Carbon Sequestration

The U.S. outlined a new carbon-credit plan that aims to pump billions of dollars into developing countries’ energy transition, while some businesses expressed caution over investing in the program. On Wednesday, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry presented the program, called the Energy Transition Accelerator, at United Nations climate talks in Egypt. The program, he said, aims to enlist investors in efforts to reduce emissions across entire regions or countries by paying developing nations to shut down…

Sixty-five miles off the coastal Norwegian city of Bergen, a drilling rig is punching through layers of mud and rock below the North Sea. The energy firms behind the rig aren’t prospecting for oil or gas. They are searching for a place to stash vast amounts of the greenhouse gases emitted by industrial facilities across Europe.The Northern Lights project—a $2.6 billion joint venture of Shell PLC, TotalEnergies SE, Equinor ASA and the Norwegian government—is one of almost 200 …

Business-software provider Salesforce Inc. is launching a marketplace for carbon credits that it says will tackle transparency and quality issues in the fast-growing field. The San Francisco-based company said Tuesday that its latest platform, called Net Zero Marketplace, is set to go online in October with close to 90 projects selling carbon credits that support programs such as forestry, soil health and renewable-energy in the developing world, among others. Business-software…

The iron and steel industry produces about 4 billion tons of carbon emissions each year, accounting for around 10% of all energy-related climate pollution, according to a 2020 report by the International Energy Agency. Those figures have risen sharply this century, driven by rapid economic growth in China and elsewhere. The hefty emissions and increasingly strict climate policies in some areas, including Canada and the European Union, have started to compel some companies to explore cleaner ways of producing these…

In 2018, Reinhardt and three others cofounded Charm (a mashup of “char” and “farm”) to build a business around what they saw as a more promising approach. The initial plan was to gasify biomass, a similar process to pyrolysis but done at higher temperatures, to produce biochar and hydrogen. They expected the latter to be the real moneymaker. But the company found that picking up the biomass and transporting it to a centralized gasification facility was far too expensive, because biomass is “too fluffy.” It’s bulky,…

Efforts to shift the U.S. electrical grid off fossil fuels have major obstacles to overcome to meet the Biden administration’s decarbonization targets, let alone some companies’ more ambitious goals, executives said at an industry event this week. “If we have to decarbonize the entire economy by 2050, electricity has to go a hell of a lot faster,” said Miranda Ballentine, chief executive of the Clean Energy Buyers Association, during a panel discussion at a climate-change conference hosted by the nonprofit Aspen…