From MIT Technology Review, October 24:
Companies have still drawn down only enough CO2 to cancel out a few hours of US emissions. Here’s what it will take to really scale up the sector.
In the early 2020s, a little-known aquaculture company in Portland, Maine, snagged more than $50 million by pitching a plan to harness nature to fight back against climate change. The company, Running Tide, said it could sink enough kelp to the seafloor to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year, according to one of its early customers.
Instead, the business shut down its operations last summer, marking the biggest bust to date in the nascent carbon removal sector.
Its demise was the most obvious sign of growing troubles and dimming expectations for a space that has spawned hundreds of startups over the last few years. A handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. Venture investments have flagged. And the collective industry hasn’t made a whole lot more progress toward that billion-ton benchmark.
The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, warns Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, a public-benefit corporation that provides data and analysis on the carbon removal industry.“We’re past the peak of expectations,” he says. “And with that, we could see a lot of companies go out of business, which is natural for any industry.”
The open question is: If the carbon removal sector is heading into a painful if inevitable clearing-out cycle, where will it go from there?
The odd quirk of carbon removal is that it never made a lot of sense as a business proposition: It’s an atmospheric cleanup job, necessary for the collective societal good of curbing climate change. But it doesn’t produce a service or product that any individual or organization strictly needs—or is especially eager to pay for.
To date, a number of businesses have voluntarily agreed to buy tons of carbon dioxide that companies intend to eventually suck out of the air. But whether they’re motivated by sincere climate concerns or pressures from investors, employees, or customers, corporate do-goodism will only scale any industry so far.
Most observers argue that whether carbon removal continues to bobble along or transforms into something big enough to make a dent in climate change will depend largely on whether governments around the world decide to pay for a whole, whole lot of it—or force polluters to.
“Private-sector purchases will never get us there,” says Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for the removal and reuse of carbon dioxide. “We need policy; it has to be policy.”
What’s the problem?
The carbon removal sector began to scale up in the early part of this decade, as increasingly grave climate studies revealed the need to dramatically cut emissions and suck down vast amounts of carbon dioxide to keep global warming in check.Specifically, nations may have to continually remove as much as 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year by around midcentury to have a solid chance of keeping the planet from warming past 2 °C over preindustrial levels, according to a UN climate panel report in 2022.
A number of startups sprang up to begin developing the technology and building the infrastructure that would be needed, trying out a variety of approaches like sinking seaweed or building carbon-dioxide-sucking factories.
And they soon attracted customers. Companies including Stripe, Google, Shopify, Microsoft, and others began agreeing to pre-purchase tons of carbon removal, hoping to stand up the nascent industry and help offset their own climate emissions. Venture investments also flooded into the space, peaking in 2023 at nearly $1 billion, according to data provided by PitchBook.
From early on, players in the emerging sector sought to draw a sharp distinction between conventional carbon offset projects, which studies have shown frequently exaggerate climate benefits, and “durable” carbon removal that could be relied upon to suck down and store away the greenhouse gas for decades to centuries. There’s certainly a big difference in the price: While buying carbon offsets through projects that promise to preserve forests or plant trees might cost a few dollars per ton, a ton of carbon removal can run hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the approach.
That high price, however, brings big challenges. Removing 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year at, say, $300 a ton adds up to a global price tag of $3 trillion—a year....
....MUCH MORE
As I've stated previously: Don't look at me, I don't have that kind of money.
On the other hand it is heartening to se the discussion getting away from electro-chemical-mechanical methods of sucking carbon out of the air. At a concentration of 426 parts per million CO2 (less than i molecule in 23,000) you simply have to move too much air across your extraction system to ever make it economically realistic.
Iron fertilization of plankton in the Southern Ocean or enhanced rock weathering are the most likely candidates for cost-effective removal and sequestration
