The Xprize’s Carbon Removal prize has been one of the most exciting stories in CDR. As it seeks to pump $100 million towards carbon removal projects, the organization is also taking steps to ensure that funding supports companies that benefit, rather than harm, the communities they work in.
This is no small detail, but in fact a main question about the future of carbon removal: can it become embraced by local communities who will host projects? We’ve been focusing on that very question on this show because we feel it is just as important as funding news and scientific advancements.
In order to help build an environmentally just industry, Xprize has partnered with Carbon180 to write a comprehensive report on environmental justice in the context of carbon removal projects.
This report discusses the importance of environmental justice for carbon removal companies, the concept of climate justice, and the need for fair distribution of project benefits.
In this episode we’re joined by two of the authors of this report, who are leading the effort build environmental justice into the CDR industry: Nikki Batchelor, the Executive Director of the Carbon Removal Prize, and Ugbaad Kosar, the Director of Environmental Justice for Carbon180.
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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: [music] Welcome to the July 11th edition of Carbon Removal Newsroom. The X Prize is Carbon Removal Prize has been one of the most exciting stories in CDR. As it seeks to pump $100 million towards carbon removal projects, the organization is also taking steps to ensure that funding supports companies that benefit rather than harm the communities they work in. This is no small detail. But in fact, a main question about the future of carbon removal. Can it become embraced by local communities who will host projects? We’ve been focusing on that very question on this show because we feel it is just as important as funding news and scientific advancements.
In order to help build an environmentally just CDR industry, XPRIZE has partnered with Carbon 180 to write a comprehensive report on environmental justice in the context of carbon removal projects. This report discusses the importance of environmental justice for carbon removal companies, the concept of climate justice, and the need for fair distribution of project benefits. So today I’m very happy to say we’re joined by two authors of this report who are leading the effort to build environmental justice into the CDR industry. Nikki Batchelor, the Executive Director of the Carbon Removal Prize.
Nikki, so nice to have you, your first time on the show.
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, thanks so much.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And Ukbad Kozar, the Director of Environmental Justice for Carbon 180. And if you have been a close listener of our podcast, one of our earliest guests. So it’s so nice to have you back.
Ugbaad Kosar: I am thrilled to be back. Thank you for having me.
Radhika Moolgavkar: And I am Radhika Moolgavkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So let’s talk about from the ground up. Nikki, my first question is for you. The XPRIZE has the mandate to find the best carbon removal methods. Why has an environmental justice element been attached to that goal? Is it as important when you are thinking about these projects as it is when you assess the long-term success of the technology of these CDR projects?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question to kick things off. The XPRIZE carbon removal is ultimately trying to catalyze a new industry. That is kind of our big picture hope for the project work that we’re doing right now. And since we launched the prize, we’ve had over 1,100 teams register and express interest in developing new carbon removal solutions. So if you think about that, we’re at the very beginning of what could become a massive new industry with a lot of gigatonne scale projects potentially, if we’re successful, around the world. And those will have significant footprints and community impacts associated with them.
So what we collectively need to think about is what does responsible deployment of projects look like now? So that’s why the XPRIZE criteria looks not only at operational metrics, things like how well does the solution work, how much net CO2 is being removed, the cost, but also we look at sustainability metrics and the environmental impacts of the solutions, as well as social license and environmental justice factors. Those are critical to the success of the overall implementation of these projects. We reached out to Carbon 180 at the beginning of the prize to really think about collaborating on what the specific EJ criteria might be for the competition and especially how to approach it in the early stages during the milestone round.
So we’ll dig more into that, but that’s kind of the genesis of our partnership and how we started working on this report together.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, Uqbad, you are an old guard in carbon removal But can you give us sort of a brief history of Carbon 180’s work within the environmental justice movement? I know there are lots of efforts, but maybe a quick overview of the efforts that you all have undertaken and how you feel things are moving in this area particularly.
Ugbaad Kosar: Yeah, absolutely. So we actually started working on environmental justice, I think shortly after myself and my colleague Vanessa joined the team in 2020. And a lot of it was because, you know, at Carbon 180, we’re thinking a lot about, you know, federal policy in particular, which is broadly And I think we really wanted to make sure we’re not just thinking about it from tonnes removed perspective, but also how is it being done? Who’s being impacted in the process? And are we thinking about those that are most disadvantaged or those that are most impacted in like the policy development we’re doing or the outreach or just like our thought process and the assumptions that really lead The work that we’re doing.
And so when I think about what we do at Carbon 180, it’s really all about how do we build trust and relationships with environmental justice organizations in the US in particular. We spent over a year doing a lot of this work without really sharing it with anyone. We really just wanted to make sure we had an understanding of as a carbon removal advocacy organization, essentially not an EJ organization. How are we thinking about EJ priorities and how are we intersecting that with the work that we do day to day? And so we did a lot of like listening sessions.
We dove into EJ scholarship and literature, which there’s a substantial amount of that as well that is highly regarded. And we identified a couple of key gaps, which is really leading the work that we’re doing today, which is one, there’s relatively low familiarity of carbon removal across EJ organizations. And we really want to bridge this information gap. I think this is really critical when we talk about evening the playing fields, however you think about that, and making sure that there’s real engagement that’s happening that People can actually provide input and thoughts and ideas if they know what it is that we’re talking about and they have an understanding of it.
And then the second was low capacity. So a lot of EJ organizations are just so capacity constrained. They’re being pulled in all sorts of directions because of everything that’s happening in the climate space and just this recognition, I guess, this awakening. I don’t know what term it is, but there’s just a real understanding of just how important it is to center environmental justice and climate policy. And so they’re being pulled in a lot of different directions. We’ve been thinking a lot about how to address these two pieces in the work that we’re doing, and particularly thinking about re-granting funding, curriculum building, and building out a dedicated EJ program with full-time staff.
So I guess in a nutshell, that’s sort of where we’re at and where we’ve been with our EJ work so far.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So just as a follow-up on that, I’m curious what the reception was from these EJ programs. You know, advocates when you first approached them and if you saw any sort of change in that as you worked with them over, have been working with them.
Ugbaad Kosar: Yes. Initially, a lot of skepticism, a lot of emails or phone calls that weren’t returned, truthfully speaking, because we worked on carbon removal and it was just a very hard line, a red line of no when it came to engagement. And I think what we noticed is Because of a lot of the things that are happening in the US, particularly with these big federal packages that are happening, thinking about the Inflation Reduction Act and thinking about the infrastructure package, a lot of these projects are starting to actually break ground, or at least project developers are starting to We really do need to come up with a stance on carbon removal and we need to start engaging on it.
And so we notice and we track sort of this shift in engagement on carbon removal from outright, you know, we don’t want to hear about it to Okay, maybe we should learn a little bit more about it too. Okay, we’re okay with some forms or versions of this type of technological or this type of land based carbon removal, but here’s where our guardrails are or here is where our red lines are so I really did see a shift. Everyone is out here advocating for carbon removal by any means, but there is a bit more of an openness, I think, to discuss and to start setting standards and ideas for what good carbon removal could look like when you start talking to EJ organizations on a project-by-project basis.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, that’s really nice to hear because I think a lot of the narrative has been the hard stop No. And so I’m happy to hear that there is progress being made. Nikki, as part of this report, you evaluated the EJ reporting from the applications of 287 teams who qualified for the milestone round. That’s an amazing number. And what did you find? Were there any generalized themes you’re seeing or is it all over the board?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, it was an interesting process to kind of go through reviewing all the surveys. So, you know, just for framing, the way that it worked was we developed this EJ questionnaire with Carbon 180, and that was a required component of the milestone submission, which happened February 2022. So it’s been about a year since then now. And all of the teams answered kind of a range of questions on different topics. And we really approached this first round more as, A learning educational opportunity. We tried to just prompt teams to start thinking about all of the different facets of environmental justice implications of their projects.
So when we looked at the answers, we got a range of responses that showed varying familiarity with this topic and all of the different components. Some people did say this was their first exposure to it. So in addition to the questionnaire, I should say, We also provided kind of a reading list to all of the teams and asked them to like, you know, go do some background homework and come back and, you know, share some of the things that you learned from that just as a starting place. So people had at least a frame of reference and then could start applying that new knowledge to their projects.
So folks started, you know, answering all the different questions and, you know, of the responses, job creation definitely was the most frequently cited consideration, I think. That is something that people can just easily wrap their minds around. And so it’s like the first thing that they go to. And so one of the things we’ve talked a lot about since we’ve analyzed the responses and worked on the report that has a bunch of recommendations is just making sure that people know that environmental justice is not just about job creation. And job creation on its own is also not enough.
I’m sure we’ll talk more about that in a lot of ways on this time together. We saw that was just definitely one of the most frequently cited things, and then followed by community engagement was the other highest EJ consideration that came up in the responses. That was also due to the way that we asked some of the questions, and I think this was really intended to be a broad starting place to see How are people thinking about this work? And I feel like just in the last year and the conversations I’ve had with teams and also being out at events and just talking with people, working on all their projects and advancing them, I do feel like the learning curve is advancing and people are talking about a lot of different things now.
So we can kind of talk more about that too as we dive into things.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So again, as a follow up to that, and I’d love both of your perspectives on this, it sounds to me like there’s both a learning curve for the EJ movement in understanding carbon removal, right? And then there’s the same sort of learning curve for the carbon removal industry on understanding the value and importance of the EJ community and what they do. So like my two follow up questions around that are one, How do you help them, the carbon removal companies, really understand what community engagement means, which I think is often glossed over as this easy to do thing, but actually to do it well, it takes a lot of time and effort and techniques and engagement, truly, if you will.
And two, how do you help them understand that job creation is not, you know, Creating jobs is just not what always the communities are interested in. I come from a place, I used to live in Appalachia, near Appalachian. I always bring up this example, Coal miners, it wasn’t about the jobs in the coal mines. It’s about like identity and social, you know, what they are and who they are in their community. And so how do you help educate these companies and help them do this when they’re small little startups that are usually founded by technical people, not folks in this area.
So Nikki, I’ll start with you. And then I’d love your perspective as well.
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is kind of the crux of it all, I think. We’re definitely seeing a huge learning curve on the carbon removal startup side of things. I know that people are interested, but also unfamiliar in a lot of ways with what to do. Trying to create more resources and tools and educational opportunities is really important right now at the phase we’re in. And then also kind of sharing case studies as people start trying new things so that folks can understand like, oh, this is what it might look like.
But it’s also important for the startups to remember, they don’t have to figure all of this out and be responsible for it on their own, nor should they you know I think understanding the local communities is one of the biggest things that we’re trying to talk to people about because. it’s so localized the work that we’re doing and really understanding where you’re potentially going to be citing your projects it’s kind of the first step. And then working with local community members to be part of that effort is the next step.
So not trying to come in and assume that you have all the answers figured out, like working together to figure out what is the community even interested in? Because if you’re guessing and bringing a set of offerings to the group, they might hit, they might not hit. And so who better to help you figure that out than bringing actual local community members onto your team into the process to be Liaisons to bring ideas to help convene and engage, so I think you know we’re just trying to help people kind of get acquainted with it and then understand that they don’t have to be so overwhelmed right at day one, because it is a lot and like to just start piecemeal with understanding like how to start working with kind of a new group of folks.
Ugbaad Kosar: Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t agree more with everything that you said, Nikki, truthfully. And I think one of the ways that we discuss it and we think about it is approaching community engagement and community outreach as a co-learning opportunity. So it’s not project developers are coming and giving a presentation and that’s the end of it. They answer some questions and then you wrap up and you’ve done your community engagement. And it’s also not coming to the table with absolutely nothing prepared and just expecting the community to have all of the answers that you’re looking for.
It’s somewhere in between the two where you’ve thought through what are some of the major risks of your project? What are the technical feasibility questions and how transparent can you be about resources or You know, jobs does come up like being honest about what kind of jobs you actually can bring to the table or come to fruition, or those that you’re unsure of, thinking about here are some of the potential co benefits that come from the project, maybe there’s an impact on air quality, maybe there’s an But just being really transparent as a project developer or even an early stage company who has 10 people who are thinking about, you know, thinking about carbon removal.
These are things you can start thinking about and coming forward with so that when you are doing that, We’re doing some outreach. There’s a back and forth. And you’re actually taking that input that the community brings when you do your outreach into consideration. And it’s actually shifting different characteristics of your project. I think that’s where sometimes community engagement falls short, which is you’ve heard, you’ve seen, and it’s checked off that you’ve spoken to the community. You haven’t actually taken into consideration what was brought forward. And made some adjustments as needed to meet that demand or maybe rethink some assumptions that you’re bringing to the table as you’ve created your project, so I think those are a couple of things that stick out to me in particular, and I think the other thing.
That I think about a lot is when you’re doing your community outreach or your engagement. Sometimes you’ll hear it’s towards the end when the permitting process is in full swing and you’re ready to break ground and you’re really just trying to get that last piece of the puzzle sorted out. And we really want to rethink that. We want to push early startups, which is why I’m so excited about the XPRIZE in particular, Early startups to think about before you even choose what your location is, do some groundwork and think about what is the implication of you setting a project in this community and what is their history like with this particular industry or other maybe extractive industries or what is the history that’s already there so that when you’re going there, it’s not a surprise the reception that you get, but it’s built into how you’ve thought through your outreach and how you’ve thought through your Your project plan and the benefits that you’re going to be proposing.
So I think just bringing it back is the co-learning is incredibly important and two-way communication when it comes to any sort of community outreach that you do.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So you brought up the communities that have been harmed and most impacted by the extractive nature of oil and gas. And obviously, over the course of that and many other historical wrongs, trust has been lost. So how can CDR companies rebuild that trust? And to both of you, have you seen projects that have been able to do that? Or is it still too early? I’ll start with you and Nikki, I’ll pass it on to you.
Ugbaad Kosar: Yeah, I can start off by saying it may be still too early to be able to say that this project has been successful in doing so. But I really appreciate that question because that’s something that I’ve actually asked a lot of EJ organizations when I’m working with them is how do you want to be approached if there’s a history of oil and gas in your region, for example. And one EJ organization mentioned to me that really stuck to me was Don’t bring your PR people to the table and have a PR ready presentation where you’re talking about all the amazing things that your project is going to and there’s no There’s no communication outside of these talking points, right?
It’s very obvious. And I think people can really see through that. So when you’re doing a presentation or you’re doing any sort of, I don’t know, town hall or one-on-one, whatever the engagement is where you’re talking directly with local organizations, community-based organizations, whoever it may be, being really honest about not only what your project can or can’t do, but also acknowledging what has already happened in that region. And putting it up on the table, I think is incredibly important. Oftentimes what you’ll see is there’s a dance around or there’s an avoidance or there’s a, I don’t want to bring it up because it’s going to derail the conversation.
And the opposite is true. When you are really And you say, look, I’ve read about this. I’ve heard about this. I’ve learned about this. And here’s what I’m hearing about what your experience has been. I’d love to dig into this more. And here’s how we’re thinking about it as we’re proposing our project. When that open conversation happens, you’re going to get a lot more openness to have this discussion. And you’re going to get honest feedback that may or may not decide whether you want to deploy there. But ultimately, I think Don’t bring your peer people.
I think that’s the one thing that I would have to say to any sort of project developer that’s thinking about this.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Nikki, anything you want to add having worked with some of these companies as well?
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, I think there’s a number of ways to probably approach the topic of harms. And I think that Companies, these startups are familiar with thinking about like the baseline environmental impacts associated with their projects. They are used to thinking about like, what is my water use, my land footprint, feedstock sourcing, energy use, etc. All of those things are, you know, baked into a lot of their planning right now. So part of it is, okay, how do we take that to the next step? We need to start thinking about what are the potential impacts of those things on the specific communities that you’re going to be going into?
And then in addition to that, what are the potential risks and unknowns with those projects? I think we’re talking about transparency here. I think being able to be open when you go talk to community members about what is known and not known about the projects because You know, we are breaking new ground here. There is a lot of innovation going on, a lot of new testing. Some things are very known and it’s important to be clear, like the research has already been proven, demonstrations that these things have happened, you know, whereas this other component, this is maybe a new thing and this is what it means and the impacts related to it.
So trying to figure out how to have honest conversations, to Uwad’s point, with people about like where you’re at and what you know and I think that’s hard to do, but it’s important. And I think the transparency will go a long way with building trust. So that’s kind of one piece. And then the next piece, I guess, is trying to go beyond thinking about harms and impacts and thinking about benefits of projects. So what can your project potentially bring to a community? How does that meet potential needs that folks might have?
What are their priorities? And this goes back to like the dialogue and kind of co-learning, co-creation element about You know, being creative. What might a side benefit be to a project? The carbon removal projects are so varied that it could take a lot of different forms. And in a way, that’s something helpful about carbon removal. It’s not all like one specific like the square box that everybody’s going to have in their backyard, it could be in all different kinds of locations coastal communities, you know located next to other existing plants.
It could be related to all the different natural ecosystems that we have, so I think trying to be open and explain that showing pictures also helping people understand like what it might look like. We’ll also kind of reduce fears. I think there’s a lot of anxiety just generally around the unknown element of this. And so trying to take some of the mystery away can help with that too.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So one of my favorite questions to ask people who are involved in this part of the CDR industry, and actually anybody who’s involved in the CDR industry, is I see a real tension between the need to move fast and But they need to build relationships which take time. And so how do you advise? And then there’s the added layer that permitting and stuff is a whole different type of community outreach that I think people think checks the box. So how do you counsel CDR companies who are in a rush, have a lot of pressure on them for various reasons, including environmental, but also environmental?
We need to take the time to develop the meaningful relationships to get the community’s engagement and trust. I don’t know if there’s an answer, but I’m always curious to hear how people approach it. Okbah, you can go. Nikki, I’d love to hear your perspective too.
Ugbaad Kosar: Yeah, I’m happy to hop in that. I actually don’t think that these are necessarily mutually exclusive. I don’t think doing something in a pretty timely manner or building a project a timely manner and having... Social considerations and thinking about environmental justice can’t coexist. I actually think, and so I want to push back on that assumption a little bit because I think what has happened in the past and what I’ve seen and what I’ve read about is a lot of those like social considerations or environmental justice priorities have been pushed aside in favor of build, build, build and deploy, deploy, deploy.
And what ends up happening is you get wrapped up at the tail end where there’s a lot of Either litigation or protests or pushback or whatever it may be and then the project falls apart or it’s delayed or there’s funding issues or that social license is just taken away and so companies just want to back out altogether. And I want to propose that. You may actually have a more timely deployment if you do some of that grunt work in the beginning and you do some of that outreach and thinking about those social considerations at the outset because you’re not going to have to reverse engineer something later down the road to fit what the protests or the pushback may be.
You have already considered these things and the deployment can actually move In a more, I guess, timely way or a more durable way. So it’s kind of a different way of thinking, I think. And we haven’t seen a ton of examples of this happening at large scale, especially at carbon removal, because it’s still relatively new. But I do think that It’s not going to, I do think you don’t have to think about environmental justice as a roadblock, but actually as an opportunity to do something really well and also durably that’s going to last, you know, the test of time essentially.
So I kind of want to push back on that one a little bit, but I’m curious what Nikki you think on that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I really agree. I would just, to be clear, I’m not saying it’s a roadblock, but I’m just saying like it takes time. And so you have like this combination of, so how do you balance that I don’t think of it as a roadblock myself fair no thank you and I’ll just I’ll just um I appreciate that clarification and.
Ugbaad Kosar: I think the only thing that, one, I hear roadblock from folks all the time and the work that I do, which is why it came into my head, but also I guess the idea of not doing this work means that you can deploy fast is something that I’m trying to challenge because I don’t think that You know, if you are trying to break ground and you just push aside the other social problems, that just kind of solve it. Like, I do think that there’s, it may go fast in the early days, you know, stage one, two, and three, but you’re certainly going to receive a lot of pushback and delays in stage four, five, and six, for example.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Vicky, sorry, you got cut off.
Nikki Batchelor: That’s okay. No, I definitely agree with this sentiment that, you know, starting... This process early can really save you time later. I mean, we don’t have a ton of examples yet from carbon removal, but we do have examples from other adjacent industries of projects really getting stopped because there wasn’t appropriate community engagement up front. I think some of the statistics I’ve seen recently is that Only 13% of the deployment of renewable energy projects that encountered local opposition initially were completed after those delays occurred. I just learned that recently, but that’s pretty compelling.
So if we’re talking about easing your path to deployment in a bigger holistic sense, this can also be really a key component to your deployment strategy. So I think that’s something to keep in mind, but also I’m very sensitive to how hard it is as a startup to do a million things at once. You know, you’re a small team. You don’t have a lot of funding yet. You have to make really hard decisions about how to focus your time and attention. So I think there is a natural tension here that everybody is grappling with around, even if you want to spend the time doing it, like how do you approach it?
And so that’s really where I think the need of having more Resources available and helping companies think about like what are the first few steps to get started and taking like bite sized steps to getting things off in the right direction up front, maybe before you have a big raise and a big infusion of capital, then maybe after that you’re able to hire someone to work on a full time and you can grow your your strategic planning and the work on that topic but. I think completely ignoring it, even when you’re a small team, is going to lead to problems down the road, like Bud was saying.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So the last question around this specific part of the topic is, you both mentioned the fact, and I agree with this, that if you don’t do it right up front, You can have way more difficulty at the end. And we all know litigation or funding pullouts or whatever it may look like. And that renewable energy statistic Nikki just gave is pretty striking. However, how do you know when you’ve done enough and how do companies get to the point where they have confidence that they can move their projects forward and they won’t be faced with some strange outlier because litigation can always happen?
So how do you Then balance at some point the need to be able to move forward and the need to say, yes, I have done. I mean, I haven’t done everything. You can always do communication. You can always do outreach, but I’ve done enough that I can move my project forward and I feel confident that I’ve done it and I won’t get, you know, attacked on it, litigated or on or get some other attack done to me.
Ugbaad Kosar: I think it’s hard to say, you know, here are the indicators to know when to go forward. Truthfully, I do think it’s, I know this is not great, but it’s almost like a project by project basis. I think one of the things that comes to mind for me, though, is that’s where having expertise on your team Folks who work on environmental justice or even hiring support of folks who know how to do this type of outreach and engagement or are familiar with a lot of these topics, having that in-house or at least that internal expertise is where it becomes really valuable because then you get that gut check of, you know, there’s internal questions you can ask yourselves of, Not just metrics of how many organizations you’re reached out to or how many people, but have you considered these specific characteristics or have you considered these specific harms or what was the reception when you did outreach and where did you land and where did the community land?
I think having these types of internal conversations or internal facing conversations I think is probably going to be a lot more valuable than having specific numbers or metrics That I know startups are looking for, they think in numbers, a lot of them are engineers, and that’s where there’s sort of this discomfort of, we’re talking about qualitative pieces, not necessarily the quantitative. And I think that’s where I see the tension more than anything, but I think having that in-house expertise is where it becomes particularly valuable as you’re trying to move forward on the next stage of your project.
Nikki Batchelor: Maybe just to add one point on that is like having more of the mind frame that’s around like this is an ongoing process and it’s more about relationship building than it is about hitting certain metrics that give you the signal that you can move forward. I think it’s more about like creating open dialogue so that people can come to you directly and they don’t have to go like to a media outlet. They can come to your company. So trying to figure out like, How do you build enough initial trust and at least have a few nodes within the community where people are comfortable having conversations with you?
This is going to look so different depending on where you’re working. This is where it’s like, you know, a project in Wyoming versus a small fishing village in Iceland or, you know, next to an existing set of, you know, fossil fuel infrastructure in the South. Like all of the communities that you’re working with are going to have so many lived experiences that will bring their kind of, Opinions to the table in that way. And some projects may face a much bigger uphill battle and they need to invest more time in those conversations up front in order to have a successful deployment.
And others might, you know, have reception right off the bat of people thinking that it’s a great thing for the project to come to the community. So it will not be equal, I think, for all of the companies. And so I think that’s where the custom strategies will really play out.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. So final question for you both. Obviously, the prize will be sending out $100 million to CDR teams around the world. So when you think about your goals for this EJ movement and specific to carbon removal, how do you hope that this $100 million will impact that part of carbon removal versus the technology and all the other things. And Nikki, I’ll start with you and I’ll give you the last word.
Nikki Batchelor: Yeah, I think our vision and our hope with Prioritizing this and the prize is that we can, one, make sure that people realize it is critical to start thinking about now. And that’s why we wanted to make sure it was part of the criteria and the submissions, because it’s a forcing function, that we can at least put a stake in the ground and say, let’s think about this collectively as a new growing industry. And I think... We really hope that over the next few years we’ll have some strong case studies of how it can be done well and things that we can point to because we’re at this inflection point of kind of public understanding of carbon removal being very low.
But as soon as we get some of these early pilots off the ground and more data coming in, deployment could happen very quickly. And so people will start to hear about it. And if people have negative Associations with early projects that went sideways because, you know, communities weren’t engaged or things went wrong. That’s going to have a really big impact on the industry as a whole. And we’re all going to feel that. There’s no avoiding it. It’s much easier to try and do things right from the beginning and not have to combat, you know, something going wrong.
So trying to figure out how we can make it easier for people to, you know, take the right steps, get started on this work now. I mean, we have I mentioned 1000 teams registered in the competition right now it’s a huge number of projects, I think you know we’re really excited to see what comes in. September 7 for us is our like final registration deadline and people will submit an intent to compete, which is basically an update on their projects which will really show us how many people are. Breaking ground next year with deployments of 1,000 tonne scale projects.
And so all of that will be happening in 2024. It could be in the hundreds. And so that’s 100 new communities that have never been exposed to carbon removal before that are going to have it in their backyard potentially. So it will be scaling quickly and it will impact a lot of people. So if we can kind of collectively put our heads together and think about responsible deployment, That, I think, will really benefit everyone, which is one of the reasons we’ve also been working on this new online curriculum for startups, kind of collaborating also with Carbon Business Council and American University with their Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy, and Carbon 180 is involved in that, too.
So just trying to put more resources out there into the ecosystem and, you know, an open call for other people to do the same.
Unknown speaker: Want to look back?
Ugbaad Kosar: Yeah, I mean, a couple of things that Nikki said I just want to echo is one, what we do in the next few years is truly going to set precedent for how the public thinks about the carbon removal sector. For the next decade or two decades or five decades to come. And so I think it’s really important what we’re doing in the next few years, which is why I’m hopeful that startups are becoming more familiar with environmental justice and understanding not just what EJ is from like a conceptual point of view, which is where a lot of the discussion is right now, but really actionable sort of attainable Steps to take, right?
To think about integrating environmental justice into their projects. And I also see this as an opportunity, not just for startups, but also for the EJ community and the environmental justice organizations who are looking for case studies, as Nikki said, or an example of what it is that we’re talking about, so that when they are thinking about environmental justice, or excuse me, thinking about carbon removal from The perspective of the community that they’re serving, there’s something to point to of like what went well and what didn’t. And here are some of the changes that we would propose to make so that the carbon removal project that would end up here is something that we want.
I think that’s what’s really missing right now is things to point to say this is How community engagement happened and here’s the output of the carbon removal project instead of pointing to other industries or related climate technology, but not having these sort of in-house carbon removal projects that we can actually point to and discuss and disseminate and then be able to build on and do better. I think the other thing too here is, you know, this is the first time really that we’re doing something at this scale and not everything is going to go well, not everything is going to be perfect.
And I think what we want to do is approach this in a way of learning, right? Like here’s what happened with the $100 million XPRIZE project and here are all the really important lessons that were learned and how are we all going to move from this? So when we’re thinking about Next inflection of funding or thinking about a lot of these other projects that are breaking ground from federal space in the US or even globally that we have things that we can point back to. So I think this is where I see the real value in something like the XPRIZE project is starting early with startups, having case studies to think about and lessons learned that we can take away and build on to do better for the next round of work in the carbon removal sector.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I thank you both for joining me and I hope that you return to give us an update on how things are going. And I wish you all the best because this is such an important topic and I’m really happy to see the industry and see people tackling it early as we build out carbon removal. So thank you both.
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