The Carbon Removal Crowd Is Feeling Cautiously Optimistic

It’s the first day of New York Climate Week, and I spent the morning attending events hosted by companies and nonprofits focused on carbon dioxide removal, i.e. sucking greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere. The vibes were, somewhat surprisingly, optimistic — not about the state of the planet or politics or climate change, per se, but about the future of an industry with a very uncertain fate.

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii struck a high note opening the first event I attended, a panel hosted by the Carbon Removal Alliance titled “Progress, Politics, and the Path Forward.” “It’s not a secret that for those of us who care about climate, these are challenging times,” he told the audience. “But the momentum behind CDR is real.”

Schatz cited the nearly $1 billion fund that Frontier Climate, a coalition of carbon removal buyers, pledged earlier this year to put toward supporting the industry, as well as the fact that Congress has continued funding carbon removal on a bipartisan basis through the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture and storage, which survived last year’s clean energy policy purge.

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During the panel that followed, a lot of the discussion centered on what the industry needs from federal policy and how to build a bigger tent of supporters to lobby for those changes. It was moderated by Ella Nilsen, a former CNN climate reporter who recently became the vice president of Echo Communications. She started by acknowledging that carbon removal has a lot of skeptics in the climate movement — many are concerned that it’s a waste of money compared to investing in emission reductions, or that it’s become a justification to continue using fossil fuels. How do you change their minds?

I was interested to hear Joanna Klitzke, the head of market development at Frontier, recommend that the industry be honest about methods and projects that are not working. A few of the companies Frontier has purchased carbon removal from have failed, she said, including one trying to do carbon mineralization using steel slag on roads. “It just doesn’t work. The economics don’t pencil, The technical feasibility isn’t there,” she said. (I followed up with Klitzke by email to ask for clarification on which companies have failed, but I hadn’t heard back as of press time.) Being transparent about the failures might help convince skeptics to support the things that are working, she argued.

Broadening the tent also means getting more members of Congress interested in supporting carbon removal. Cristina Shoffer, the cofounder and director of the Clean Economy Project, stressed that carbon removal companies should be building relationships with their members of Congress before they need something. When it came to defending the tax credits during the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, she said, a lot of the companies that were trying to make their case to Congress didn’t have an existing with their representatives. Jeremy Harrell, the CEO of the conservative clean energy nonprofit Clearpath, added that we are about to be in a historic turnover point for federal policymakers, so it’s an opportune time to go to new members elected in November’s midterms, teach them about the industry, and “foster new champions.”

And what, pray tell, should the industry ask of these members? That part is still a little fuzzy. The industry’s biggest challenge is, and has long been, a lack of customers. Giana Amador, the executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, was optimistic that Frontier’s fund and other voluntary buyers will carry the industry forward for the next few years, but “we need to be thinking about, what is that baton pass?” she said. I heard this expression a few times today, and it refers to the moment when buying carbon removal moves from the hands of volunteers to the hands of government.

Amador mentioned potentially embedding carbon removal into California’s cap and trade market, passing federal tax credits that support a broader range of CDR methods, or expanding the federal carbon removal purchase prize — a Biden-era program to have the Department of Energy vet and buy carbon removal that is still technically alive but that, by all accounts, Trump’s Department of Energy has not carried on. “The field really needs to come together around, what is our big ask around carbon removal demand? How can the U.S. federal government create these opportunities for demand?”

Later in the day, at a summit hosted by the carbon removal registry Puro.Earth, there was more talk about how various voluntary and government frameworks are shaping demand. Kyra Power, the engagement manager for North America for the Science Based Targets Initiative, addressed some potential disappointment in the room around the Initiative’s recent Net-Zero Standard update.

In the absence of regulatory requirements that compel companies to buy carbon removal, SBTi’s standard is the next closest thing. The latest version of its standard for what counts as a “science-based” corporate net zero plan, released in June, introduced guidance requiring larger companies in higher-income countries to begin offsetting their ongoing emissions with carbon removal beginning in 2035, later than the CDR industry — which is desperate for more buyers — hoped. SBTi will also encourage companies to purchase carbon removal before that date by creating an optional “recognition program.” It hasn’t spelled out all the details yet, but it would essentially mean giving companies that buy CDR early a gold star.

Power explained that corporate buyers told SBTi that starting the requirement earlier, in 2030, was “not feasible.” But she tried to reassure the audience, noting that SBTi is already fielding inquiries from companies about how they can go after the optional recognition program.

“I hope at some point that we’re able to publish some of those reflections and insights that we’re gaining internally,” she said, “but I think it is more like an indicator that there is interest in this recognition program, there’s interest in this above and beyond framework.”

A few other quick notes on big CDR announcements before I go:

• Archer Daniels Midland, an American food processing company, announced its first carbon removal project today at an ethanol plant in Nebraska, advertising that it will capture and store 800,000 tons of CO2 per year. The company already operates the first commercial-scale carbon injection well in the country at another ethanol refinery in Illinois. Carbon captured from the plant in Nebraska will travel to a storage site in Wyoming via a 400-mile natural gas pipeline that has been converted to transport CO2. “That’s a really cool way to leverage infrastructure that already exists in adjacent industries and convert them to deliver meaningful environmental impact as quickly as possible,” Kristen Allison, the director of carbon markets at Archer Daniels Midland, said at the Puro Summit today.
• Robinson Lumber, another legacy American company, is also entering the market with a new industrial-scale biochar facility. It plans to convert 100,000 metric tons of wood waste per year into biochar and achieve about 40,000 tons of carbon removal.
• Vaulted Deep, a carbon removal company that injects organic waste underground, raised $35 million in debt financing to expand across the U.S.