When the Manchester-based company Parallel Carbon was in the thick of its first funding round in 2022, investors kept asking its chief executive, Ryan Anderson, why the company hadn’t already moved to America.
Anderson and his colleagues had built a device that does two things the net zero transition will require in massive quantities. It takes carbon dioxide out of the air and it produces hydrogen, a clean fuel, as a byproduct. In August 2022 President Biden took a huge step to incentivise both these activities. Signing the Inflation Reduction Act into law, he committed the US government to paying companies $3 for every kilo of clean hydrogen they produce, and $180 for every tonne of carbon they take out of the atmosphere and store
