10 valuable insights from carbon removal experts and entrepreneurs
From policy wins, to MRV, and driving down the cost of carbon removal. Here are some of the most insightful perspectives from leaders across the CDR space I've picked up over the last few months.
Back in June, I launched The Carbon Curve podcast to profile the exciting work of people I know and respect in the carbon removal (CDR) field. I wanted to speak to entrepreneurs, leaders, and policy experts about what market, political, or social changes are needed to scale up CDR. To me, the challenge of scaling up CDR to combat climate change is not just technical in nature, it’s far more complex and ambiguous. It’s a vast problem that requires learning and action from a variety of stakeholders. In starting the podcast, I was keen to highlight nuanced points of view and new ideas on what’s needed to scale up CDR while keeping the podcast accessible and approachable to a climate-curious audience.
Less than three months and nine episodes later, “Season 1” of The Carbon Curve is a wrap - and I learned a lot, to say the least. I’m excited to share some of the key insights that surfaced across these 9 episodes, including an AirMiners discussion on measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) that I facilitated last month. Preparation for the next series of episodes is underway, with new episodes presently being recorded covering subjects including the role of advance market commitments like Frontier, what equitable deployment of CDR looks like, and more on MRV (because everyone wants to talk about MRV). You’ll find these episodes here on The Carbon Curve and your favorite podcast app in the coming weeks.
Each of the insights below links to the relevant podcast episode. If any of these resonate with you, please share this post and subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already.
Jason Hochman, Executive Director of the Direct Air Capture Coalition makes a compelling argument for growing the DAC industry beyond the Global North. He believes that while paying for CDR should lie primarily on the shoulders of countries that have caused the climate problem, we shouldn’t assume that these same countries exclusively accrue the economic and employment benefits from deploying CDR at scale.
📺 Watch TED Talk on Africa’s Great Carbon Valley by James Mwangi
Chris Neidl, the co-founder of OpenAir Collective, pushes back on the “subservient volunteer” model and proposes an entirely new approach to climate activism. Also, do you want to work on climate change? He doesn’t think you have to quit your job to do it.
“The key is, is that there's so much that people can bring to solve problems where we don't need to come up with a generic subservient role of the volunteer, where they support the expert or they march and they wear the t-shirt and they hand out the thing … I'm more interested in the full person and like, what can they do? …
We're not competing against the labor market. We're competing against Netflix … we're trying to get people to binge on us. Those people are saying … I don't want to quit my job. I'm fine with my job, you know, but wouldn't it be awesome if a part of my life too, is that I made a real impact on leading change [in] carbon dioxide removal?”Dai Ellis, entrepreneur and executive coach to climate tech founders and CEOs, thinks we shouldn’t just accept having a large, stable, but sh*tty CDR market. He shows us how to be active shapers of the market we want and not takers of market dynamics that exist today. He gets into key lessons that can (and can’t) be applied from market shaping in global health to scaling up CDR.
Ben Rubin, Executive Director of Carbon Business Council, thinks America’s ripe policy environment is driving interest from CDR companies abroad to expand operations or open up headquarters in the US (and this was before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act).
Robert Niven, CEO of CarbonCure, captures the scale of the concrete sector saliently: The world is adding buildings and infrastructure at a rate of adding a New York City every 30 days for the next 40 years. He thinks the concrete plants driving that growth can be retrofitted into CDR factories.
📖 Read more about CarbonCure’s mission to reduce the concrete sector’s emissions
“When people talk about carbon removal, they often reference it in terms of the oil and gas sector. You know … we need to build an industry 10 times as big as the oil and gas sector. You can look at it the other way and say - we need to build [the CDR industry] as big as the concrete industry … it gives you some important appreciation of not only the challenge of decarbonizing this industry but when it’s paired up with carbon removal, the opportunity to scale.”
Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial, thinks of MRV as being CDR’s “product” and why that makes it so important to get MRV right.
“The way I think about it … it’s almost the product, right? If you’re making steel or something, you show up at a loading dock and you make the delivery… And someone sees the material come onto their loading dock. But with carbon removal, you take the CO2 out of the atmosphere somewhere, but it’s all in a big bulk aggregate, kind of hard to know [whether] it happened or not. And so [MRV] is how you prove that you really, truly delivered the product.”
Meron Tesfaye and Danny Broberg from the Bipartisan Policy Center give me a full rundown of CDR policy wins in the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and more. They remind us that we can’t forget about the importance of fixing regulations around permitting if want to successfully deploy CDR at scale.
📖 Read the climate and energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act
Shashank Samala, CEO of Heirloom, thinks the biggest enabler for the CDR industry is long-term off-take agreements. He shares several insights on lowering the market risk to finance CDR, driving down cost, and speeding up CDR deployment.
📖 Read Heirloom’s white paper on their scalable direct air capture process
“The biggest thing that is an enabler for the CDR industry is long-term off-take. You know, for every one venture dollar we raise, we need to raise a thousand dollars of infrastructure and project financing … I was talking to a project finance vendor yesterday … the reason they’re even considering looking at DAC now is that … all these folks (Frontier, etc.) are coming in and writing corporate off take”.
Robert Höglund and Natalya Jarlebring, who work on Milkywire’s Climate Transformation Fund, think we need a new definition for carbon removal based on the short and long carbon cycle, more precisely differentiating CDR from nature restoration. When you do that, it enables you to look at nature restoration efforts - which are critical to climate action - more holistically rather than reducing their value to their stated carbon removal/avoidance benefits.
📖 Read the article on why they think CDR and nature restoration are not the same
Bonus: What problem is MRV trying to solve, and what does a good MRV system look like? My conversation with Cara Maesano (RMI), Peter Minor (Carbon180), Christophe Jospe (Carbon A List), and Berta Moya (Carbonfuture) covers MRV basics, as well as issues around governance and quality. I learned the importance of getting clear on the intended purpose of MRV initiatives (not always a given) before designing MRV systems and approaches.
A huge thanks to those of you who have tuned in to The Carbon Curve podcast so far! And if you haven’t yet, please be sure to subscribe to this newsletter for updates on new content. Also, please feel free to share ideas for topics I should cover in the next series of episodes in the comments below.
To receive regular insights and analyses on carbon removal and the new carbon economy, please subscribe to this newsletter. If you enjoyed this post, please share it with friends. And if you’d like to get in touch, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.