<div><span style="font-size: 1rem;"><b>The US government said Friday it will spend up to $1.2 billion for two pioneering facilities to vacuum carbon out of the air, a historic gamble on a still developing technology to combat global warming that is criticized by some experts.</b></span><br></div><div><br></div><div>The two projects -- in Texas and Louisiana -- each aim to eliminate one million tons of carbon dioxide per year, equivalent in total to the annual emissions of 445,000 gas-powered cars.</div><div><br></div><div>It is "the world's largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history," the Energy Department said in a statement.</div><div><br></div><div>Direct Air Capture (DAC) techniques -- also known as Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) -- focus on that CO2 emitted into the air, which is helping to fuel climate change and extreme weather.</div><div><br></div><div>Each of the projects will remove 250 times more CO2 from the air than the largest carbon capture site currently in operation, the Energy Department said.</div><div><br></div><div>The UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) considers capturing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere one of the methods necessary to combat global warming.</div><div><br></div><div>But the sector is still marginal -- there are just 27 existing carbon capture sites commissioned worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency, though at least 130 projects are under development.</div><div><br></div><div>And some experts worry that use of the technology will be a pretext for continuing to emit greenhouse gases, rather than switching more quickly to clean energies.</div><div><br></div><div>Direct capture "requires a lot of electricity for extracting CO2 from the air and compressing it for pipes," Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson told AFP.</div><div><br></div><div>US non-profit Battelle is the prime contractor on the Louisiana project, which will inject captured CO2 for storage deep underground.</div><div><br></div><div>It will partner with another American company, Heirloom, and the Swiss firm Climeworks, already a sector leader that operates a plant in Iceland with an annual capacity to capture 4,000 tons of CO2 from the air. According AFP reports&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>bnbd24/fas</div>