“TODAY WE SEE the birth of a new species,” declared Julio Friedmann, gazing across the bleak landscape. Along with several hundred grandees, the renowned energy technologist had travelled to a remote corner of Texas’s oil patch called Notrees at the end of April at the invitation of 1PointFive, a division of Occidental Petroleum, an American oil firm, and of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian technology startup backed by Bill Gates. The species in question is in some ways akin to a tree—but not the biological sort, nowhere to be seen on the barren terrain. Rather, it is an arboreal artifice: the first commercial-scale “direct air capture”
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