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And for his energy czar, Doug Burgum.
Instead of rocket fuel, they’re burning biomass.
A conversation with Kajsa Hendrickson, Carbon180’s director of policy
Fire prevention comes as part of the deal.
Climate world turned out in New York.
How Equatic solved seawater’s toxic gas problem and delivered a two-for-one solution: removing carbon while producing green hydrogen
Isometric is trying to become the most trusted name in the scandal-plagued carbon market.
Regulations are probably coming for the scandal-plagued voluntary carbon market. After years of mounting skepticism and reports of greenwashing, governments are now attempting to rein in the historically unchecked web of platforms, registries, protocols, and verification bodies offering ways to offset a company’s emissions that vary tremendously in price and quality. Europe has developed its own rules, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, while the Biden administration earlier this year announced a less comprehensive set of general principles. Plus, there are already mandatory carbon credit schemes around the world, such as California’s cap-and-trade program and the E.U. Emissions Trading System.
“The idea that a voluntary credit should be a different thing than a compliance credit, obviously doesn’t make sense, right?” Ryan Orbuch, Lowercarbon Capital’s carbon removal lead, told me. “You want it to be as likely as possible that the thing you’re buying today is going to count in a compliance regime.”
That’s where the carbon credit certification platform Isometric comes into play. Founded in 2022, the startup raised $25 million in its seed round last year, co-led by Lowercarbon and Plural, a European venture capital firm. It has created a rigorous, scientifically-driven standard for carbon removal credits, with the intention of becoming the benchmark that buyers, sellers, and other stakeholders can coalesce around. So whenever federal standards or compliance regimes do kick in, there will be no doubt whether Isometric-verified credits are up to snuff.
“Isometric was basically founded to say, look, the long-term solution here is obviously government and regulation, but in the meantime, this is too important to let the market just keep doing it like this,” Lukas May, chief commercial officer at Isometric, told me. He believes that the government’s role in the carbon market should mirror the financial sector, but instead of preventing insider trading or predatory lending, federal regulators would make high-level determinations on things like what types of credits count and how long carbon must be locked away to count as “permanent removal.” Platforms like Isometric (often referred to as registries) could then focus on setting more granular, scientifically specific requirements for particular methods of carbon removal.
The startup aims to separate itself from existing registries, which include Puro.earth, Verra, and the Gold Standard, in two big ways.
First is just a focus on science. May said that 15 of Isometric’s first 25 hires were scientists. Today, the company’s chief scientist is Jennifer Wilcox, who recently left her position on the leadership team at the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, housed within the U.S. Department of Energy. Other registries, he told me, are “filled with NGO types” and “policy people” who lack the technical background to, say, evaluate what types rock formations are best for the geological sequestration of bio-oil or how CO2 fluxes in the soil impact enhanced rock weathering. These types of in-the-weeds analyses are integral to establishing stringent protocols to validate the amount of carbon that’s actually been removed.
Additionally, May, Orbuch, and Khaled Helioui, a partner at Plural who led the firm’s investment in Isometric, all said the company fixes a key flaw in the voluntary carbon market —- alignment of financial incentives. Traditionally, carbon removal suppliers pay registries to certify their credits, which creates an incentive for registries to overlook lax standards. But Isometric is instead paid a flat fee by the buyers for performing verification work on a per-ton basis.
This year, Isometric verified its first credits ever, from the carbon removal companies Vaulted Deep, which collects sludgy, organic waste and deposits it underground, and Charm Industrial, which injects processed biomass into abandoned oil and gas wells. Credits from these two suppliers were sold to Frontier, the carbon-removal initiative led by the payments firm Stripe. Just last week, Frontier identified Isometric as its first and only leading credit issuer.
“What makes Isometric stand out is they’re explicitly focused on durable CDR [carbon dioxide removal],” Joanna Klitzke, Frontier’s procurement and ecosystem strategy lead, told me. “Durable” refers to the fact that Isometric’s projects must sequester CO2 for 1,000 years or more. “They’re building tech products that make data and reporting particularly easy for suppliers and for credit management,” she added.
Everyone is essentially trying to avoid another scandal like the one that engulfed rainforest carbon offsets, which were found to be largely worthless. The industry has thus been shifting away from more nebulous carbon offsets, which seek to avoid future emissions by preventing deforestation or funding renewables development, and towards more concrete, but often more expensive, forms of carbon removal — think direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, or biomass carbon removal and storage, all of which have seen a boom in investment.
“As carbon removal was emerging as a new and potentially very exciting way to do this stuff, potentially more measurable and more rigorous, we couldn’t just sit and watch the same registries do the same thing,” May told me, saying doing so would “destroy trust in the carbon removal industry before it’s even off the ground.”
In a past life, Isometric’s founder and CEO, Eamon Jubbawy, founded a digital identity verification company for the financial services industry. This gave investors confidence that he could bring his expertise in trust-building and verification services to the carbon removal space.
“It’s not a like for like, but there’s a lot of overlap in terms of actually introducing efficiency, effectiveness, and having technology really open a market,” Plural’s Helioui told me. “This is not an endeavor or an opportunity where I would have been necessarily that keen to back a first-time founder, just because of the complexity of what you need to manage,” he said. “We’re really talking about market creation.”
But May doesn’t expect Isometric to totally dominate other registries. Just like there are many private banks, May envisions an “ecosystem of high quality registries,” eventually unified around a set of federal guardrails. Until then, he believes Isometric’s role is to “set a bar that is so high that the expectation and norm in the market shifts,” thus avoiding a race to the bottom where companies are able to greenwash their image with cheap, low-quality credits.
Now, not every company can afford the highest quality credits. And because of Isometric’s 1,000-year storage requirement, many cheaper, nature-based projects, such as reforestation, are excluded from its registry, even though there’s still demand for them. Orbuch told me that Isometric will continue adding guidelines for different carbon removal pathways, as it recently did for biochar, a charcoal-like brick that locks up carbon contained within biomass.
It’s still early days, and there’s plenty of room for Isometric to grow alongside the market. After all, it’s only issued 5,350 carbon removal credits to date, while nearly two billion credits have been issued in the voluntary carbon market overall.
“The whole industry needs to be scaling up,” May told me. “So we need to, in 10 years time, be, you know, issuing and verifying hundreds of millions, if not billions, of credits annually.”
DAC startup Holocene has a novel chemistry and backing from Breakthrough Energy and Frontier Climate.
Direct air capture companies are in a race to prove they can reduce the cost of removing carbon from the atmosphere down below $100 per ton. Now, one is closing in on the prize with a first-of-its-kind deal.
On Tuesday, Google announced it will pay the startup Holocene $10 million to remove 100,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere, to be delivered “by the early 2030s.” The tech giant said the price point was made possible by the federal tax credit for carbon sequestration, and its own willingness to cough up the bulk of the funds upfront.
There’s no question the deal is risky on both sides. Today, most estimates place the cost of direct air capture at upwards of $600 per ton. Bringing the cost down is essential if the tech is ever going to play a meaningful role in tackling climate change. But even the companies that are farthest along, like the Swiss pioneer Climeworks, aren’t sure they will be able to offer a price of $100 per ton by 2030. Holocene has yet to build a commercial plant, so its ability to remove carbon for $100 per ton is pure projection at this point.
But for Google, the goal is more to catalyze a potentially important climate solution than to clean up its carbon footprint.
“The point of our program is to help Google reach net zero in whatever way most helps the world reach net zero,” Randy Spock, the company’s carbon credits and removals lead, told me in an email. “So this deal is an example of us identifying what the planet needs (long-term cost reduction for Direct Air Capture) and then doing what we can to help it take a step in that direction.”
Though Holocene is relatively new to the direct air capture market, it was started by veterans. Co-founders Anca Timofte and Tobias Rüesh spent roughly six years working in research and development at Climeworks back in its early days, when the company was building its first prototypes. Timofte left in 2020 to get an MBA at Stanford, and while there, came across some exciting research out of Oak Ridge National Laboratory that described a new approach to removing carbon from the ambient air — one that seemed to have distinct advantages. Seeing the potential, Timofte decided to start Holocene with Rüesh and another Stanford classmate and, in 2023, licensed the Oak Ridge technology.
“The chemistry from Oak Ridge is special,” Timofte told me. “It's different than all other chemistries, we think, in direct air capture.”
Most direct air capture systems fall into one of two categories, liquid or solid, and each approach has trade-offs. Liquid systems typically have simpler engineering and can capture CO2 continuously, but require more heat, and therefore more energy. Solid systems have lower heat requirements, but work sort of like cartridges that get “charged” with CO2 and have to be “discharged,” and therefore capture CO2 in batches rather than in perpetuity.
Timofte described Holocene’s process as the “best of both worlds.” It captures CO2 in water and operates in a continuous loop, but requires relatively low heat — between 70 to 100 degrees Celsius (158 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit) — which could potentially come from a source of waste heat like a data center. The enabling discovery was the use of two chemicals — an amino acid and a compound called guanidine — that attract CO2 and then further concentrate it within the water, making it easier and less energy-intensive to isolate so that it can be stored securely underground.
After licensing the tech, Holocene moved quickly. Within a year, the team had built a small pilot plant in Knoxville, Tennessee that’s capable of capturing about 10 tons of CO2 annually. That’s, of course, a totally insignificant amount, but it’s enough for the team to demonstrate its approach to potential funders and to keep testing variations on the basic chemistry to refine the system, Timofte told me.
Timofte said the company has made it this far with just over $6 million in grants and prizes from the Department of Energy, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, and Frontier Climate, a coalition of carbon removal buyers that includes Google in addition to other tech companies. The $500,000 that Holocene got from Frontier was technically a pre-purchase of 332 tons of removal, which would put the current cost per ton at roughly $1,500.
Frontier’s pre-purchases are not a precise indicator of price as they are meant to “pressure-test the viability of novel CDR solutions,” and are granted with the expectation that some ventures will fail. Still, even with a fresh influx of cash from Google and the prospect of a $180 per ton tax credit from the federal government, the company has a steep climb ahead. Timofte told me the team is beginning to fundraise to build their next project — a 2,000- to 5,000-ton per year demonstration plant. When asked about how it reached the $100 per ton deal with Google, she stressed that having a delivery date past 2030 was crucial to the deal.
The industry’s fixation on achieving $100 per ton is somewhat arbitrary. A 2019 National Academies of Sciences report found that estimates of the cost of capturing CO2 via direct air capture spanned “an order of magnitude, from $100 to $1,000” per ton. In 2021, the Biden administration’s Department of Energy set a goal to bring the cost of all kinds of carbon removal below $100 per ton, which seemed to solidify the goal across the field. In 2022, the nonprofit CarbonPlan surveyed carbon removal buyers, suppliers, and brokers, and found that $100 per ton was a common benchmark. “If cost were $100/ton, demand would be practically unlimited,” one supplier said. “Bringing down cost to $100/ton for CDR would be the sweet spot,” said a buyer. CarbonPlan pointed out, however, that the responses weren’t consistent on whether $100 per ton was the desired break-even point for carbon removal companies or the desired price for buyers.
“I think we focus too much on the cost of DAC,” Erin Burns, the executive director of the nonprofit Carbon180 told me when I asked her if $100 per ton was a meaningful goal. “Sure, DAC should and will get cheaper. But we need to also be thinking, right now, about things like renewable energy availability, infrastructure, and reducing emissions as quickly as possible.”
Finding clean sources of power for direct air capture is becoming more of an issue as companies try to scale. At the end of August, a startup called CarbonCapture Inc. announced it would try to relocate a commercial-scale project it had planned to build in Wyoming because it was struggling to procure enough clean energy to power the plant due to competition with data centers and cryptocurrency miners.
Timofte agreed that “clean electrons are hard to come by,” but added that Holocene’s potential to use waste heat might make it a little easier for the company.
“I don't want to dismiss the challenge. I think this is the challenge that everyone faces. We each have to solve it, and the solutions are going to be individual.”
Anu Khan is pushing carbon credits to better serve the public good.
There’s a new player in carbon removal. It’s not another startup building machines to suck carbon from the air. And it’s not another trade association or consulting firm or marketplace peddling carbon removal credits. Instead, it wants to help establish a different system for advancing carbon removal — one where the challenging but important goal of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere is treated as a public good and not just a business opportunity.
It’s called the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative, and it’s run by Anu Khan, the former deputy director of science and innovation at Carbon180. CRSI (pronounced like the Lannister queen in Game of Thrones, “Cersei”) is a “financially unconflicted, independent nonprofit,” that will provide technical assistance to policymakers, regulators, and nongovernmental organizations in quantifying carbon removal outcomes.
A group providing technical assistance may not sound like a revolutionary development. But Khan hopes CRSI will be a fulcrum around which the entire industry can begin to pivot.
Today’s carbon removal industry is built on selling credits, each of which is supposed to represent one ton of CO2 pulled out of the atmosphere. But the market is almost entirely self-regulated. The standards for measuring and reporting how much carbon a given project is removing have either been developed by the carbon credit registries that take a cut of the sales or by the developers themselves — in both cases a conflict of interest, even if governed by the best of intentions. Plus, there’s a multitude of standards for every type of project, and they vary in quality.
Take carbon farming, for example. If a farmer alters their practices to increase the carbon stored in their soil, they can choose from more than a dozen standards to quantify the effects. In theory, the standards all produce an identical product — a fungible carbon credit equivalent to one ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere. In reality, they vary widely in quality, with some standards producing more accurate results than others.
In watching this environment develop over the past several years, I’ve often wondered if some independent, unbiased entity might eventually step forward to enact one set of standards to rule them all. Khan told me that about a year and a half ago, she had the same thought. “Oh, to be so young,” she said.
At the time, there was growing concern that the carbon removal industry would suffer from the same credibility issues that plagued the wider market for carbon credits. “You have a multiplicity of these verification entities driven by profit motives, some of which have very loose standards,” Wil Burns, the co-executive director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University, told me. “From the standpoint of those purchasing credits or those viewing whether companies are doing anything meaningful, nobody can really distinguish.”
In early 2023, dozens of carbon removal suppliers, buyers, verifiers, academics, and nonprofit staff — including Khan — signed an open letter that now reads like an early draft of CRSI’s missions statement. It called for the creation of “an independent, not-for-profit initiative that conscientiously avoids conflicts of interest and has funding that does not depend on issuing or selling carbon credits.” This new body would “provide a trusted, scientific stamp of approval for CDR protocols through an inclusive process to identify scientific consensus.”
The letter focused on the issues with measuring carbon removal in the context of the voluntary sale of carbon credits. But over the next year, it became clear to Khan that carbon removal won’t reach the scale necessary to make a dent in climate change without government policy. “Even the market enthusiasts recognize that we’re going to need policy as quickly as possible to shore this up,” she said, “and it’s going to be policy, long term, that gets us to gigaton scale.”
So instead of providing “a trusted, scientific stamp of approval” to private businesses, CRSI is laser focused on working with policymakers. It’s not entirely clear yet what that will look like, and it’s likely to evolve as CRSI finds its footing. But the group is launching with a few projects that are already underway. It has created a database of “quantification resources,” which is basically a list of all of the methodologies published by companies, academics, government agencies, and international standards organizations, for measuring different kinds of carbon removal. It also has a database of carbon removal policies, both those enacted and proposed. Eventually, Khan plans to have them link out to each other, so you can see which standards underpin which policies.
Khan wants CRSI to be a go-to resource for policymakers and agency staff to ensure that carbon removal programs actually result in climate benefits. “We are fundamentally a mission organization,” she told me. “We believe that carbon removal is a tool for climate justice. Justice requires accountability, and in carbon removal, that means knowing how to count the carbon. We want to make sure that if we're putting public dollars into these policies, that they are backed by the ability to actually measure the carbon.”
Khan isn’t the only one whose thinking on standards has shifted toward a government-led approach. Burns, who also signed the letter, told me he’s seeing more carbon removal companies pushing for a compliance market, where the government requires polluting businesses to buy carbon removal. “They would like to both have government standards that would provide more confidence, for example, to investors,” he said, “and they would like government mandates that generate more demand.”
Freya Chay is the program lead at the nonprofit Carbon Plan, which spearheaded the letter. She told me many in the industry are now thinking about carbon removal programs that don’t revolve around selling credits at all, and therefore may have very different measurement and verification needs.
One of CRSI’s first projects is an illustrative example. Imagine if the Department of Agriculture developed a program to help farmers restore the pH of soils that have gotten too acidic, by adding basalt — a mineral that also happens to capture CO2 from the atmosphere as it dissolves. Today, carbon removal companies that sell carbon credits based on this process are taking hundreds of soil samples to measure the outcomes. The USDA likely wouldn’t need that level of precision — the captured CO2 is a co-benefit, not the entire point of the program — but “at some point you probably do want to know if you removed carbon through this policy,” said Khan. CRSI is working on figuring out how you would do that.
Similarly, we might see the development of building codes that encourage the use of concrete cured with CO2 from the atmosphere, or waste management regulations that govern the injection of carbon-rich organic waste into underground storage wells. Bigger picture, the U.S. will eventually have to measure and report how much carbon removal it’s doing across all of these little programs as part of its obligation under the Paris Agreement.
In many of these cases, those setting the rules won’t be experts in carbon removal science. “They’re going to need technical expertise,” said Khan. “We want to make sure that when they are doing that work, they have access to all of the relevant information, and that it’s organized in a way that’s legible for the expertise that they already have.”
Shuchi Talati, the former chief of staff in the office of fossil energy and carbon management at the Department of Energy, told me that having this kind of centralized resource would definitely have been useful. “The private sector has a lot of power right now in setting standards because the public sector doesn’t have the capacity,” she said. And since the field is so diverse, efforts are spread across a bunch of different agencies that don’t always talk to each other. Talati sits on the board of CRSI, and for her, the focus on government is not just about helping carbon removal scale.
“If we’re allowing the private sector to set standards and norms — and maybe they’re fine right now — but if we continue to let that happen, I can see the actual climate benefit of CDR slipping away,” Talati said. “That’s really where I see Anu’s organization fit in, where we are trying to set standards and norms from this core, foundational principle of a public good.”
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
Jim Doten will soon rule over one of the first municipally owned carbon removal programs.
Minneapolis may be the only city in the country with a carbon sequestration program manager on staff. Now, Jim Doten — who holds that title — is about to realize his dream of starting up one of the first municipally owned and operated carbon removal projects.
The Minnesota metropolis has just purchased its very own biomass pyrolyzer, a machine that heats up tree clippings in a low-oxygen environment and turns them into a form of charcoal called biochar. As the wood grew, it sucked carbon out of the air during photosynthesis; as biochar, that carbon becomes stable for hundreds of years, if not longer.
Biochar can be mixed into soil, and has a wide range of demonstrated benefits, including increasing crop yields and enhancing the soil’s capacity to hold water. Some studies suggest it can filter contaminants out of stormwater. The city plans to use the biochar in public works projects and donate it to community groups in “green zones,” neighborhoods with high levels of pollution and marginalized populations. It’s also in talks with other local governments that might be interested in buying some.
“One of the things we want to do is be a regional resource for other government agencies,” Doten told me, “whether it be city, county, state agencies, making biochar available for projects addressing the effects of climate change, sequestering carbon, as well as providing environmental benefits throughout our infrastructure.”
Studies say that we should be shoveling billions of tons of CO2 out of the skies each year by 2050 to keep climate change in check — and that’s on top of cutting emissions to near-zero. Scholars have compared the vast responsibility of cleaning up the carbon in the atmosphere to municipal waste management: Since the task is more of a public good than a profitable enterprise, it may be best suited for the folks we already rely on to take out the trash.
A number of other municipalities have been experimenting with carbon removal to support their climate goals. Notably, Boulder County, Colorado teamed up with Flagstaff, Arizona, and a number of other cities, to form the Four Corners Coalition, which is pooling resources to finance local carbon removal projects. But Minneapolis is the first, at least that I’m aware of, to essentially start its own carbon removal department.
Doten became a biochar evangelist more than a decade ago. He first learned of the substance’s various benefits while working in southern Afghanistan with the Minnesota National Guard in 2012. He was serving as a hydrologist on an agribusiness development team and helping village farmers rebuild soil health to improve crop yields. When he returned to Minneapolis the following year, he was eager to test out biochar’s benefits at home.
Over the decade that followed, Doten worked days as the supervisor of environmental services for the city’s health department. But on the side, he led a number of biochar passion project. He convinced the public works department to use biochar in landscaping projects along street medians. He started a partnership with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux, a tribe that runs a compost facility, to provide a mix of compost and biochar to urban gardens around the city. He got the health department to sponsor a research trial at the community farm at Little Earth, a federally-subsidized housing complex primarily occupied by indigenous families. Though the study was disrupted by vandalism, the city gathered enough data to show that the plots with biochar-amended compost saw superior plant health, food production and water retention during August drought conditions.
Doten told me the limiting factor for expanding these programs was the availability of biochar. The city was buying it and shipping it in from elsewhere, which Doten was also not happy about because the emissions from shipping cuts into any climate benefits. Then, in 2019, he had the opportunity to see what the city could do if finding biochar wasn’t an issue. Bloomberg Philanthropies flew Doten and his colleagues to Stockholm, Sweden, where five years earlier, the charity had helped the city finance its own biochar production facility.
“So I went to Stockholm along with one of our city council members and the head of public works, and ‘I’ll be darned, oh my gosh, Jim, you weren't lying, this is a real program and it does really great things in Stockholm!” Doten recalled. He waxed on about the “Stockholm method” for planting urban trees that involves using biochar and which can help manage the flow of stormwater. Stockholm is also sending waste heat from its pyrolysis facility into a district heating system used to warm apartments.
A few years later, Bloomberg Philanthropies invited other cities to apply for funding to build similar programs. Minneapolis was one of three U.S. cities, along with Lincoln, Nebraska, and Cincinnati, Ohio, to win $400,000 in 2022 to develop city-wide biochar projects. All three are expected to begin construction on their production facilities this year; Doten hopes the Minneapolis facility will be operational this fall.
The city has made an agreement with Xcel Energy, the local utility, to collect the tree clippings from the company’s electrical line maintenance work — previously that material was getting burned in a power plant. Doten has also found a site for the facility — a somewhat isolated industrial property near railroad tracks — which was no easy feat in an urban environment. “It’s very difficult to site a place like this within the city that's not near residences, properly zoned, get the neighborhood approvals, council approvals, and make sure everybody's happy — well I shouldn’t say happy, but at least satisfied with the result.”
The other big piece was sourcing the equipment. As my colleague Katie Brigham has reported, there are a lot of biochar companies. According to one carbon removal database, there are more than 240 such companies around the world — more than any other type of carbon removal company. But most of them have developed fancy pyrolysis machines for their own use, to develop their own carbon removal projects. There aren’t that many offering the technology for sale. Doten said he talked to most of the ones that did, and there was one company whose bid came in far below the rest — BluSky, a small startup based in Connecticut. Minneapolis purchased the company’s equipment, nicknamed the “Vulcan” system, for $585,000.
“We really believe in what Jim is doing and what the city is doing,” Will Hessert, the company’s CEO, told me. “We want to see more cities doing this.”
Writing in The New Republic in 2022, four scholars made a case for a public model for carbon removal. They argued that if the responsibility is left to private companies, it could end up like plastic recycling, which is basically a big lie and “distracts from underlying causes while pollution continues.” Or it could end up like privately owned electric utilities who take shortcuts that end up costing lives, like how PG&E’s inadequate maintenance led to the 2018 Camp Fire in California.
“Imagine a regional, community-run carbon removal authority,” they wrote, “that simultaneously pursues wetland restoration and forest management, safely operates an industrial removal facility and associated mining and geological sequestration operations, monitors carbon levels in forests, and works with farmers to maintain healthy fields that store carbon in the soil.”
That’s not what’s happening in Minneapolis. The climate benefits are likely to be minimal. The city couldn’t provide me with an estimate, but a story about the project from last year noted that the city anticipated having a system that could handle 3,600 tons of wood waste per year, resulting in an estimated 1,500 tons of CO2 removed. That’s about 0.04% of the city’s current annual emissions.
There is a real opportunity for cities to play a role in carbon removal. A study from 2022 found that cities might be able to play a significant role in carbon removal — potentially removing up to 1 billion tons per year, though the numbers are “plagued by uncertainties” — by sequestering carbon in vegetation, soils, and the built environment. In that sense, Minneapolis’ biochar program could be one component of this larger vision.
