This week on Carbon Removal Newsroom, we’re bringing you the most significant Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) policy updates from COP26.
At the time of this episode’s release, COP26 is coming to a close. Many countries are pledging to bring their emissions to net-zero in the next few decades. What are the specifics of these new pledges, how does CDR fit into all of this, and what needs to happen to push the CDR industry forward in a timely manner?
Plus, last Friday night, House Democrats along with 13 Republican Representatives voted to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal that their Senate colleagues had approved 87 days earlier. Included in the bill is $3.5b to build four direct air capture hubs— an amount that dwarfs all other federal support of DAC to date. The bill also provides $2.5b to build geologic storage sites for storing the gas underground and $2.1b to transport it via pipelines. Will this all be enough to create significant progress towards U.S. climate goals?
Our good news story of the week centers around Biden’s Carbon Removal “Earthshot” initiative, which has the goal of bringing carbon removal costs to $100/ton by 2030.
We are joined by special guest host David Morrow, the Director of Research at the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University. As always, hosts Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori and Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo are here to weigh in on the latest carbon removal happenings.
Resources
Sustainable Carbon Removal Report (Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy)
Why the BID is a BIG Down Payment on Clean Energy
Buying down the Cost of Direct Air Capture
U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hello, Carbon Removable Newsroom listeners. This week, we’re talking about policy and pretty much it’s going to be all about COP. Today, we have a guest with us because Chris, lucky guy, is actually in Glasgow at COP. So we have David Morrow, Director of Research Institute for Carbon Law and Policy at American University and Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University. So David, thanks for joining us today.
David Morrow: Thanks for having me.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And additionally, as always, we have Holly Jean Buck, the Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo.
Holly Jean Buck: Hello.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hi, Holly. How are you doing?
Holly Jean Buck: I’m doing just fine. Thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: You always are doing great. Always have a smile. And I’m Radhika Bogovkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at Nori. So we’re going to just dive right in and talk a little bit about CDR at COP. The day the show is released, COP26 will be wrapping up, but we are recording a few days early, so things may change. But there have been lots of ambitious national targets that have been announced. A global carbon market is being talked about. Net zero continues to be cemented as a central framework used by nations and corporations trying to address climate change.
So that implies we need carbon removal. And as the world heads home, what does the carbon industry removal industry need to think about? How does it keep growing fast? And so I’m going to turn it over to our two experts in policy to kind of get maybe a little overview of what happened at COP. I’ll start with you, David, and then Holly would love to have your thoughts as well.
David Morrow: Thanks. So it’s often hard to sort of see from outside all the things that are going on at COP, of course. And so there are lots of side events that address CDR that we don’t know much about. At least I don’t know much about. But I think that other than the carbon earth shot, right, is the big announcement about US administration trying to drive innovation in CDR and bring down the cost of CDR, the most interesting CDR related news out of COP comes from things that don’t actually talk about CDR at all.
I sort of put those in two buckets. There are announcements about sectors or the decarbonization of sectors that are often regarded as hard to abate sectors. So agreements between the US and EU on low carbon steel, for instance, and announcements about support for sustainable aviation fuels. And these are ways to decarbonize heavy industry. And long haul aviation that don’t depend on carbon removal. Although there might be some sort of related technologies involved, right? So direct air capture is one way you might make sustainable aviation fuels, for instance. Carbon capture with use and sequestration on, you know, a steel plant or a cement plant is one way you could decarbonize those things.
But by and large, these industries that have been held up as like a potential Market in a sense for CDR look like they’re going to try to decarbonize without CDR. And so that’s big news for CDR in a sense, because they’re not talking about it, right? Because they’re not mentioning it. The other big CDR related news that doesn’t talk about CDR you’ve already mentioned, and those are the net zero announcements, in particular, India being the big one. I think as of today, we are up to like 90% of the World economy being covered by some kind of net zero pledge, although that ranges from, you know, things that are actually enshrined in law to, you know, some politician said we’re going to get to net zero by whatever.
And there’s a sort of obvious implication that there’s likely to be a role for CDR in a country getting all the way to net zero. But especially in the India announcement, setting a target of 2070, I think this means that in addition to whatever role CDR might play in India’s climate policy, meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement in light of India’s 2070 target means that some other countries will have to go net negative first. And so in a sense, their announcement is going to compel other countries, hopefully developed countries to develop CDR to clean up some of their legacy emissions to make room For India’s emissions as they move towards net zero.
So I’d say those are the big CDR related announcements. There was also just not long before this recording started the joint declaration from US and China, which has a passing mention of support for development and deployment of CCUS and direct air capture.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Holly, anything else you want to highlight from the past few days or weeks at COP?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I thought that was a great roundup. I think that in terms of what’s going on with the actual negotiations, not that much addressing CDR directly, as David alluded to, but obviously there’s things that impact it, possibly like the Article VI negotiations, like the conversations around transparency and reporting. And then you have Beyond the actual negotiating rooms, these announcements coming up. So another one is, for example, this mission innovation on carbon dioxide removal. So that’s something that has this goal of enabling CDR technologies to achieve net reduction of 100 million tonnes per year globally by 2030.
That’s kind of sponsored, road mapped, led, whatever, by the United States, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Canada, Norway, also supporting Australia, Europe, Japan, India. So, you know, that’s a collaboration that was announced that may have some bearing on CDR.
Radhika Moolgavkar: David, you know, when you were just describing your roundup, which I agree with Holly, was fantastic. It almost seemed like there are two competing tensions in that CDR space. You have the people in the hard-to-abate industries that are not looking at CDR as a potential solution, which I actually think is really interesting and probably laudable to get rid of the emissions ahead of instead of looking. And then you have the 2070 target of India, which sort of... And so that side of the world seems to be like almost... would not propel CDR technology in the same way.
On the other hand, you have the 2070 announcement of India, meaning that we have to do more on our side. And so that would potentially propel CDR technology. So where do you think and where do you see CDR moving forward in the next five years and maybe even looking as far out as 2050?
David Morrow: It’s a pretty big range of time spans to think about and it makes a big difference. I think that the ways in which people have traditionally thought about what CDR might be used for, what the policy goals might be, Are cleaning up hard to abate sectors, really offsetting or is science based targets initiative apparently likes to say now neutralizing emissions from those sectors at the time that they’re happening. I take it that language is to distinguish from offsets where you’re paying someone else not to admit or something like that. So there’s neutralizing emissions from hard to abate sectors.
There is cleaning up legacy carbon, so removing historical emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere. And then sometimes there’s this vague category of sort of getting to net zero faster. And in the short term, through the next decade, say, I think that the only way in which it’s really going to do any of those things is with forms of CDR that produce energy. So BEX is the dominant or sort of most discussed technology in that category. There are some other sort of carbon negative hydrogen, that sort of thing that people have talked about.
And obviously these aren’t very big right now. There are some projects coming online, but this is the kind of thing where you Being fossil fuels, not just with zero carbon energy, but carbon negative energy, right? If it’s sort of done well. And so that’s something that you could see in the next decade, providing some sort of minor contribution towards those policy goals. But in terms of offsetting the hard to abate sectors, it really does seem like most of the things that people have traditionally thought about as hard to abate sectors are trying to do it without CDR.
And like you said, I think that’s laudable, right? If we can do that, great. And then basically no one’s going to be in a real position anytime soon to be net negative and really start cleaning up historical emissions. And so other than those energy producing forms of CDR, I think that sort of the short term, maybe even medium term is about growing and diversifying the CDR industry and diversifying among other interpretations of the word in the sense of developing a broader Range of technologies and practices to do this so that different societies or communities or whatever can adopt the technologies and practices that make the most sense for them in their context.
And then looking sort of way out longer term, right, then you get to the net negative. You get to potentially large CDR industries cleaning up historical emissions and cleaning up sort of the bits of industrial emissions or other emissions that we can’t manage to eliminate yet.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So is that what you mean when you tweeted out carbon removal need and shouldn’t be all short-term pain for long-term gain? Or what do you... I know you just released a report.
David Morrow: So this was in connection with a report that we recently released, the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy on sustainable carbon removal. And the thought behind that tweet was that there are plenty of carbon removal options that have at least some near term and local upsides, whether those are social or economic or environmental, whatever. And that it’s worthwhile trying to find those, and that’s going to vary from place to place, which is the connection here, that a particular community or society or country has a reason to look for the particular approach that works well for them in the near term while delivering those long-term climate benefits.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Holly, I’m curious what your impression is of How the world did to recognize the inequities around emissions through COP26? Do you feel like the Global South and the parts of the world that aren’t historically responsible for these emissions got a good voice at the table? We kind of talked about this two weeks ago. And as a side note, how is any of this really going to move forward without China participating in the talks, which Has been discussed a lot, but it shouldn’t be overlooked.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, unfortunately, my impression was that it’s been kind of a repeat of other cops in that regard. I know that there’s been concern about, you know, civil society groups not really having enough access to negotiation spaces, but that was the case even in Copenhagen. So I think the dynamics Are kind of long lived and I didn’t see, you know, really a break from them at this one. That said, I think that there’s been some interesting bilateral things talked about.
Radhika Moolgavkar: What do you think of India, like kind of pushing and saying, you know, we’re not going to do it till 2070. Do you think that is the model that some of these countries have to Even though, I mean, I have mixed feelings about it because obviously you want people to decarbonize as fast as possible, but there’s the balance. Is that what we think we’ll be seeing in the future? Is these countries sort of pushing out their deadlines and telling us we need to be negative before they’re zero?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, possibly. But I mean, to David’s point about changing assumptions around leftover emissions, I mean, this has been really interesting to watch because I think 10 years ago, there were pretty high assumptions around industry being hard to transition, firm electricity being hard to transition. And now we’ve seen technologies come online that could really decarbonize a lot of this stuff all the way. Same with fertilizer. That’s something that is still considered hard to transition. But now we have Pretty interesting startups working on sustainable fertilizer. So I’m reluctant to project too much further because we might have some innovations on the horizon in the next 10 or 20 years that would make it possible for other countries to reach net zero even sooner than they’re projecting now.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I think we... All are definitely banking on some good innovation in the CDR space to keep us moving forward. And as a person who works in it every day, for sure, there is always, there’s so much going on and it’s constantly changing, which is why we talk to Susan once a month, but it’s a fascinating area to be in. I’m going to pivot us now to something a little bit more old school, which is the infrastructure world and For those of you who have not been following, though it’s been everywhere, last Friday night, the House Democrats, along with 13 Republican representatives, does that count as bipartisan?
I’m not sure, voted to pass an infrastructure bill and now the Senate colleagues, that their Senate colleagues had approved almost three months ago. The climate provisions maybe weren’t as aggressive as some people wanted, but it is sending billions of dollars to some important initiatives that will help in efforts to decarbonize the economy. And the switch to renewables will be slower than what President Biden had hoped for, but it is a start. So I am curious because for the carbon removal field, the passage of this bill is big news because it has $3.
5 billion to build four direct air capture hubs. You know, an amount that dwarfs all other federal support of DAC to date. And there’s some funding to capture atmospheric CO2, 2. 5 billion, I think. I’m not sure to build geologic storage sites for storing ground underground, storing gas underground. So David, curious what you think about the 8. 5 billion for direct air capture and carbon storage. Do you think this kind of heralds the beginning of engineered carbon removal in the US?
David Morrow: It’s hard to say, right? There’s a long history of things where you’d say, well, this is going to be the beginning of like this climate technology in the US and then maybe it doesn’t go anywhere very quickly. But I think my sense of that is probably the same as the sense of the rest of the bill, right? This is good. It’s not good enough. We need more. I’m a little, or maybe irrationally Annoyed at how much of the focus is specifically on direct air capture rather than carbon removal in general.
But I do think these are important. And I think the approach of trying to build hubs is important. It’s important for making overcoming some of the sort of financial and project risk associated with You know, building a direct air capture plan or building the geological storage, well, developing geological storage site. Right where if you’ve got one plant linked to one storage site and either side of that sort of doesn’t deliver, you’ve got a big problem. But if you can share the cost of developing the storage site across a bunch of potential users, then it’s both cheaper upfront for the users.
There’s less risk to everybody because if one of the users backs out or fails or whatever, there are other possible avenues there for the project to go forward. So I do like the hubs approach. And we’ll see, right? I think that the two different things that need to happen to sort of push CDR industries forward are on the one hand trying to find new technologies and new approaches so that you can, as I was saying earlier, sort of customize things to local contexts. But then it’s also essential that you have policies that will support sort of steady incremental improvements In the technologies and practices that we already sort of have coming online.
Because that’s going to be as important to bringing costs down as finding new technologies.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Holly, you know, David was mentioning the hubs and I’m curious, I don’t probably is not yet available, but how do you design a system When you’re choosing those hubs, that ensures that people who haven’t historically been at the brunt of bad infrastructure are not, again, at the brunt of bad infrastructure. I’m thinking of the traditional example of building highways through neighborhoods of color. So how do you design something that doesn’t have inadvertent social consequences?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I can start out by telling you what this legislation says about how they’re thinking about it. So they want to locate these in regions that either have existing carbon intensive fuel production or industrial capacity or capacity like that has retired or closed in the last 10 years. So they’re thinking about, you know, what communities are suffering from this transition, right? They also say they want geographic diversity, so these projects will be in different regions. They’ll be in places with high potential for sequestration or utilization. Two of them need to be in fossil producing regions, so in economically distressed communities.
In the regions of the US with high levels of coal, oil, or natural gas resources. That’s what it says. And they’re going to prioritize projects that are likely to create opportunities for skilled training and long-term employment to the greatest number of residents of the region. So, I mean, you can see that they’re thinking about this in the Energy transition context. But to your question, it doesn’t really answer, you know, obviously communities have borne harms from extractive projects, right? I think that probably this is being worked out. And if we’re thinking about equity and justice, you know, part of that is the procedural dimension about who gets to make decisions about this, who gets a seat at the table and the language From the Department of Energy signals that they’re thinking about this.
They’re thinking about engagement with communities that will be affected from environmental and climate justice organizations to tribal nations to labor groups and so on. So I think that there’s like some capacity for better procedural justice than we’ve seen in the past anyway.
Radhika Moolgavkar: You know, I’m completely hopeful that is what happens. I often wonder the procedure often slows projects down, right? You have to do process well, but that takes time and that could slow the building of these hubs. So this is to both of you. How do you think you balance the pace that we need to move to get these projects up and running and ensure that the procedure is fair and equitable by like 2030 or whenever they want to get this done, you know?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I just start out by saying I think that for this, we have the time because if we do it wrong, the risks are really high of not being able to continue doing it for one. And then we also don’t want to lock in bad infrastructure. As was mentioned, we still have a lot of kind of basic R&D to do on a bunch of other approaches. So I don’t think we want to like race to build up a whole bunch of DAC that gets locked in and then, you know, Five years later, figure out that there’s some other approach that’s actually more efficient, less resource intensive or whatever.
So I think that on this particular issue of scaling up DAC, I think that there is time for proper public and stakeholder engagement.
David Morrow: Yeah, I’d agree with that. And I really like Holly’s point that it’s not just about how soon can we get it started, it’s how long can we sort of keep doing CDR in a particular place, right? And that’s going to depend and should depend On how well it meets the needs of the people who live where this is happening. And yes, starting sooner is better, but this is something that we’re going to need to be doing for a very long time. And so you want to get it right. In the setup.
And so you’d said, how do you balance those issues? And I think that’s the right word, right? It’s a matter of balance. You don’t want to rush it through. I think that’s both the wrong thing to do and sort of unwise from a long-term perspective. But of course, you don’t want to drag it out for 20 years either. I don’t think you have to, right? But getting that process right is important.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I would just add, if you get the process right, you avoid the litigation. That could drag it out for 20 years as it goes through the courts. Oh, so important. So let’s hope that they’re getting that part right. Last question about this is, I know you’re both familiar with Klaus Lochner. He’s sort of the preeminent direct air capture experts in this country. And he released a paper earlier this year that we would need up to $2 billion of government support to bring the cost of DAC down to $100 a ton.
So curious if you think that this was enough to get DAC down to $100 a ton, which is kind of the only way I see it being a feasible carbon credit right now of any sort.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, in so much as I understood that paper, it was fitting this simple analytic model to this function of solar PV and how the costs came down there, which I have no idea, like no way to judge if that’s the right analogy. I do know that it’s an instance in which experts, you know, their forecasts were wrong. The cost came down much quicker than they thought. However, there’s a lot of things that went into that and it is a different kind of technology. I’m not sure like it’s replicable just, you know, on this simple curve.
So my first thought would be that probably this isn’t putting the industry on this inevitable march towards $100 a ton. But it’s one thing out of several things that can help.
David Morrow: Yeah, that seems right. And I have no idea if it’s the right number. But I agree with Holly’s analysis there. It’s one of several things that will help. Again, to reiterate that the way you do that is not just by finding some like miracle version of DAC that nobody has thought about yet that turns out to be magically way cheaper, right? It’s how do you improve the You know, the manufacturing and the operation of DAC equipment and facilities in this sort of incremental way that’s not going to be super exciting.
You know, it’s not sort of a splashy news story, but it’s one of the key ways to drive costs down. And some of that might be from R&D. Some of it, I think, would be from, you know, just a clear, consistent financial incentive to build more of the stuff so that you get better at doing it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I mean, I just want to say I wholeheartedly like the idea of it going under the radar of the press because I think it’s not in splashiness because I think that’s where the hard work has to happen to get these things to do it. And the less sexy it is and the less attention it gets, probably the more likely it is to succeed in some ways. So as most of the listeners know of this show, we always do a good news segment. Usually it’s one person talking about something that interested them, but this week I’m tweaking it a little bit because as David alluded to at the very beginning of the show, the Biden administration just put together a carbon removal earth shot, which is basically the Department of Energy Spends a whole lot of money and asks people to figure out ways to bring down, to develop an important technology.
And this time they’re focused on carbon removal. So I wanted to hear from both of you what you thought of that announcement. I mean, and if you were applying for the Earthshot, what you would be thinking about and where you would be focused. So I’ll start with you, David, since you’re our guest this week.
David Morrow: So it’s exciting to see DOE getting behind Carbon removal in this way. And I’m hopeful that this sort of incentive will drive innovation in new approaches to carbon removal. And I’m excited about that, not because I think that’s the thing that’s going to get it down to $100 a ton, though it might help. But because it gives us far more options about how we might do carbon removal in particular contexts or in pursuit of particular social or environmental co-benefits. So that’s why I think the focus on innovation is exciting. But as I said, I don’t think someone’s going to magically discover some approach to DAC that everyone else has overlooked that turns out to be way, way cheaper.
At least not in the short term, right? It might be that someone discovers a new approach That over the long run ends up being cheaper than the approaches that are sort of in the demonstration or early commercial stages now. But I would be surprised if by 2030, this particular approach on its own would get cost down to $100 a ton. Which is not a criticism of it, right? I still think it’s great. I just think it’s great for Reasons that are additional to the things that the announcement was focused on.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Carly?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I like a lot of the language in the announcement. I like that it talked about a responsible CDR industry. So responsible is a pretty good keyword to throw in. I like that it talked about place-based approaches that meet the needs of individual communities that could participate in or be affected by CDR. But the words aside, I still don’t know how this will be operationalized. So a lot depends on that. I’m also excited about the earth shots around hydrogen and long duration storage. I mean, those could end up being a lot more transformative potentially.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So one last question for you both, and it’s the same one. So do you think that the Biden administration is living up to its promises to drive towards a green energy economy? Especially in light of some of the obstructionism he’s getting out of the Senate in particular, or do you think there’s a long ways more, much more than he could do?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I don’t think the administration is living up to its promises, yet it’s kind of hard to see what can move forward given the broader political landscape.
David Morrow: I’d say, They’re trying, they’re facing some obvious challenges, and they clearly have a long way to go. But they’re moving in the right direction, right? It’s against some strong headwinds.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, with that, I thank you both for joining us this week. And David, it was great to have you on the show. And anytime you want to come back, please do. Holly, as always, it’s lovely to have you on the show and have a wonderful Veterans Day. Happy Veterans Day to all of those veterans out there listening to us. And we will see you next time. Thanks.
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