A facility that will be able to extract carbon dioxide from the air is being planned for Scotland.

The plant will remove one million tonnes of CO2 every year and will also create up to 300 jobs.

The project is one between UK firm Storegga and Canadian company Carbon Engineering and will be operational by 2026. 

Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, said: “Even if all the other measures that we’re taking to avoid emissions, electric cars, renewable energy, those types of things, even if those succeed, you still need carbon removal.”

“Direct air capture I think is going to be a significant part of the UK is net-zero plan. For us a typical facility is about a million tonnes of CO2 removal per year. That’s the equivalent of 40 million trees.”

The plant will be built in North East Scotland where there a skilled workforce from the North Sea oil industry.

Alan James from Storegga commented: “We’re keen to locate the plant as close as possible to transport and storage infrastructure so we don’t actually have to suffer more and more costs to move captured carbon offshore and then underground.”

Dr Ajay Gambhir, a senior research fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, said on the proposed site: “It’s a much more sensible strategy to treat these technologies as a really nice addition, we should work hard on them and make sure that they can become cost competitive, and economic in the 2020s.”

“But at the same time, we need to just make sure we reduce emissions as fast as possible as far as possible. So that if DAC does come along, then then that’s great. That’s a really nice addition to our toolkit if you like, but we definitely don’t rely on them.”