I am standing atop an eighty-foot-tall synthetic lung made of metal and plastic. In its scale and ambition, it’s unlike anything else in Texas, or the Western Hemisphere, for that matter. Its existence leads me to feel something rare in the world of energy and climate: optimism.The machine is a key component of Occidental Petroleum’s nearly complete $1.3 billion direct air capture facility called Stratos. When it’s turned on, in mid-2025, it will suck in industrial mouthfuls of air and strip out the carbon dioxide. That gas, a driving force behind climate change, will get diverted into pipelines and then pumped some five thousand feet into the earth to be buried within porous rocks. The transformed air it exhales into the atmosphere will have as…
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