In Search of Carbon Removal Offsets

November 19, 2020

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(Carbon 180) What our (extremely arduous) journey to find carbon removal offsets tells us about the state of voluntary carbon markets today, and some ideas about how we can fix them.

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Others have explored the efficacy of existing carbon markets and offset frameworks, and found convincing evidence that carbon offsets have rarely delivered the robust emission reductions that they promise, while creating negative impacts on ecosystems and communities that deploy these projects. Our hope was that carbon removal offsets could address many of these concerns.

What we found was concerning at best.

Effort to find projects was way too high

Unfortunately, finding carbon removal offsets to purchase proved challenging. For one, it took immense effort to mine existing carbon offset registries for projects that claim to remove carbon — in addition to the well established registries like Verra and Gold Standard, there are many smaller voluntary carbon offset registries, each with its own set of protocols and projects. We also found that some emerging technologies like direct air capture from companies like Climeworks were skipping registries and selling directly to consumers (we have purchased Climeworks offsets in a limited capacity in the past).

Once we identified offset registries and retailers, it was hard to determine which projects were actually carbon negative. The vast majority of potentially carbon removal projects included nature-based approaches like reforestation, afforestation, wetland restoration, and agricultural soil carbon sequestration — but the line between removal and reduction was often blurry. This difficulty in finding robust carbon removal credits is an issue and even with a decent amount of effort and expertise, we felt stymied by the fragmented and opaque nature of the markets.

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1. For nature-based carbon removal offsets, it was incredibly difficult to assess the quality of removal across key dimensions like volume, additionality, permanence, leakage, and non-carbon impacts. It took immense effort to figure out what the projects were actually doing and how much carbon was being removed in a verified way, for how long, and at what cost.

2. Technological carbon removal projects with more directly verifiable and permanent carbon storage were both rare and really expensive.

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On the rare occasions that carbon removal claims are made by offset projects, they are not rooted in carbon cycle science.

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(W)e see an immense opportunity to invest in carbon removal in parallel with offsetting. Corporate sustainability and climate programs can support a burgeoning carbon removal industry and ensure more capital goes directly to durably, safely, and equitably removing carbon from the atmosphere while limiting fraud, host-community harm, and bureaucratic inefficiencies that are emblematic of carbon offsetting schemes.

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Beyond offsetting, companies can:

Augment offset purchases with high-quality, more expensive projects that are delivering verifiable outcomes and shift to carbon removal with storage offsetting as soon as possible,
Build in supply chain procurement of carbon-removing products (e.g. concrete, materials, food),
Invest strategically in carbon removal companies,
Collaborate to create a central hub for purchasing quality carbon removal offsets and/or setting standards for apples to apples comparison across carbon removal solutions, and for disclosing carbon removal purchases to external stakeholders,
Leverage corporate philanthropy to pool resources to drive down carbon removal costs, and
Lobby for policy change.

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Investing in carbon removal now provides tangible climate benefits while also helping build the carbon removal industry and driving down the cost of carbon removal solutions in the future. READ MORE

Any hope of keeping Earth habitable now requires sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere, a new study found (Business Insider)

Shooting for the moon: 3 radical innovations to remove atmospheric CO2 (GreenBiz)

In the quest for carbon offsets, (almost) anything goes (GreenBiz)

Truterra Will Pilot Carbon Project With Nori (AgWeb)

Excerpt from GreenBiz: 2. Charm Industrial: Turning biomass waste into CO2-dense bio-oil

Charm Industrial is working to reverse the process of crude-oil production — that is, to take the carbon stored in biomass, turn it into CO2-dense biofuel through fast pyrolysis (superheating) and inject it back into the Earth’s crust.

The startup is on a mission to "return the atmosphere to 280 ppm" through its technology, which it claims is more permanent and cost-effective than traditional nature-based offsets and direct air capture (DAC) methods.

Currently, Charm makes its bio-oil from excess sawdust and wood, but it plans to use agricultural residues such as corn stover, rice straw, sugar cane and almond shells in the future. Its aim is for the process to have additionality, meaning that if the feedstock was left unused, such residues would be left in fields to rot and emit CO2 back into the air.

The bio-oil Charm produces has properties similar to crude oil but with half the energy content and a very high carbon content. This, along with its tendency to form a solid over time, make the product safe for injection into existing oil wells, according to the company.

Further, the oil is less likely to leak back into the atmosphere or groundwater than CO2 gas (or CO2 dissolved in water) when injected into the same wells, according to Charm, and the oil also can better help prevent seismic activity in large underground caverns created by past mining activities.

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By opening multiple smaller plants, Charm hopes to have a more stable quantity of biomass to work with.

What does it cost for this form of sequestration? Charm’s current projections are around $475 per ton of CO2 equivalent for the first few years — a number it hopes to get down to $200 by its 10th plant and eventually to $50 per ton of CO2 equivalent.

Like Project Vesta, Charm believes its solution is scalable. The company already has received regulatory approval for its first injection site in Kansas. READ MORE

Excerpt from AgWeb: Truterra, the sustainability business unit of Land O’ Lakes, has launched a pilot program through the 2022 growing season with Nori, a startup with blockchain technology for a carbon removal marketplace.

The goal of the pilot is to explore the scalability of an ecosystem services marketplace and provide farmers a view for what they could gain in a carbon market.

In working with their retailer using the Truterra Insights Engine, farmers can explore the possible scenarios and ROI of the conservation practices leading to the credits. Nori says that currently via its marketplace, farmers can be paid up to $15 per tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil. READ MORE