From: National Center for Energy Analytics

By: Jonathan Lesser, PhD

Date: February 11, 2026

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Using Direct Air Capture to Remove Atmospheric Carbon

Executive Summary

This paper assesses whether direct air capture (DAC) can effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere in a physically, economically, and environmentally viable way and concludes that it cannot. DAC is inherently energy-intensive due to the laws of thermodynamics. Because using fossil fuels to power DAC facilities would reduce or even eliminate the resulting CO2 emissions, such power would require substantial quantities of emissions-free electricity—either from nuclear plants or from wind and solar generation. The amount of new generating capacity required would be prohibitively expensive, costing trillions of dollars. The DAC facilities themselves would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The resulting costs per tonne of CO2 reduced by DAC far exceed even the most recent estimates of the social cost of carbon. In fact, current federal subsidies, along with the additional costs of financing them, would considerably exceed these estimates of the social cost of carbon. Finally, even if these physical and economic issues could be overcome, the resulting impact on global CO2 concentrations would be negligible, and the effect on temperature would be too small to measure.

By way of example, reliance on DAC to capture 1 billion tonnes (1 gigatonne [Gt]) of CO2 per year, which is in line with goals cited by the U.S. Department of Energy, yields the following results: (continue reading)

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Using Direct Air Capture to Remove Atmospheric Carbon