"Last year, when David Keith and his associates at Carbon Engineering published figures projecting that their carbon-capture technology could bring costs as low as $94 a metric ton, Herzog was not convinced. Keith nevertheless made the case to me that two new investors in Carbon Engineering — Chevron Technology Ventures and a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum — scrutinized his company’s numbers to an exhaustive degree and agreed the economics of the venture were solid enough to merit putting up substantial amounts in a $60 million investment round."

This is the most interesting part. The investors are oil companies. Perhaps they are just funding the story that there is no need for government to curtail or tax their activities, because DAC will be able to "reverse time" for us in the future? The article has already debunked this quite well, like the quote from Hal Harvey. But at the same time, these technologies are still pencilled in by the I.P.C.C.[1] and of course, Chevron when they say they will abide by the Paris agreement but still increase their year-on-year output of fossil fuels[2].

Carbon Engineering does seem to get outsize coverage in the news. Hope sells better than despair, or the idea that we would actually need to change our lifestyles (fly much less, eat less meat, etc) to combat climate change.

Carbon Engineering is also based in Calgary, home to a lot of the O&G industry, but are not working on the thermodynamically easier problem - extracting CO2 from the pollution output of power plants, where it's 25% of the output instead of 0.04%.

[1] http://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/posts/2018/10/response-t...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-07/chevron-p...