Guest panelist Peter Minor, Director of Science and Innovation at Carbon180, joins us in this episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom to weigh in on the Energy Sector Innovation Credit Act (ESIC), and panelist Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the University at Buffalo returns to discuss the latest carbon removal news with host Radhika Moolgavkar of Nori. Plus, stay calm during the unexpected tornado warning on Holly’s side near the end of the episode— a coincidental and eerie emphasis of what the daily workday might look like in the era of climate change…
(Holly is safe, not to worry!)
Also covered in this episode:
CarbonCure, a company that is reducing emissions in concrete manufacturing, announced it was carbon neutral in 2020 through carbon removal purchases from Running Tide, greenSand, Charm industrials, and Husk (P.S: To learn more about CarbonCure, check out an episode of Reversing Climate Change we did with Rob Niven of CarbonCure!).
Black & Veatch, a global engineering company, was awarded $2.5 million in federal funding to advance direct air capture technology.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced intent to fund direct air capture front-end engineering design (FEED) studies, showing the Biden administration’s commitment to carbon removal.
Chevron failed to hit the target with their troubled carbon capture and storage (CCS) scheme at their Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project in Australia.
The Energy Sector Innovation Credit (ESIC) Act of 2021 was introduced by Senate and House leadership on both sides of the aisle. This bill aims to create investment and production tax credits for technologies across the clean energy portfolio, including direct air capture.
Listen until the end to hear the panelists describe their favorite type of carbon removal!
Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time!
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, listeners. We are back for the July 29th episode of Carbon Removal Newsroom. Today, as always, we’re joined by Holly Jean Buck, Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Buffalo. Hi, Holly. How are you doing?
Holly Jean Buck: Hi, I’m well. Thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Good. And enjoying your last day in D. C. before heading to the better coast, the West Coast, San Francisco.
Holly Jean Buck: I am.
Radhika Moolgavkar: We are also joined today by Peter Minor, Director of Science and Innovation at Carbon 180, who’s his first time on the show, though we love the folks at Carbon 180 all the time. And he kind of sits at that intersection of science and policy. Peter, welcome.
Peter Minor: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Radhika Moolgavkar: We’re looking forward to getting your perspective. And then I am Radhika Mulgothkar, Head of Supply and Methodology at NORI. So just to get started today, I’ll give a little update on the carbon news of the world for the last few weeks. One interesting thing that came out a couple weeks ago is that CarbonCure, a company that’s reducing emissions in concrete manufacturing, announced it was carbon neutral in 2020 through a bunch of carbon removal purchases from Running Tide, which does deep sea kelp. Green Sand and Olivine Manufacturing, Charm Industrials, which converts waste biomass into bio oil, which then injects into the earth, and Husk, who’s working with Cambodian farmers to make rice husk into biochar.
So all really interesting and innovative products and projects and super excited to see CarbonCure helping push forward different innovative technologies and carbon removal. Also, the Department of Energy had two announcements. One, they awarded Black and Veatch Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp, Stapp For all of those who might be interested in a webinar, Carbon 180 just did one literally five minutes ago about 1230 Thursday Pacific Time or 12 o’clock, 1230, either way.
And so I think that’ll probably be available on their website at some point. And it was a really good overview from multiple perspectives from the government to private sector. To a carbon 180 policy hawk all about carbon removal. So encourage you all to go out to their website and take a look in the next week when I’m sure it will be posted. With that, Holly, I’m going to turn it over to you so you can talk about what happened to Chevron this last week or so.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so Chevron made headlines with a, quote, failed carbon capture and storage project. So where are we talking about CCS on a carbon removal show? Let me briefly review the relationship here. Carbon capture and storage being a set of technologies to capture, transport, and store underground Carbon dioxide. So it has a really important role in decarbonization. And so this project, it’s in Western Australia. It’s on a $54 billion liquefied natural gas plant. The CCS project cost about $3 billion. And it’s the world’s largest CCS project dedicated to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
So kind of a showpiece of CCS as part of mitigation CCS is also underpins a bunch of carbon removal techniques like bioenergy with CCS or direct air capture with CCS. But those are somewhat, it has a different role there because in those systems, it’s pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere rather than carbon dioxide at a point source like this LNG plant. And so it was a condition of building this plant with the Australian government that Chevron would store 100 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. And there were a bunch of difficulties with this project, which is not unusual with mega projects, frankly, especially kind of first of a kind or showcase, not necessarily first of a kind, but I mean, this is really kind of a big deal project.
So it was a couple of years late. It had some welding issues. It had issues around water entering pipelines and corrosion risks and sand clogging reservoirs and various things, right? So it failed to meet these requirements set out by the government to lock away 80% of emissions generated within its first five years. Now it’s facing some fines and a lot of bad press.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, a lot of bad press, which is kind of what I was curious about and would love to get both of your perspectives on that. I mean, we all know carbon removal is important and CCS is important. They’re also nascent technologies. So how do companies like Chevron, who from everything that has been described in the media, obviously I’m not in their boardroom, genuinely seem to be trying to push a new technology forward that could have huge benefits. But how do you incentivize that when, if you fail, you get just kind of hammered by people?
Love to get your thoughts.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, I think that they might not have gotten as hammered if they weren’t Chevron, right? So there’s a question, should we be using CCS technology on fossil fuel operations or Maybe we should just be focusing on carbon removal. That’s kind of my position. I think that we can decarbonize the power sector with renewables and battery storage and possibly some amount of nuclear. I’m not sure that we need to keep on going. Well, actually, I’m sure we don’t need to keep on going with fossil fuels, right, just to be plain about it.
So, I mean, I don’t know that this project was a great use of money anyway. That said, I mean, I think there’s a bunch of lessons here. One is about the importance of regulation and that they had to monitor and now they have a fine. They should probably have a higher fine. But also there’s trade-offs around, you know, building fast and cheap, which is going to be a huge issue with scaling up these technologies and like the quality of the work. Are they using the most expensive, best materials or shoddy ones?
I mean, so that’s going to be a challenge. And then there’s a question of, Should these emitting companies like Chevron be the same companies responsible for the carbon capture and storage or those different sorts of companies that are providing that service?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, Peter, what do you think?
Peter Minor: I agree with Holly in every way. I do think it is great to see more corporate step up and try to invest in new technologies that can have an effect on sustainability and fighting climate change. I prefer the ones who are thinking more into the future and looking at technologies that are more in carbon removal in that landscape. And I think there are quite a few who have really stepped up in big ways. So Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft are now putting in collectively in the tens of millions of dollars a year.
But I think as a class, that could grow to hundreds of millions of dollars or eventually billions of dollars. And so I think there is an opportunity for companies to be the first interesting Customers for carbon removal and actually get them down the cost curve, but I think I agree with Holly that it should be done in the right way, and they should be investing in the right technologies.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So just to play devil’s advocate a little bit, not even sure I agree with this position, but oil and gas, I think, are here to stay for, let’s say, 30, 40, 50, 60 years probably, or I don’t, I mean, I personally don’t see how the whole world moves away from these energy sources as quickly as maybe certain countries will be able to, nor maybe they won’t have the incentive even to move away from these technologies because they give them a cost advantage. So that being said, I think there is some value in them at least trying to develop technologies that clean it up to the extent that they can because it’s better than where we were at.
So- Maybe that doesn’t resonate with anyone, but it’s something I think about a lot when I think about countries that are not the US, that are not Europe, but maybe the Indias of the world or the Africas who might need oil and gas for other reasons, and it’s better, cleaner than as dirty as it was.
Peter Minor: I think carbon emissions are one piece of the question, and we need to think as a community and as, I think, a From a technology perspective, how do we deal with emissions? But emissions aren’t just carbon, right? It is also pollutions of other kinds. So I think maybe I would be more appreciative if I also could hear the plan for how you reduce other types of pollutants and how do you make sure that frontline communities aren’t the ones being affected by this industry and by the existence of fossil fuel activity.
So if there was maybe a more comprehensive solution being proposed for how we deal with all those things, then Sure, we could have that conversation. But just saying that we’re going to build technologies to cover our carbon footprint isn’t really enough.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, really good point. Really good point, Peter. And I have to say, coming because I’m always in carbon removal, sometimes I lose that bigger picture. But I agree with you. And as always, it’s that interesting tension that we’ve talked about many times around sustainability, equity, and You know, parts of the world that have not benefited from oil and gas for a century plus, but are expected to sort of bear our burden, if you will, and how you how you manage all those is obviously a very complicated question that we have not quite figured out.
But there was some interesting news on the tax front. So, Peter, I’m going to turn it over to you, but I have to know, do you guys call this ESIC or ESIC? Like, what’s the acronym?
Peter Minor: Yeah, so what you’re talking about is the Energy Sector Innovation Credit Act. Internally, we’ve been calling it ESIC, but it’s brand new. So I guess anyone could call it whatever they want at this point and we’ll see what sticks. But I actually love that you had me come on to talk about this because sometimes I wonder, are we the only ones who nerd about No doubt about like new acts and new policies coming out, but seems like we’re not the only one and other people are excited. So that’s great to see.
And I think this is actually potentially a really big deal because for folks, I’m sure most folks on your podcast are generally aware of the fact that there are existing incentives for people deploying new carbon removal and carbon capture technologies through things like the 45Q tax credit through the low, low carbon fuel standard LCFS. But it’s largely believed that those two are probably not going to be enough to really advance the deployment of direct air capture and likewise technologies in the scale that we need in the timeframe that we have.
And so this adds another layer to that equation that can actually have a really big impact. So it’s a 40% investment tax credit or 60% production tax credit. And what that means is for the investment tax credits, Effectively 40% of the upfront cost of deploying these new technologies is going to be written off in three year taxes. And so it can really lower the bar for what is required to actually develop and fund some of these new state of the art And it also has a couple of other really important features that I think are going to be very positive for the field of carbon removal.
So first, it reduces the threshold of how much removals you actually need to have before you are applicable for this credit. So looking at 45Q, that’s 100,000 tonnes per year, which is actually quite a lot when you consider that the biggest currently operating DAC plant is only 4,000 tonnes per year. And what this act does is it has a threshold that’s only 5,000. So it really creates more opportunities for new plants to come on at a smaller size when they’re just getting started. But it also allows for deployments of new types of facilities.
Like we sort of made the assumption that a DAC plant should be as big as possible and look like a large industrial facility. I think we’re early enough in the development of this technology that’s not a foregone conclusion, that there is room for new technologies that actually allow for smaller, more distributed forms of plants that could never even possibly think about reaching the 10,000 tonnes per year threshold. And so this, I think, brings incentives to the field where it is today and leaves a lot of optionality for new ideas, new technologies, and new people to think outside of the box.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thanks, Peter, for that overview. So I myself have a couple questions, so I will go ahead and ask them. One, what’s Carbon 180 thinking in terms of its likelihood of passing the Senate and the House? I mean, as we kind of know, sometimes these things are incremental, right? You introduce it one year with the idea of building traction for future years, so kind of curious about that. And two, this is a question I’ve asked before, I think, who else is from Carbon 180. Why limit it to industrial? There are plenty of necessary technological needs in nature-based solutions like ocean, CDR, even soil.
So curious about both of those.
Peter Minor: Yeah, for the first part, I think, so let me answer the second part first. So it’s a good question, right? I think from a carbon 180, our perspective, there are no silver bullets today. If you look at how much the scale of carbon removal that we’re going to need to have an impact on climate change, we’re talking about in the billions of tonnes. So when you look at what has been put online today, it rounds down to zero. Effectively, nothing has been done in the scope of what we need to accomplish.
So it’s always really important to keep that in mind. So this is just the very earliest days of actually trying to build the right solutions. So how can we possibly say which are the right solutions? Which are the ones that are going to win in scale? We don’t know. We at Carbon 180 believe in supporting all of the solutions. And when we think about policy, we are trying to move forward policies across the board. So I think this was a bill that came across and supported specific industries because that’s what came across.
But I think there are other bills that we’re trying to do that will be around soil carbon, that will be around looking at ocean carbon opportunities. And so I think we do need to invest in all of these different potential pathways. So that’s sort of a non-answer to your question, specifically why this didn’t cover it, but I think there should be more room for creating the right incentives to push across all the different pathways. And remind me, what was your first question again?
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, my first question, and I should also give Holly an opportunity if she has anything to add, but was the likelihood. Do you see this, you know, one of the reasons I thought maybe it was focused on industrial is it could get broader support because who’s going to turn down a job? Or what could potentially incent a job. So curious what your read is on the passage through the House and the Senate.
Peter Minor: We’re obviously very hopeful that it will pass. We spend time trying to rally support with lawmakers who I think have the long view of carbon removal being a new driver of jobs and of industry and I think bringing more equity to the climate space. So it’s probably too early to say You know, how, what are the real chances of it passing, but we’re obviously going to do everything we can to make sure that this is something that gets turned into law.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. And, and to your earlier point into, I think somebody on your webinars point early today too, was what, like four years ago, nobody was talking about carbon removal. So even getting this far along to get different types of innovation credits available, I think is a huge step forward. So kudos to your team for managing to do that so quickly. Holly, anything you’ve been quiet? I want to make sure you get a chance.
Holly Jean Buck: Maybe we can back up and get really basic for people who aren’t in the U. S. listening or people who just aren’t as nerdy. No offense. I get myself in that category. So this is part of the infrastructure bill. Is that correct?
Peter Minor: Good question. I actually, I don’t know the answer to that, to be honest. I don’t know if it’s part of it or not.
Holly Jean Buck: And so what’s the status of the infrastructure discussions today? I heard there was some new CDR stuff in that, including 3. 5 billion for these four regional direct air capture hubs, some state grants for carbon tech procurement, a bunch of money for regional hubs for hydrogen. That’s all in play in parallel with this and some other things, right?
Peter Minor: I think that’s right, yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so I guess for the... Fair enough, Holly, good point, you know, and something my husband scolds me about, like, don’t make it so high level or like, assume we don’t know what’s going on. But this is a investment tax credit. It is designed to help companies who are looking to innovate in the direct air capture space, particularly, potentially other spaces related to Start doing that innovation by providing, you know, ability to write down some of their tax burden. And it is the biggest step forward in probably this space since 45Q, which I’m not sure when it was put into play, but it’s a tax credit that was more probably designed for the oil and gas kind of carbon capture and storage area than really for true carbon removal.
Which this one, this ethic, is more designed for carbon removal. So it’s a big step forward, I think. And in conjunction with all that infrastructure stuff that Holly just was talking about really does represent a new and interesting commitment to carbon removal. And something, Holly, that... Definitely, we will talk about in the future when Chris is back on the show to get his perspective on the billions of dollars that are maybe going to be spent on this and how he reconciles that with his conservative heart. With that, I’m going to move to our last segment today because instead of doing good news of the week, which is something we instituted a little bit ago, I wanted to talk to these two experts about what their favorite type of carbon dioxide removal is.
Process is knowing that sometimes it’s like picking a child and you never have a favorite child, but I’m going to force them to make some choices. And I am doing it from the perspective of how the XPRIZE has described CDR buckets, our carbon dioxide removal buckets. So the XPRIZE is a prize funded by the Musk Innovation Fund or the Musk Climate Fund, Elon Musk’s group, and they are basically funding Intimation within the carbon dioxide removal space. They are doing it in increments where they’ll fund a little bit based on What your project is, and then they fund again if you show results.
And they think of it in sort of four different buckets. They think about direct air capture, which is what we’ve been just talking about. These are more industrial type. Ocean. And interestingly, they don’t seem to, they only talk about ocean in terms of deep ocean. So ocean, what sometimes I call ocean CDR. Talk about rocks, which is mineralization. It’s the kind of the idea of olivine that I mentioned at the top of the show. That Carbon Cure was using as one of its projects. And finally, land, which they lumped together both soil, agriculture, forestry, and what I would call blue carbon or mangrove, seagrasses, shorelines, that kind of thing.
So I’m just going to throw it out there and ask, you know, I’ll put you on the spot, Peter, because it’s your first day on the show. What’s your favorite carbon dioxide removal process and why? And maybe give an overview of what it does exactly.
Peter Minor: It’s so hard to try to pick because there’s so much to be excited about each of these. I think with direct air capture, it’s this new technology that I think really has the opportunity to be very high quality, high quality in the sense that you can remove CO2 in a very verifiable way. You have this pure stream CO2, then you can then store durably. It can scale with other technologies that we’ve seen like photovoltaics or batteries. But this, I think, really fits into how we think about the technology development landscape and moving into deployments.
There’s just a very clear roadmap for how we can actually accomplish this and get to billions of tonnes. And so it’ll be hard. Right now, it’s very expensive. But we’re just at the very top of the cost curve and have a long way to drive down. So for those reasons, I think I’m very excited about direct air capture. It’s very easy to visualize how we can overcome some of the challenges that exist across all of the Carbon removal landscape and get to something that can really work for the long term.
Oceans, of course, though, are also very exciting because there’s just so much CO2, so much carbon in general, and definitely a lot of CO2 in the ocean. In some estimates, it’s denser for sure than we have in the air. So from a technology perspective, it might be easier to pull out. But we’re just getting started there. Love rocks. I mean, rocks are fantastic. That’s nature’s way of storing CO2 in the long term is in rocks. And so why not just use what nature has developed to try to either keep CO2 in a geologic form for long term or just use the mechanisms like Oluvene to accomplish that.
And again, like land, how can you argue with land? Land is beautiful. We all love trees. We love soil. And I think the best thing about land is where direct air capture, we not only need to actually build these plants, but we need to design them and create the supply chains and deploy them. Nature is a self-assembling technology, right? Like we literally plant the tree or we, you know, enrich the soil and it does the rest. Like we actually have to do so much less work there. So I think land is really My real answer, I think, is maybe land is my favorite.
And the reason why is there’s so much work that we already do around forests and agriculture that if we could actually solve some of the challenges that exist for durability and leakage, then I think the learning curve that we could go down would be so quick because we’re already doing it at such scale. Getting to scale would happen so quickly. And that’s really exciting to me. But I think it’s a pretty close second is probably direct air capture.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Peter, I’m glad you chose one because I was going to be like, I think you’re skirting the question, but you did it. You chose land. Holly, what about you? What are your feelings and tell us why you love one of them or maybe don’t love one of them?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I’m going to tell you one that’s a no-brainer and one we need to be thinking more about. So the no-brainer is blue carbon. It might not be gigatons and gigatons, but it’s really important for ecosystems and we should just not be clearing wetlands in the first place. Tornado warning. Okay.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Tornado, are you going to be okay? Do you need to go? I don’t know.
Holly Jean Buck: That’s kind of drastic, isn’t it? I guess we’ll see.
Radhika Moolgavkar: We can try to finish up the episode. Okay. Well, if you need to jump, just let us know.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. So... The no-braider is blue carbon. We should be protecting wetland ecosystems and not destroying them in the first place. It might not be gigatons and gigatons of removals, but I think it’s one of the most important things to be pursuing right now for a variety of ecosystem and human system reasons. The thing I think that’s intriguing that we should be focusing some research on is direct ocean capture. Because like Peter just said, there’s a lot of carbon in the oceans. And so kind of on a lab scale, there are people working on new technology that could turn the CO2 in the oceans into minerals by, you know, Pulling seawater through a machine, giving it an electric charge that sparks chemical reactions that will create limestone and other minerals, magnesium-based.
So then you have materials that you can dispose of. You also could have hydrogen as a byproduct of that. I think it’s pretty interesting work in the initial stages, and I’m looking forward to seeing where that goes.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, I guess I have to also answer this question. Definitely, even though right now I’m thoroughly, thoroughly in the soil world on a daily basis, because that is where Nori launched in the croplands agriculture. I am super excited about oceans. I think that they provide a really good opportunity. They’re obviously 70% of the earth. The thing that makes me nervous is that they are a nature-based solution. And when you mess with the ocean, who knows what else you’re messing with, like the unforeseen consequences. So sometimes then that pushes me to DAC because it feels like DAC is a lot more, once it scales, a lot more controllable and understandable.
So it kind of pushes me towards a DAC solution sometimes because again, it seems scalable. Much less likely to have unintended consequences in the same way that nature-based solutions have. However, I also go back to thinking about our rather unfortunate history of how we site manufacturing, the impacts of things like redlining in this country, particularly the building of industrial sites and traditionally BIPOC neighborhoods, and how If this direct air capture is really to scale correctly, it has to be done in a much more intentional way than we’ve ever scaled manufacturing before.
So I guess that goes to just say that every one of these solutions to me has a very upbeat side and a very side that needs to be better investigated or better funded or better researched. And that leads me to just end the show by saying that I really appreciate, again, that the Biden administration is putting this forward, has tried to put some funding forward. And I appreciate what Carbon 180 is doing and what Holly’s doing as advocates and trying to get this carbon removal space up and running. And with that, listeners, thank you again for listening to another one of our shows.
And we will be back in a couple of weeks when Holly’s back from vacation and I’m back from vacation and Chris is back from his honeymoon. So until then, have a wonderful time and thank you so much.
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