Bid in for $500 mln U.S. climate grant for direct air carbon capture

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Reuters) - Two companies developing technology to suck carbon out of the air, Switzerland's Climeworks and California's Heirloom, have teamed with non-profit firm Battelle to bid for a $500 million U.S. grant to commercialize the climate-friendly technology.

The U.S. Department of Energy launched a five-year program last year to spend $3.5 billion to build four regional Direct Air Capture, or DAC, hubs to kickstart commercialization of technology to capture carbon dioxide from the air and store it permanently.

Scientists view direct air carbon capture as vital to limiting global warming, but the technology is nascent.

Terms of the $500 million grant require a hub to scale up to sequestering one million tonnes a years of carbon dioxide. Applications for an initial set of grants closed this week.

The Department of Energy declined to say how many applications it had received.

Unprecedented federal investment, private sector activity and endorsement by scientists of the need for carbon removal to meet global climate goals has created a "once in a lifetime opportunity" to deploy the technology, Battelle's energy and resilience manager, Shawn Bennett, told Reuters.

Battelle has a history of working with carbon capture technology and managing centers and labs for the government.

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