The real carbon dioxide removal deal

There is perhaps no climate tech that inspires such an intense mix of loathing and loving quite like carbon dioxide removal — CDR, for the in-the-know. Sucking carbon pollution from the air is largely the stuff of science fiction. But that hasn’t stopped major venture capital firms, the Department of Energy and at least one rogue entrepreneur from pouring money and time into trying to make it happen. And the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report makes it clear why.

CDR comes in many flavors. Say what you will about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but there’s no shortage of ways to do it.

• Do you love trees? Then let me introduce you to afforestation and reforestation.
• More of a wide-open spaces person? Meet soil conservation, biochar and dumping pulverized rocks on the ground. (No, seriously.)
• Are fancy machines your thing? Direct air capture might be more your speed.
• What’s that? You love the ocean? We have so much to offer you, from kelp farming, to dumping iron in the high seas to promote algae growth, to zapping seawater.
• Still wanna burn things for energy? Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is your new, problematic fave.
• There are even more examples, but you get the drift. There are a lot of options, and we don’t have all day to discuss them. All of the techniques come with tradeoffs in terms of cost, their impact on people and ecosystems and durability (i.e., how long they actually keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere). But all of them could play some role in our struggle to protect the climate over the coming decades.

And we’re gonna need CDR. Quite a bit of it. The IPCC makes it clear our best shot at getting the world to a more chill — or at least slightly less sweaty — place is going all-in on renewables, starting now. But the report calls CDR a “necessary element” for the world to get to net zero. Personally, I’d say it’s a super necessary one, but admittedly I do not write like a panel of world-renowned scientists.

• The IPCC’s chapter on CDR shows that to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, the world will need to collectively remove up to 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in 2050.
• That number jumps as high as 35 billion tons in 2100. For comparison, that’s equal to all of last year’s energy-related emissionsfor the entire planet. That is … a lot of carbon dioxide.
• “If we’re talking about going from where we are today, where direct air capture is about 10,000 tons per year, to billions of tons per year?” Erin Burns, the executive director of CDR think tank Carbon180, told Protocol. “That’s a massive industry.”

But this doesn’t exist as an industry yet. I mean, that should be obvious from Burns’ quote, but I just want us to be clear: While an array of companies are getting to work on CDR, calling it a cottage industry is honestly rude to actual cottage industries, like cross-stitchers on Etsy. In other words, there’s a lot of work to do. But luckily, we do have some time and the tools required to ensure we get there.

• “We’ve seen a huge impact in the private sector from companies like Stripe and Shopify that have really driven a lot of innovation,” Burns said. Those companies have researched CDR startups and purchased carbon removal.
• But private money alone isn’t going to make the industry into the powerhouse it needs to be. A reasonable price for CDR is $100 per ton. You do the math of how much 17 billion tons of CDR every year would cost by 2050. (It’s a lot.)
• To even get to that scale, though, will require a lot of smart investments in federal R&D as well as developing an actual market for the service in the first place.
• Burns pointed to federal procurement as one avenue to get that market going. “When we think about federal procurement, we often think about products, right?” she said. “The government is a customer for a ton of products. We can think about other ways in which they procure services.”
• For CDR, the government could decide it wants to contract with companies that stash carbon away for a century for $100 per ton and that it’s willing to pony up the cash to sequester enough emissions to cover the military’s current and historic carbon footprint. That is … a lot of carbon dioxide. (Yes, I’m stealing my own words from earlier.)
• Burns also pointed to the success of the Department of Energy’s SunShot program, which helped bring down costs of generating solar power over the past decade, as a template for another avenue to bring down the cost of CDR technology. For what it’s worth, SunShot was so successful, DOE went back to the wellthis decade.

Still, the IPCC says we need CDR — but not right now. The best way to ensure there’s not too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to stop putting it there in the first place. You can think of the atmosphere as a bathtub filling up with water. It’s a lot more effective to turn off the tap than running around to find a big enough bucket to bail it out before it overflows. The IPCC is extremely blunt on this point: “CDR cannot serve as a substitute for deep emissions reductions but can fulfill multiple complementary roles.” It’s a small bucket, if you will.

• It’s been that way for a while. “The IPCC has been clear for many years [that] this needs to be in addition to aggressive mitigation,” Burns said.
• The chapter also contains a laundry list of concerns ranging from the fact that some CDR techniques could displace people from the land they live or work on, to the fact that some could turn parts of the ocean into a toxic waste zone. It’s a seriously long list (on page 39 in Chapter 12, if you’re interested!), and one that should give us major pause about leaning into CDR.
• There’s also the issue of cost. While $100 per ton is ideal, most techniques aren’t close to that at this point. And some — maybe even most, or all — may never be. That makes banking on CDR as a panacea an incredibly risky financial, social and ecological bet.
• The real risk is that we delay taking concrete steps to reduce emissions now waiting for a train that’s never going to come. And frankly, we’ve already delayed long enough.

 
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