I am standing atop an eighty-foot-tall synthetic lung made of metal and plastic. In its scale and ambition, it’s unlike anything else in Texas, or the Western Hemisphere, for that matter. Its existence leads me to feel something rare in the world of energy and climate: optimism.
The machine is a key component of Occidental Petroleum’s nearly complete $1.3 billion direct air capture facility called Stratos. When it’s turned on, in mid-2025, it will suck in industrial mouthfuls of air and strip out the carbon dioxide. That gas, a driving force behind climate change, will get diverted into pipelines and then pumped some five thousand feet into the earth to be buried within porous rocks. The transformed air it exhales into the atmosphere will have as little carbon dioxide as it would have 25,000 years ago. (Don’t worry, it won’t usher in a new Ice Age. Like an ice cube tossed into a pot of boiling water, it dissipates quickly.)
Stratos occupies 65 acres, formerly covered by scrub brush, in Notrees, about 25 miles west of Odessa, in the heart of the Permian Basin. In addition to a matching pair of the giant lung-like devices, the facility includes a tangle of pipes and tanks, as well as a 260-foot skyscraper of exposed metal scaffolding that holds a dazzling array of machinery. Outside the fence line sits a large solar farm that will supply Stratos with electricity.
My guide is Christine Irvin, a chatty engineer with a long brown ponytail poking out from under her hard hat. “We are by far the largest DAC in the world,” she says, using the shorthand for direct air capture. The technology at the heart of Stratos emerged from a company founded fifteen years ago in British Columbia. Back then, the carbon dioxide concentration globally was 387 parts per million; today it’s 420. As that level rises, the greenhouse effect transforms our climate. Temperatures are rising. Ice sheets are melting. Sea levels are higher. Storms and wildfires are growing more destructive. Stratos aims to remove carbon dioxide and reverse those trends.
The energy industry has, in recent years, deployed new low-carbon means of generating electricity, such as solar panels and wind turbines. These renewable sources allow us to retire some high-emissions power plants, including those fueled by coal, but they don’t address the impact of the gigatons of CO2 that have been released into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution. What’s been missing is an effective technology for removing greenhouse gases, something like a giant vacuum cleaner. Stratos will be the first large-scale attempt to create one.
To date, the largest DAC project in the world was built by the Swiss firm Climeworks at the foot of an active volcano in Iceland. Called Mammoth, at full strength, it draws 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually. Stratos is in a different league: It is designed to bury 500,000 tons underground each year.
Removing that much carbon dioxide each year would be impressive, but it’s not nearly enough to make a noticeable dent in climate change. Energy-related emissions amounted to 37.4 billion tons in 2023 alone. That makes the potential effect of Stratos only marginally more potent than a fart in a windstorm. To accomplish more than that, Occidental has talked about building a hundred or more similar facilities, along with a hub for carbon removal and storage on King Ranch, south of Corpus Christi.
These grander plans raise an important question: Will governments and companies pay to dispose of their carbon dioxide to reduce their climate impact? Until now, the answer has been academic. “We had to build this first one and prove it can be done commercially,” Irvin tells me. “You can have lots of great ideas, but if you can’t make it a reality, it doesn’t help.”
Stratos is being built by an oil and gas company that has no intention of forsaking its century-long legacy of producing fossil fuels. Last year Occidental spent $12 billion purchasing Permian oil producer CrownRock—run and partly owned by Texas political megadonor Tim Dunn—on the heels of a $38 billion deal to acquire Anadarko Petroleum in 2019. Skeptics argue that oil companies are embracing DAC technology as a distraction, designed to allow them to continue their highly profitable, emissions-generating pursuits.
Vicki Hollub, Oxy’s president and chief executive, has expressed a different outlook. “Too many people are focusing on killing energy sources rather than killing emissions. The common enemy that we all have are the emissions, and that’s what we need to control,” she said in a 2022 podcast in which she announced the decision to build Stratos. In addition, most serious efforts that model how to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, including work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have carbon dioxide removal as a necessary technological enabler.
Occidental’s plan to build a host of Stratos-like projects depends on two factors out of its control. One is a generous federal tax credit for the long-term disposal of carbon, which was increased and expanded in 2022. A new Congress could eliminate the credit, although most of the beneficiaries are oil companies friendly with the incoming Trump administration and Republicans in both chambers. The second requirement is finding enough customers willing to pay to bury CO2 so that they can credibly claim their operations have attained carbon neutrality. (A diverse group has already agreed to contract with Oxy to offset their carbon emissions at Stratos, including Amazon, Airbus, TD Bank, and both the Houston Astros and Texans.) This market has so far been robust, but its breadth and duration are hard to predict.
While the financial prospects of Stratos are murky, the technology is fairly low risk. Stratos is an amalgamation of machinery assembled from a variety of industries: cooling towers from chemical plants, pellet reactors from water treatment facilities, and dewatering equipment from pulp mills. The scaffolding holds a calciner, a device that superheats materials to change their properties and is commonly found in aluminum smelters.
A couple of days after my visit to Stratos, I met Steve Melzer over coffee and pastries in the Derrick Room of the Midland Petroleum Club. Melzer is a former oil producer who now consults on carbon storage. He has concerns about Oxy’s approach. Why build a facility to scrub CO2 from the air, where it constitutes a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, which is mostly oxygen and nitrogen? Why not scrub it from a natural gas power plant, where carbon dioxide is sixty to seven times more concentrated? The answer is that the federal tax credit is more generous for DAC than for pulling carbon dioxide from a smokestack. “It is costing you and me money because of the subsidy,” Melzer says, “when we could be doing it easier and cheaper from other sources.”
Michael Webber, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a respected public intellectual on energy matters, applauds Oxy’s efforts. “Industrial innovation is built on big bets. Some pan out, and some don’t. But the spoils go to those who figure it out first. Investing one-point-three billion dollars to get a head start on what could become a trillion-dollar industry might be a fool’s errand,” he told me, “But it might also unlock a whole new growth opportunity for a sector whose future is uncertain.”
So is direct air capture a viable new tool for combating climate change? We won’t know the answer until someone tries at scale. Occidental will do that next year. They’ve sat down at a poker table and pushed a large pile of chips to the middle. And that makes me optimistic.
