Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 01 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/what-is-really-happening-to-dac-hubs-with-grant-faber

TL;DR

  • Only ~2.5% of the original $3.5B DAC Hubs budget has been disbursed; contract negotiation ate most of the Biden term before terminations froze things.
  • $1B of hub funding was reprogrammed by Congress to nuclear; ~$1.3B sits unobligated but not rescinded — dormant, not dead.
  • DOE admitted in court that project terminations were chosen on political basis; cancellations skewed toward blue-headquartered primes even when projects sat in red states.
  • Both TA3 megahubs (Project Cypress, South Texas) survived the retention list — Grant credits BIL/IRA’s deliberate red-district geography strategy.
  • Grant’s speculative but useful scenario: unspent CDR appropriations pile up, and 2029 brings a sudden multi-billion-dollar “we’re back” moment. Take with salt.

Grant Faber — former DAC Hubs program manager at DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, now Head of Standards at Absolute Climate — joins Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart on The CDR Policy Scoop to walk through his recent Substack article mapping the actual state of the US DAC Hubs program. This is the most granular public accounting of what survived, what got killed, and what’s still sitting in an account somewhere.

The disbursement number is the headline every practitioner should internalize: ~2.5% out the door. The mechanism matters. A DOE “selection” announcement isn’t a kickoff — it launches contract negotiation covering milestones, budgets, NEPA compliance, cybersecurity plans, sub-recipient roles. Under Biden, BIL and IRA flooded a semi-fixed contracting capacity, so negotiations dragged. Faber’s entire tenure was consumed getting the 21 originally-selected projects (14 TA1 feasibility, 5 TA2 FEED, 2 TA3 megahubs) from award to executable contract. Then the administration changed, everything froze, and the Valentine’s Day RIF caught him personally. The lesson he keeps returning to: move faster. In a system where political windows close in 24-month increments, a two-year contracting cycle is a structural vulnerability, not an administrative footnote.

The politics of what got terminated is the other useful disclosure. Faber notes DOE admitted in court that terminations were selected on political grounds — and did so somewhat carelessly, since some killed projects were headquartered in blue states but sited in red ones. The counterpoint: both TA3 megahubs survived, and Congress reprogrammed only $1B (to nuclear) rather than clawing back the full remainder. Roughly $1.3B sits unobligated. Faber’s optimistic read is that BIL/IRA’s deliberate geographic distribution created enough red-district constituency to keep the program from being zeroed out. His speculative kicker — that unspent FY26 CDR appropriations (~$45M) plus the dormant hub billions could accumulate into a 2029 gold rush — is more hope than forecast, but the underlying point about statutory funding inertia is real.

For adjacent context: this pairs well with Vikram Rao’s earlier Scoop appearance on how Heirloom navigated its hub’s revival, and with the broader debate about whether voluntary buyers (Frontier, Microsoft) can bridge the demand gap the DAC Hubs were meant to seed. Faber’s closing policy prescription — coalition-building across TRLs, enabling infrastructure (CO2 pipelines, Class VI permits), and durable demand-side support beyond one-off procurements — is the same diagnosis European practitioners are making about CRCF and ETS integration, just from the opposite direction.

Worth an hour if you’re modeling US DAC deployment timelines, advising a project developer on hub exposure, or building the political-economy case for demand-side policy anywhere. Skip if you already read Faber’s article — the episode covers similar ground with modest additional color on