Carbon Removal: Climate Savior or Distraction?

by Chelsea Harvey (Politico's Power Switch) The technology, which was originally seen as a way to suck down “residual emissions” from industries like cement and steel, is now the object of a burgeoning international industry. It has already attracted the attention of major petrostates, like Saudi Arabia, as well as oil and gas companies that have touted its potential, as your host and Corbin Hiar reported today.

“Carbon removal technologies offer an easy way out, to cover up business as usual, and the expansion of [polluting] industries right now — without any of the major transformations we need to see in rapid emissions cuts,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil economy program at the Center for International Environmental Law, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Researchers are racing to develop new carbon removal technologies. Startups today are exploring everything from special carbon-sequestering minerals sprinkled into the ocean to giant machines that guzzle pollution directly out of the air.

But the core issue is that the international promotion of carbon removal has emerged well before the technology has reached a scale large enough to offset even modest residual emissions. Now the field’s growing popularity has divided scientists over how much money and attention the world should devote to it — and whether it holds real promise or largely distracts from making painful cuts in pollution.

Last March, the leader of Occidental Petroleum, Vicki Hollub, said the technology “gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the next 60, 70, 80 years.”

As interest grows, some experts suggest that clearer global guidelines from the U.N. could help ensure carbon removal doesn’t become a force for climate action lollygagging. At the very least, they say, nations must deliver more clarity on their expectations for their own leftover emissions and carbon removal strategies in the coming decades. READ MORE

Excerpt from E&E News Climatewire: But there’s a problem: The technology doesn’t yet exist at the scale necessary to offset even modest levels of residual emissions. And there’s not enough land on Earth to plant the number of trees required to balance the world’s overdrawn carbon budget.

If petrostates like Saudi Arabia and fossil fuel companies use the promise of carbon removal technology as a justification to keep on emitting, that could increase the pool of pollution that needs to be offset in order to achieve net zero. There’s also no guarantee that commercially unproven carbon removal approaches will be able to keep up.

A growing chorus of critics now argue that the idea of using machines to pull pollution from the sky is becoming a distraction to the main event — reducing emissions.

Meanwhile, there are only 27 direct air capture plants in operation around the globe. They, along with planting forests and other natural ways of reducing emissions, siphon a small amount of pollution from the air compared with what humans dump into the atmosphere each year. There’s no guarantee that they will be able to eventually fix the climate problem.

To some experts, that’s a reason for making massive new investments in those technologies, such as the $3.5 billion effort by the Biden administration to jump-start the direct air capture industry in the U.S. Those experts argue that there must be at least enough carbon removal capacity globally, via natural or technological means, to offset future residual emissions to ensure that the world achieves net zero on time. As of today, that’s nowhere near possible.

Meeting even the 2-degree target would require nearly an additional billion tons of carbon removal each year by 2030, likely through a variety of different methods, according to a major report led by the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment earlier this year. It estimates that the world is currently removing around 2 billion tons a year, mainly through low-tech efforts like planting forests.

“We need to start having more serious demonstration programs and efforts to scale it up and build supply chains, public deliberation about where sites go,” said Nemet from the University of Wisconsin, one of the report’s authors. “That’s all needed because we have to deploy at quite fast rates to meet the targets and have this technology even be helpful for net zero.”

But others argue that policymakers should keep their focus on ensuring they leave as few residual emissions as possible, to reduce the need for big carbon-sucking machines and other interventions. READ MORE

Excerpt from CNBC: Both water and captured carbon can be used to make sustainable aviation fuel. That was particularly attractive to investor JetBlue Ventures, the venture capital arm of the airline, which invests in companies attempting to change the travel industry.

“It is not only more climate friendly, but it’s also a cheaper way to pull carbon from the air and actually produce a feedstock for the future for sustainable aviation fuel,” said Amy Burr, president of JetBlue Ventures.

In addition to JetBlue Ventures, Avnos is backed by Shell Ventures, the Grantham Foundation’s Neglected Climate Opportunities Fund and Rusheen Capital Management. Total funding from VCs so far is $35 million. READ MORE