One of the most persistent arguments against direct air capture is the energy one: DAC is too energy-intensive, too greedy, to be a serious climate tool. It’s repeated often enough that many people have accepted it as settled wisdom.
It isn’t.
A study published in Environmental Research: Energy modeled exactly how much additional primary energy demand a serious CDR buildout would require to hit a 1.0°C temperature target. The answer: 12.0–37.5% additional primary energy compared to a baseline scenario without ambitious CDR.
That’s the entire buildout. The full deployment of direct air capture at scale sufficient to keep warming under one degree. Between 12 and 37.5 percent more primary energy.
Context Matters
To be clear about what that number means: we’re not talking about 37.5% more coal. The same energy transition that enables CDR to scale — cheaper solar, cheaper wind, hydrogen for hard-to-abate sectors — is exactly the infrastructure that would power DAC facilities. They’re complements. DAC scales as renewables scale.
The figure also puts the concern in perspective against what we already accept without much discussion. Global gas flaring — burning off natural gas as a waste product of oil drilling — wastes roughly 150 billion cubic meters of gas annually. The energy inefficiencies baked into the current system are enormous. A 12–37.5% additional demand for a 1°C ceiling isn’t a wild ask in that context.
The Real Constraints
None of this means DAC is easy. The actual constraints are deployment speed and capital, not energy physics.
Building DAC capacity fast enough matters. Supply chains for sorbents and contactors matter. Cost curves matter — current DACCS costs sit in the $300–1,000/tonne range, and the IEA’s pathway to scale requires that to come down to roughly $100 by 2050.
These are engineering and financing problems. They’re hard. But they’re categorically different from “it uses too much energy” as a dismissal. One is a challenge to be solved through investment and scale. The other is a physics argument that doesn’t hold up.
What the Study Covers
The modeling covers scenarios ranging from moderate CDR ambition (1.5°C compatible) to aggressive removal rates required for a 1.0°C target. The 12–37.5% range brackets that full spectrum. More aggressive CDR deployment sits at the higher end; scenarios where CDR supplements strong mitigation land at the lower end.
The conclusion isn’t that DAC is easy or cheap. It’s that the energy demand argument, stated in absolute terms, fails the basic test: it doesn’t account for what energy system we’d be drawing from when this infrastructure exists.
The dismissal dies on contact with the actual numbers.
Source: Environmental Research: Energy study on CDR energy demand. Study via @kevinleecaster.bsky.social.