Two former Department of Energy staffers warn we’re doing carbon removal all wrong

“CDR cannot succeed at restorative and reparative goals if it is controlled by the same forces that created the problems it is trying to solve,” write Grubert and Talati, executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering.

There is evidence that some companies have come to perceive carbon removal in the way that the authors describe. 

Earlier this year, Vicki Hollub, the chief executive of the oil and gas company Occidental, which recently acquired a direct-air capture company, told the audience at an energy conference: “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

Part of the problem, the authors note, is that carbon removal is seen as  “unconstrained,” easily scaled to meet industry goals and climate needs. But in fact, it’s hard and expensive to do it reliably. Direct air-capture machines, for instance, require a lot of land and resources to build and a lot of energy to run, Talati says. That limits how big the sector can become and complicates the question of how much good the facilities do.

Last week, the Global Carbon Project reported that the world’s technology-based carbon removal only sucked down about 10,000 tons this year, “significantly less than one-millionth of our fossil-fuel emissions,” as MIT Technology Review reported.

Other means of carbon removal may be cheaper and more scalable, particularly methods that harness nature to do the job. But some of these approaches, including adding minerals to or sinking biomass in the oceans, also raise concerns about environmental side-effects or create added difficulties in certifying the climate benefits.

Grubert and Talatai fear that growing market pressures, including the demand for high volumes of low cost carbon removal, could undermine the quality of the measuring, reporting and verification of such efforts over time. They add that the carbon removal market may simply replicate many of the problems in the traditional carbon offsets space, where researchers have found that efforts to plant trees or prevent deforestation often substantially exaggerate the amount of additional carbon trapped.

Ultimately, the authors argue that the global task of drawing down billions of tons of carbon dioxide should largely be a publicly funded, owned and managed enterprise, if we hope to achieve the global, common good of stabilizing and repairing the climate.

“CDR cannot succeed at restorative and reparative goals if it is controlled by the same forces that created the problems it is trying to solve,” write Grubert and Talati, executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering.

There is evidence that some companies have come to perceive carbon removal in the way that the authors describe. 

Earlier this year, Vicki Hollub, the chief executive of the oil and gas company Occidental, which recently acquired a direct-air capture company, told the audience at an energy conference: “We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

Part of the problem, the authors note, is that carbon removal is seen as  “unconstrained,” easily scaled to meet industry goals and climate needs. But in fact, it’s hard and expensive to do it reliably. Direct air-capture machines, for instance, require a lot of land and resources to build and a lot of energy to run, Talati says. That limits how big the sector can become and complicates the question of how much good the facilities do.

Last week, the Global Carbon Project reported that the world’s technology-based carbon removal only sucked down about 10,000 tons this year, “significantly less than one-millionth of our fossil-fuel emissions,” as MIT Technology Review reported.

Other means of carbon removal may be cheaper and more scalable, particularly methods that harness nature to do the job. But some of these approaches, including adding minerals to or sinking biomass in the oceans, also raise concerns about environmental side-effects or create added difficulties in certifying the climate benefits.

Grubert and Talatai fear that growing market pressures, including the demand for high volumes of low cost carbon removal, could undermine the quality of the measuring, reporting and verification of such efforts over time. They add that the carbon removal market may simply replicate many of the problems in the traditional carbon offsets space, where researchers have found that efforts to plant trees or prevent deforestation often substantially exaggerate the amount of additional carbon trapped.

Ultimately, the authors argue that the global task of drawing down billions of tons of carbon dioxide should largely be a publicly funded, owned and managed enterprise, if we hope to achieve the global, common good of stabilizing and repairing the climate.