NEW REPORT: Barriers to scaling the long-duration carbon dioxide removal industry
Understanding the barriers to scaling up CDR from the vantage point of 37 stakeholders including CDR providers, buyers, brokers, NGOs, VCs, and more.
I’m excited to share a new report I co-authored with Freya Chay, Danny Cullenward, and Jeremy Freeman at CarbonPlan called Barriers to scaling the long-duration carbon dioxide removal industry.
The report delivers a comprehensive picture of the barriers to responsibly scaling up carbon removal (CDR) based on the perspectives of key stakeholders in the sector. I surveyed representatives at 37 organizations involved in CDR, including providers, buyers, brokers, NGOs, and investors and worked with the amazing team at CarbonPlan to distill these views into key findings. While this is not a representative sample of the entire CDR universe, it surfaces key barriers that need to be addressed in order for CDR to graduate from a nascent sector to a mature industry that credibly addresses climate change.
Some of the stakeholder perspectives expressed include:
the convergent view among stakeholders that the lack of third-party standards are not seen as an immediate barrier to scaling up CDR, though it will become more important as the CDR market grows;
divergent views across stakeholders on what the role of the public sector should be on scaling up CDR; and
emerging views on the lack of operational carbon dioxide storage and transportation infrastructure creating a potential supply bottleneck in the future.
I encourage you to check out the article and the full report for many more perspectives (including anonymized stakeholder quotes) over at CarbonPlan. If you have any questions or would like to chat about the findings, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
I’m particularly proud of this work because it offers the CDR space a much-needed starting point for tackling a question that’s been at the center of my work for the last few years: what does it take to responsibly scale up carbon removal? If answering that question is at the center of your work, whether you’re a CDR start-up, broker, funder, or NGO, please reach out. I’d love to talk about how we can work together.
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