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The carbon removal company has a pitch to solve the industry’s biggest “moral hazard.”
The carbon removal industry has exploded over the past few years, with billions of dollars in government funding and venture capital flowing to startups, nonprofits, and university research centers working on different ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. But all the attention has also stirred up a long running controversy about whether this solution is a dangerous distraction.
Critics worry that governments and corporations will not work as hard to cut greenhouse gas emissions if they believe they’ll eventually be able to reverse them. Some have warned this is already happening. On Thursday, Climeworks, one of the leading companies developing machines that suck carbon dioxide from the air, published a manifesto of sorts to fend off the risk that its technology is used to delay climate action.
The Swiss company’s statement calls for “a clear distinction between emissions reductions and carbon removals” in corporate and national climate plans and in the carbon market. It can be read as a pitch to improve the ever-popular but dangerously vague net-zero pledge. In theory, a plan to achieve net-zero emissions should involve both reducing emissions and then reaching a sort of equilibrium where any remaining releases are canceled out by removing carbon from the atmosphere.
The problem with net zero is it puts a lot more emphasis on the second part, and doesn’t require much transparency about the first. For example, a clothing brand pledging to achieve net zero by 2050 might buy renewable energy to power its stores, but avoid making more difficult changes to its production process or supply chain to reduce emissions, with the vague intention to balance them out later.
Climeworks is urging companies and governments to instead set two separate targets: One for how much they plan to reduce their carbon output, and a second for the level of remaining emissions they plan to balance out with carbon removal. It’s an idea with roots in academia; a 2019 paper argued that unpacking net-zero goals this way would help ensure that investments in carbon removal are truly additional to essential investments in emissions reductions.
“What we are saying is that removals should not stand as an excuse to not reduce your emissions,” said Louis Uzor, the climate policy manager at Climeworks.
The prospect of removing carbon from the atmosphere is undeniably seductive. “Depending on how you look at things, the technology represents either the ultimate insurance policy or the ultimate moral hazard,” New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in a 2017 story about the kinds of machines that Climeworks is building.
It’s not hard to see how the fantasy version could turn into a nightmare. Our future ability to remove carbon will be limited by all kinds of constraints, like clean energy availability, land use, finance, and community support. If we operate under the assumption that we’ll be able to remove huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere in a few decades, and that capacity doesn’t materialize, we could end up with more catastrophic warming — and still be far off from stabilizing the climate.
“Carbon removal capacity is going to be finite,” said Holly Buck, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo. “Its in our interest to really constrain the residual emissions to the smallest amount possible to make sure that we can, in fact, compensate for them.”
At first glance, it may seem like Climeworks’ manifesto undermines its entire business model. Carbon removal "has a different role to play and should not be substituting emission reductions,” the statement reads. But today, companies like H&M and Square pay Climeworks for carbon removal to compensate for some of their emissions. Even the band Coldplay has bought credits to offset emissions from its tour.
Uzor argues its clients are not purchasing removals in place of cutting emissions. Paying Climeworks to remove carbon is still really expensive — upwards of $600 per metric ton of carbon. “It’s quite obvious that if you can reduce [emissions] for even up to $200 per ton, you’re still better off reducing than going with Climeworks,” he said. Rather, customers are lining up because they have emissions that are considered “hard to abate,” meaning there may not be any way to eliminate them for a long time. Uzor said their clients understand that if they want to achieve net zero in the next few decades, “they better start working with us now, because we have a whole industry that needs to scale up.”
Buck, of the University of Buffalo, pointed out that making it the norm to set a carbon removal goal could actually be great for Climeworks’ business. She’s optimistic that the company’s message comes from a place of genuine concern, but she thinks governments should be the ones leading the way by setting stronger requirements to cut emissions. “If people in the private sector are going to try to basically create policy in the absence of governments doing it, this seems good, but I don't think it’ll solve all the problems.”
Gilles Dufrasne, a lead on global carbon markets at the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch, said his organization supports the ideas in the statement, noting that this clear distinction would bring more transparency to climate plans and progress.
Climeworks’ statement also included a second, related plea. The company wants carbon credit certifiers to distinguish between projects that reduce or avoid emissions, like a wind farm or protection of a forest that might otherwise be chopped down, and those that remove carbon from the atmosphere, like Climeworks’ direct air capture plants. Thus far, Uzor said, Climeworks has refrained from working with large carbon registries like Verra or the American Carbon Registry, where many companies go to buy carbon offsets, because it couldn’t compete in that environment as long as its projects were lumped together with those that reduce emissions, which sell offsets for a fraction of the price.
This is another delicate subject. The growth of carbon removal projects is colliding with major tumult in the carbon market. Traditional carbon offset projects that purport to reduce emissions have been raked over the coals by researchers and journalists who have found time and again that those projects exaggerated their benefits. Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, said that the Science Based Targets Initiative, a nonprofit that creates voluntary standards for corporate climate action, has also begun discouraging companies from buying these kinds of offsets while encouraging investments in carbon removal. “It’s led to this kind of perverse outcome where everyone’s chasing removals,” said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. “Yet if you look at a global level, what we really need to do is reduce emissions rapidly and significantly. So it ends up being a bit of a distraction.”
Uzor said some have opposed the idea to clearly separate removals because it could make them seem like a superior product. But he insisted that wasn’t Climework’s intent. “Currently, global emissions are still on the rise, so any avoided emission that is timely and properly done, based on robust assessment, is massively needed.”
It doesn’t seem like this will end up being such a big ask. Verra, the largest carbon offset registry in the world, plans to introduce a “removals” label in the middle of this year, said Anne Thiel, Verra’s senior manager of communications in an email.
But shoring up the integrity of the market is another question altogether — and one where Climeworks does have a clear advantage. The benefits of a direct air capture project are pretty easy to measure, but other types of carbon removal projects, like those that involve storing carbon in soil or sinking it to the bottom of the ocean, will be a lot harder to verify.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”