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That’s how much the U.S. should be spending per year by 2050 to achieve net zero, according to a new Rhodium Group report.
Money seems to be pouring into the field of carbon removal from every direction. Every other week there’s an announcement about a new project. Multimillion dollar carbon removal procurement deals are on the rise. The Department of Energy is rolling out grants as part of its $3.5 billion “direct air capture” hubs program and also funding research and development. Some carbon removal companies can even start claiming a $130 tax credit for every ton of CO2 they suck up and store underground.
The federal government alone spends just under $1 billion per year on carbon removal research, development, and deployment. According to a new report from the Rhodium Group, however, the U.S. is going to have to spend a lot more — roughly $100 billion per year by 2050 — if carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, is ever going to become a viable climate solution.
“The current level of policy support is nowhere near what's needed for CDR to play the role that people say it needs to play in solving climate change,” Jonathan Larsen, one of the authors, told me. “We wanted to reset the policy conversation with that in mind.”
Carbon removal is what’s implied by the “net” in net-zero — a way to compensate for whatever polluting activities are going to take longer to replace with clean solutions. It will be impossible to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, either at the national or global level, without removing carbon from the atmosphere. But how much carbon removal will we need, and how do we make sure we’re ready to deploy it?
These questions are, in a sense, unique to the field. When we talk about cutting carbon emissions from buildings or transportation, experts are relatively confident in the set of solutions and the scale of the task — they know how many buildings and cars there are and can make reasonable estimates of growth rates.
But carbon removal is a moving target. We know how much we’re removing today — roughly 5 million metric tons, mostly from nature-based solutions like planting trees. Based on current policies, Rhodium estimates we could scale that up to about 50 million metric tons by 2035. But figuring out how much we need depends entirely on how successful we are at decarbonizing everything else. Even if we know we need to electrify all our cars, for example, no one can say whether that will happen by 2050, or at least not with any meaningful degree of certainty.
The Rhodium Group report attempts to narrow the range of this uncertainty so that policymakers can better attack the problem. The authors looked at a handful of different decarbonization roadmaps for the U.S. and found that the minimum amount of carbon removal needed to compensate for residual emissions in 2050 is 1 gigaton, which is the same as one billion metric tons, or a 20x increase from where current policies will get us. It's also equal to about 20% of the carbon that the U.S. emitted last year. “There's a very likely scenario where we need a lot more than that,” said Larsen. “There's scenarios where we need less. But most of the studies out there say at least a gigaton.”
Even if it’s only a rough estimate, landing on a number is useful, he told me. Rhodium Group spends a lot of time answering questions about, for example, what some new policy means for achieving Biden’s goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030. “I don't know if we’d get those questions if there wasn't a 50% target to shoot for,” he said. “So I think this way, people can be like, what does this next wave of policy support for CDR do for getting the U.S. on track for a gigaton?”
The level of investment it will take to get there is also highly uncertain. The authors did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation to land on $100 billion by 2050: We need to be removing a minimum of one billion tons by then, and the Department of Energy has a goal to bring the cost of carbon removal down to $100 per ton.
The meat of the new report focuses on how to bridge the gap between the roughly $1 billion we spend today and $100 billion, which starts, according to the authors, with treating carbon removal as a public service. It’s not like other climate solutions such as wind turbines or heat pumps, they write, which can rely on private markets to provide predictable demand or to stimulate innovation. “There are very few pathways one can envision where the private sector is going to both scale and deliver those tons,” Larsen told me. Voluntary carbon removal purchases by companies could play a role, he said, but it will not be big enough to get to a gigaton.
Rhodium recommends expanding and extending many of the federal policy programs that already exist — by, for example, providing more R&D funding, doing more government procurement, handing out more loan guarantees, and creating more “hubs” centered on other approaches besides direct air capture, like enhanced weathering or biomass burial. Right now, the tax credit for capturing carbon from the air and burying it underground can only be claimed for 12 years, and projects have to start construction by 2032. The authors call for extending the claim period and moving up the construction start deadline. They also recommend expanding the program to apply to a wider range of carbon removal methods.
A common criticism of government support for carbon removal is that policy makers will over-rely on it. If we aim to do 1 gigaton of carbon removal, does that mean we won’t cut emissions as much as we could have? What happens if, for whatever reason, we can’t achieve the 1 gigaton?
Larsen disagreed with that framing. For one, it’s easy to turn it around: If we don’t scale up the capacity to remove carbon, and we also don’t eliminate emissions by mid-century, we’re not even going to have the option to halt climate change at that point.
But also, decarbonization shouldn’t stop in 2050, he said. If we can achieve that 1 gigaton of annual removal and then keep cutting emissions from remaining sources, we could eventually get to net-negative emissions — even without more CDR. In other words, if we reach a point where we’re removing more than we’re emitting, we could start to reverse global warming, not just stop it.
“I know that's, like, sci-fi,” he told me. “But that's ultimately where we as a species have to go and that’s why setting a target here of at least a gigaton, to me, does not take away the need to reduce elsewhere.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.