After mapping where renewable energy and carbon storage geology naturally align for Direct Air Capture (DAC) in Part 1, I turned my attention to the other major carbon capture pathway: Point Source Capture (PSC).
Unlike DAC, which pulls diffuse carbon directly from ambient air, PSC targets concentrated emission sources — power plants, steel mills, cement factories — and captures CO₂ at the stack before it ever reaches the atmosphere. This approach reduces the energy cost of capture, but imposes a new constraint:
Facilities must be located close enough to storage hubs to make transportation feasible.
Method: From Data to Feasibility Map
To model where PSC could be most effectively deployed, I:
- Downloaded facility emissions data from the EPA FLIGHT database.
- Created a point layer based on facility coordinates (using XY Table to Point).
- Created a new layer filtered for high-emission power plants (>1 million tons CO₂ per year).
- Intersected these facility points with my existing ideal CO₂ storage geology layers:
- Depleted Oil Fields (offering enhanced oil recovery opportunities)
- Saline Reservoirs (long-term geological storage)
This allowed me to isolate facilities that sit directly over viable geological formations — eliminating the need for expensive pipeline transport.
Key Findings
The results were more encouraging than anticipated.
Several notable trends emerged:
Clusters of Viable Facilities Over Oil Reservoirs:
- Eastern Ohio and West Virginia surfaced as major hotspots.
- These regions differ sharply from the deserts of West Texas which emerged as a hotspot for DAC, offering denser populations and existing industrial infrastructure — factors that could streamline PSC deployment
Viable Facilities Over Saline Formations:
- Again, parts of the Midwest (e.g., Illinois, Indiana) led in sheer facility count and strategic location.
- The Texas Gulf Coast and southern Florida lso showed promising concentrations of facilities sitting atop saline formations.
This suggests that PSC could be an extremely viable option not only in historically industrial states like Ohio and West Virginia, but also in newer industrial corridors across the southern U.S.
Reflections & What’s Next
Compared to DAC, PSC offers the advantage of capturing emissions where they are already densely concentrated. However, it also depends on:
- The ability to retrofit aging facilities for carbon capture
- Regulatory incentives and funding to make retrofitting economical
- Access to nearby storage to minimize CO₂ transport costs
In the final blog post for this project, I’ll compare the two strategies side-by-side and attempt to answer:
What are the pros and cons of each type of CCS technology, and where might each be most ideally deployed? And how might a blended strategy look for maximizing carbon management potential across the U.S.?