-captured CO2 in saline reservoirs not used for oil and gas production.
If the UAE project is approved, CO2 extracted at the DAC facility is expected to be connected to ADNOC’s CO2 infrastructure in Abu Dhabi for injection and permanent storage into saline reservoirs not used for oil and gas production. ADNOC is in the testing phase of the world’s first fully sequestered CO2 injection well in a carbonate saline aquifer in Abu Dhabi.
