Everyone used to say carbon removal was supply-constrained. Now everyone says it is demand-constrained. So which is it?
Today's show has Dr. Gabrielle Walker, Co-Founder of the carbon removal marketplace CUR8 and the Founder of Rethinking Removals, an NGO working to change the conventional environmental story around CDR. She is hosted by Nori's VP of Supply and Methodology, Radhika Moolgavkar.
Dr. Walker discusses her long history in the climate space, including time spent in carbon capture, and how she works to address questions from corporate buyers.
The conversation covers the importance of portfolios in carbon removal strategies, the necessity of immediate action, and the challenges of gaining local and environmental community support.
Additionally, Dr. Walker delves into major stories in carbon removal for 2024, including the XPRIZE finalists, Europe's policy actions, and private industry investments.
On This Episode
Dr. Gabrielle Walker
Radhika Moolgavkar
Resources
CUR8
Subscribe to Climate Workers Anonymous
My other show, Reversing Climate Change
Books referenced in the podcasts, at Bookshop
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 and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, VP of Supplied Methodology at Nori. Dr. Gabrielle Walker is a leading carbon removal communicator and the founder of Curate and Rethinking Removals. She works with organizations of all kinds to raise the profile of carbon removal and help grow the industry. Two years ago, she gave a TED Talk on CDR that has since become one of the most viewed videos on that topic. Today, we’ll talk to her about her work telling the story of carbon removal, what she’s hearing from corporate buyers interested in CDR, and how she would strategize around some of the biggest communication stories the industry has seen this year.
Welcome, Gabrielle.
Gabrielle Walker: Thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, let’s just jump into it and talk a little about Curate and rethinking removals. So Curate works with corporate clients to create carbon removal portfolios. Right now, what are the types of questions about the carbon removal industry are companies asking you?
Gabrielle Walker: Great question. And so Curate is actually a market maker in carbon removals. And so we’re currently functioning as a broker. We source out carbon removals projects. We do due diligence on them when we have it. A very detailed and strict process, given the absence of other standards and methodologies out there at the moment. But we also work with corporate buyers to try to help them navigate through what they should be buying and how they should be buying. And we think it’s very important that we put the renewables together in portfolios rather than individual approaches.
There’s a whole bunch of reasons for that, spreading the risk, spreading the cost, spreading the durability and also spreading the bets into what’s actually going to be able to scale at the rate that we need it. And so one part of our due diligence is do the projects we’re working with have a route to scale and is this money actually going to help them to scale? So that’s what we do, but also when talking about what companies are asking us, I should mention that beyond that, we’re also investigating different financial products.
What will it take to get money into the hands of the suppliers? And that’s one of the most important things that’s around at the moment. And then another is what software, what other things are going to be needed to be able to accelerate this industry? And the way I’ll work as a broker is helping us understand the market very well so that we can develop the other products that are needed. Now, with that background, What we’re hearing from corporate buyers is that especially among CSOs, Corporate Sustainability Officers, who are these days much more integrated into overall corporate strategy than they were when I started working on this a few decades ago.
Many of them who come to us and we go to them already get it. Many of them have net zero targets. They know that they’re not going to be able to go to absolute zero, that they’re going to have residual emissions that they’ll have to remove. And they’re trying to figure out what their plan should be for why to do it. But one of the challenges that they face is taking a business case to their CFOs. So why should they actually be buying carbon removals now rather than waiting till everything settles down, giving it such a nascent industry?
And I think that’s one of the questions that comes up quite a lot for us. And then also, what role their action now could play in building the industry? And that’s why I mentioned the financial products, because really, We spoke into lots of global banks and also providers of project capital. And we all know that this is burgeoning, exciting industry in carbon removals. There’s all these startups, all these brilliant ideas, and they’re getting VC funding, and there’s even some private equity that’s pining in. But what happens when they need to get to the next level?
How do they get the money in their hands? And so the first thing is they need offtakes. They need offtakes. They give me commitment from big, reliable corporations to say, when you make it, we will buy it. And that’s a demonstrated to the providers of finance that there will be a market and there will be a future revenue stream and therefore we can land against it. But on top of that, we actually did a first of a kind instrument using an offtake last year. It was working with British Airways who provided the offtake with Undo.
An enhanced rock weathering company and with a standard chart, it is obviously a big global bank to provide the debt. And one of the things that we really learned from that is it’s not just about the offtake, it’s also about how you spread the risk and who takes it. Because this isn’t just first of a kind technology, this is a first of a kind industry. And so the two crucial things that are needed, this is what we’ve been learning both from buyers and from the whole industry is one, Optakes from very reliable corporate buyers.
And the other thing is some way to understand and spread the risk, maybe insurance or maybe some kind of catalytic capital. So those are two things I’d highlight. But I’d also highlight we’ve been developing the business case for why anyone should buy now. And it’s really becoming increasingly clear. One of the things that I think when this industry started to take hold a few years ago, around the time before that I was doing my TED Talk, There was this widespread perception that it would grow and as it grew, the prices would go down, just like they did with certain wind.
We’ll have this lovely, la la la la, we’re going to go down the cost curves. But in fact, prices are going up. Every single supplier that we work with at Curate, the prices over the last year have risen. And we strongly believe that they’re going to continue to rise over the next three to five to seven years. If we do our job right, if we get the offtakes out there, if we get the money in the hands of the suppliers, then we can start to get down the cost curves. But in the meantime, Everybody is going to want a piece of this industry and there just is not going to be enough supply.
So that’s the economics 101 recipe for prices going up. So one of the things that we say to the companies is, buy now. Get an offtake that gets you very preferential rates because all of the companies want the offtakes. And then you can secure your supply at a rate that’s actually going to be much more favorable now. And then the other thing that we’ve been telling them, of course, is that compliance is coming. So the Oxford Offsetting Principles was the first voluntary rule setter to come out and say, you need to start buying now, buying removals now.
But then we’re starting to see the work in the European Union. I think we’ll come back to that later in the conversation, but Policies around the place that are demonstrating that this is coming in the compliance space. And so, you know, what we say back to the buyers that we discussed this with is those two things. The compliance is coming. And if you buy the offtakes now, because that’s specifically what people need to get the money in their hands, we can get you really good rates for that. And then the final thing I’d say in this is it’s all about portfolios.
So quite a few big companies are doing one-off deals with individual companies, but it’s a risky bet. It’s a risky bet on the price. It’s a risky bet on the technology. And so really spreading your risk and spreading your costs and spreading your opportunities across the range is what we strongly advocate and that’s what we build and to curate.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Super interesting in all the stuff that we think about at Nori, too, particularly that financing piece and the offtake and the risk spreading. But those are pretty sophisticated ideas. You’re balancing both financial risk, first of its kind technology. So how do you feel the general corporate understanding is of CDR and how did they respond to these, you know, rather uncertain risks?
Gabrielle Walker: So I think there are some players, and starting to be more, not just in the tech industry with the high profit per tonne, we have money to put at risk category, but more in the kind of real economy, especially the ones that are kind of on the front line around compliance, for example, the aviation industry or Or some of the others like that who are really starting to understand this better, but still I would say not taking it as seriously as other solutions. So yesterday I was at Farnborough at the Sustainable Skies Conference speaking about carbon removals and almost all of the conference was devoted to sustainable aviation fuel.
And then once in a while, someone will mention removals. And they’re probably going to have to be at least equal solutions in this space. And they’re probably going to, I mean, removals, the CEO of British Airways yesterday said, their estimate is that the aviation industry can get to, throwing everything at this, can get to maybe 70%. To 75% of the solution, which means that at least a full quarter of it is going to have to come from removals. And yet it’s not quite there in the mentality. And one of my messages to the aviation players yesterday was, my advice is start thinking about carbon removals now, the way you’re thinking about SAF now, and not the way you were thinking about SAF 10 years ago, because we don’t have 10 years to get carbon removals to the same space.
So I think, you know, awareness of this, but taking it seriously as an issue isn’t maybe quite there in some of those industries. And then there are plenty of others who will say, you know what, we’re working really hard on our reductions. We’ve heard the message that we should do first reductions and then removals. And so we’re working on our reductions. And when we get to the point where we need removals, then we’ll start worrying about it. And I think that the message hasn’t quite got across that if you don’t buy now, if you don’t make those advanced purchase commitments, then That not only will the supply not be available when you need it, but the limited amount of supply that will be there is going to be extremely expensive.
So, you know, for the world and for yourself, it’s a poor solution. But at the moment, I think that’s a message that’s been being received from the voluntary rule set as first and next. And I know that the voluntary rule set is meant to say it’s a hierarchy of priorities, but not a sequence. And so I think those are the two things that we’re working very hard to try to combat. It’s spreading more of an understanding that there are the reasons to buy now and the reasons to take it seriously now as part of an overall plan.
And then the final thing I’d say is that quite a lot of the less sophisticated players are just frightened by the whole offsets toxicity. And for them, I think their perception is it’s much safer and easier to do nothing And I have to say that this is a conversation that I’m starting to have with some of my friends and colleagues in the NGO space, which is it’s really important to go after greenwashing, but it might be even more important to go after not acting. And I haven’t really seen anyone being attacked for doing nothing.
And therefore, that’s what’s the safe space for many corporates at the moment. And I’d like to see that change.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I could not agree with you more about the not acting part. It’s very unfortunate. You led nicely into our next question, which is what part of rethinking removal’s goal is to create space for difficult conversations around toxic issues? And I think some of the things you touched on might be the toxic issues that are holding CDR back right now. So can you expand on that a little more?
Gabrielle Walker: Absolutely. And I think In a way, you know, I came to carbon removals from carbon capture and storage, and I came to carbon capture and storage, not because it was my great love, but because I realized that it’s one big area of the whole climate space that really wasn’t getting attention, mainly because it was so toxic. And I’ve been working on climate change now for 30 years. So I’ve worked in more or less every aspect of it with more or less everybody. And so, you know, in a way, kind of have the luxury to choose where I point my attention and really wanted my attention and energy And the networks and the people who are good enough to trust me and work with me to be targeted to areas that really needed a kind of big picture approach and a non-partisan approach.
So that’s why I went to carbon capture and storage and I realized that carbon removal is even more toxic and even more important to get right because it plays an even bigger place in the whole climate space. So that’s kind of why I’m in it. To see what I and we can do to help build bridges and to make more inclusive narratives. Now, that emphatically doesn’t mean convincing people to change their minds or getting people to see reason or anything like that. All of our work is really talking with an extremely open mind to everybody.
When I say everybody, I mean everybody across the ecosystem. So every different kind of carbon removal from what some people call nature-based ones all the way through hybrids and techs, different approaches to the same, different technological approaches to the same overall way of doing removals, but also to people outside society. Carbon removals in the climate space, to policymakers, to think tanks, to people who focus on nature and biodiversity, and understanding where they all sit and how carbon removals fits or doesn’t fit within their worldview, and then trying to see how we can reconstruct worldviews to make them sufficiently inclusive.
Because there are definitely trade-offs in this space, of course, but there’s fewer trade-offs than people think. And so I think that actually looking for, I learned a new word yesterday, underlap. So, you know, you want to avoid overlaps so you’re not duplicating, but you want to avoid underlaps where there’s actually quite good synergy between different approaches. And they don’t need to be in opposition if you can frame them right. So one example of this is a direct air capture in Kenya. So this is a really interesting one. I’ve been working with the brilliant guys down there with Africa Climate Ventures and the Climate Action Platform Africa with Octavia.
Bottom line is that when people think about the global south and carbon removals, of course, they think about trees and soils and nature. But they don’t think about tech. They think that tech is all about the global north and it’s about industrialized nations. And that ain’t necessarily so. The Great Rift Valley in Kenya is a brilliant potential place to do direct tech capture. Why? Because it’s got two things that are absolutely necessary. One of them is fantastic storage. They’ve got fresh lava, just like in Iceland, so they can mineralize the CO2.
The other thing is they have vast amounts of renewable energy, which is going begging, which cannot be developed. Because there’s nobody to be a big industrial offtaker. And until there’s a big industrial offtaker, it just doesn’t pay to develop the smaller amounts. It just pushes the price of electricity up for everybody and that makes it harder. So you have a situation where if you cite direct air capture in Kenya, you have a mechanism for developing renewable energy. Which can then also be used for other things to help get green industrialization.
It helps for development, it helps for climate justice and local communities. It also is a mechanism whereby money can go from the Global North, where companies need to pay for removal, so Global South, who are the places that have done the least to cause climate change and they’re doing the most suffering from it, but they’re not getting money through aid in the place that they need. And so you look at that and that’s not a, should it be Global North or Global South? Should it be nature or tech? Should it be renewables and reductions or should it be removals?
It’s actually when you put them intelligently together that you get a much better answer. So I would say that some of those toxic issues, by listening to everybody and helping to reframe them, you can get to much better answers. And the other thing I’d throw in on this is that I really, I find that it’s so, we in the climate space are being attacked on all sides. You might call it the anti-wrote brigade. You might call it a political issue. It’s become part of the culture wars. And the attacks are coming in thick and fast.
And so it’s terribly disappointing that many of us are responding by attacking each other. And I think that’s a space where we really want to, we are operating, we want to operate more. It’s very understandable. But within the carbon removal space, there were direct air capture companies that were attacking each other. There were approaches, you know, don’t do biochar, do DAC, don’t do DAC, do BEX. And then within that, there’s don’t do nature, do tech, don’t do tech, do nature. And then there’s Don’t do removals. Do Red Plus and avoidance credits.
Don’t do credits. Do nature or do reductions. And in this almighty mess, our enemies are rubbing their hands in glee. And so one of the things that we’re working on very strongly in Rethinking Removals is not just to try to help align the removal space, but to help Insert removals more sensibly and sympathetically in the overall climate space. Really understanding where the trade dots are and where the potential synergies are and helping to reframe that overall picture so that we can see where we all fit together. Provide something that looks a lot more like a united front to the attack.
Radhika Moolgavkar: As a side note, do you have anti-woke culture in the UK like we have in the US? Does that exist?
Gabrielle Walker: Yes, it’s not so severe here, but it definitely exists. It’s more like poking and prodding. It hasn’t really caught the zeitgeist. But certainly there’s a lot of vested interests out there that really want to push back on any kind of climate action. And the fact that it’s got tangled up in the culture wars is a shame when, in fact, all of our lives and livelihoods and businesses depend on solving this problem. One of my good friends and my co-founder at Curate, one of my co-founders at Curate, Mark Stevenson, says we should stop thinking so much like politicians and be thinking more like engineers.
And what he means by that is that it’s quite easy to disagree over politics. But if you think about what happens when you get a bunch of engineers around the table saying you’ve got this problem to solve, they’re just trying to solve it. And I think in a way, you know, I think that we need a bit more of that in this climate space. It’s Watching out for bad actors, being ready to police, absolutely. In many places, there’s a deserved catastrophic lack of trust. I understand all of that. But basically, we have collective problems that we could actually be sitting around tables saying, okay, how do we solve it?
How do we stick this together with that? Where are the trade-offs and what do we do about it? Rather than just having circular firing squads where we all end up on the ground.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, so now I want to move on to or move the conversation to about communication and public acceptability. You obviously described in Kenya what seems like an amazing situation. And I agree with you from all the work that we’ve been doing in the DAC space. But generally, how well do you think the industry has engaged with local communities so far? And are there areas that we should be thinking about more?
Gabrielle Walker: You know, the answer to this is probably, to my dying day, the answer to this is going to be not enough. And this is one of my great brokers. I feel like when we’re doing our due diligence for Q8, I said that in addition to, does the project do what it says it will do? What does the science tell us about it? Are they doing the right methodology? Do they have the right monitoring? Are they like to go out of business? Do they have the right team? Do they have a path to scale?
You know, we look at all of those, but we look really strongly at how do they engage with local communities and where does the benefit sharing happen? And there are two reasons to do that. One reason is a reason of justice. It’s absolutely that the voluntary carbon market scandals have been rocked by cowboys diving into places, grabbing the money and running and then going off on the yachts while the local people say, what about us? And that’s not fair. And we can’t afford to do that. And the other reason is practical, which is if you continue to do that, you’ll get what started to happen across countries in Africa, which is 60% taxes get slapped on projects.
Project can’t happen. It goes wrong. So for both reasons of justice and reasons of practicality and license to operate, it’s an absolute shoo-in. So we are extremely strict about our projects and how they engage to make sure that’s a key part of the due diligence and not kind of tacked onto page 42. And I think many more Companies and also buyers of car mills need to be doing the same thing. That’s the way, one of the things that’s challenging about this industry is it’s so early. One of the things that’s marvellous about this industry is it’s so early.
So we still have a chance to get it right and actually build that into our zeitgeist and DNA instead of it being something that’s a kind of let’s be nice to people add-on. I’ll get off my head off.
Radhika Moolgavkar: No, no. I mean, I totally appreciate it. And, you know, I think one of the things that we see in the U. S. is often what feels like a good project from the environment is strongly opposed from the local community, maybe rightfully or maybe because of a misunderstanding. So what advice do you give to companies who are embroiled in a controversial project and how they should work through that?
Gabrielle Walker: Yeah, the thing is, this isn’t rocket science either. Every project that’s ever been cited near to a community through all of history has needed to do the same thing. And it isn’t rocket science. It’s basically involve people from the beginning and have them give them a reason to care, give them a sense of ownership. And whether that sense of ownership is being involved from the beginning with the discussions and having clarity and having repeated town halls and or some kind of ownership and the benefits that come from it. Specifically, you know, it could be jobs, it could be profit sharing, it could be, but when local communities feel a sense of connection and ownership, they don’t have a problem.
Universally. So, you know, there are definitely, there are people out there who are deeply suspicious of anything to do with many of these technologies or approaches and who will try to find any way that they can to try to stop it. And if they can go in and have those discussions before anyone understands what the project is about, then that’s already going to seed mistrust. And so you need to be engaged from the beginning. And also it’s absolute transparency. You know, we humans are extremely good at understanding what we’re being played eventually.
And so just being very transparent about the project from the beginning and making it a kind of a sharing approach. And, you know, the oil and gas industry have been doing this for years. They call it local content, and they know exactly how to go about making sure that they can get both the government and the local people on board. And as I said, it’s not rocket science, and we need to be doing the same thing in the mobile space.
Radhika Moolgavkar: My final question around this particular topic is, you alluded to it earlier, but there’s a lot of resistance to CDR within some of the environmental movement. And so... What guidance can you offer to people who are trying to engage with those groups and to help bring them along the carbon removal journey?
Gabrielle Walker: Yeah, I think many of the people that I speak to in the environmental space who’ve kind of come to me about carbon removals have done it for the same reason I came to carbon removals, which is basically you kind of can’t argue with the science. So fundamentally, I think there is a widespread misperception that either there’s loads of carbon removals out there and we need to slow them down because they’re taking over everything, which is obviously not the case when we know how tiny the fraction actually is, or that it’s only when you’ve done everything else should you allow that because if you allow anything sooner, it’s going to take over everything.
And so I think part of it is a misunderstanding about the actual scales that are needed and the scales that are possible. So when people say carbon removals is just going to be an excuse for business as usual, nobody thinks we can make 50 billion tonnes of carbon removals in the next, how long have we got? 20, 25 years. Nobody thinks that. So we cannot do enough carbon removals just to continue as business as usual. Even if we stopped everything and through everything we got at it, it can’t be done.
It can’t be scaled that fast. And so, you know, that’s one of the things that I, in fact, we developed this kind of four really important narrative pillars about carbon removals that we took to COP29 through our work with Rethinking Removals work with carbon removals at COP. We created a coalition of different NGOs. And point one is, That carbon removals have to go hand in hand with carbon reductions. And not just like a kind of the normal, yeah, you know what, we should do both, shouldn’t we? It’s they literally have to go hand in hand.
Because if we do reductions and don’t do removals, we might as well not bother. We’re going to blast so fast through our climate targets. If we do only removals and not reductions, same thing. So they literally have to go hand in hand and every tonne that we do not stop going in the air is yet another tonne we have to take out and it’s already hard enough. So item one is they really are interconnected and they do go hand in hand. It’s not, you know, first one and then another or only do one or which one should we do?
It really is both hand. And the second one is that carbon removal is never, ever, ever an excuse for fossil fuel business as usual. And one of the reasons for that is of course we need to make the transition. But the other reason is we couldn’t do it anyway. We can’t make that many rules. And then the third part of the narrative is we really need to start now and not later. And lots of the kind of challenges come from we should only do it when we’ve done everything else. And that’s for the reasons we discussed before, of course, which are if we don’t start building the industry now, we don’t have a cat in house chance of getting to the scale that we need.
And then the final one is one that I’ve already slightly alluded to, which is in conversations with people who aren’t necessarily yet on the cover rules journey, just understanding the range of removals that are out there and the range of geographies that they can be applied to. So people hear trees or machines and they don’t know about ocean CDR, they don’t know about BECCS, they don’t know about enhanced rock weathering, they don’t know about hybrid approaches, they don’t know about Building up materials and different approaches to Dax and Bex. And when you start doing that, it becomes something that’s much less like crazy people who think machines can solve everything and come into here, or it’s just trees, why don’t we stop chopping down trees instead of just planting new ones, right?
So I think that range, and also the range of geographies, so not just the global north, an incredible development opportunity in the global south, and a redistribution of justice. And when you start to show that range, it becomes much easier for people who care about, as everyone indeed should care about, Injustice in the global south. So we care about balancing nature with tech or we care about actually having climate solutions that match. And the final thing I’d say about this is that I told you I’ve been working on climate change for a really long time.
I have never met anything, any topic and anything that I’ve worked on before that has a better capacity to give people hope. When people haven’t heard about it, they often say, I didn’t know we could do that. There’s this kind of sensation that it’s all about just stopping the problem and this kind of despairingly stopping the problem getting worse. At least try to stop it before it gets too awful. And the idea that we actually have an approach that can start to help us reverse it and clean up our mess is something that people really engage with.
So those are some of my observations on narratives that are wider framing that aren’t saying us or them and that really seem to land.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I said it was my last question, but I have to ask you one follow up, which is, you know, here within the U. S. , the oil and gas companies have done a lot of damage to communities around the Gulf Coast, right? They’ve been the victims of the extractive economy. But you mentioned oil and gas as being able to bring communities and policymakers along. And I, for one, believe they’re necessary to the solution because they have a level of expertise that we need. How would you talk to those communities where they, I think, rightfully are anxious about the tech and don’t want to hear about the science?
They’re just mad for like, you know, rightfully frustrated after many, many years of being taken advantage of.
Gabrielle Walker: It is a great question. And it’s not just in places like that communities can feel taken advantage of. There’s also communities feeling taken advantage of because, you know, carbon cowboys came in and grabbed the resources and the carbon credits and went off and got rich while the communities got nothing and promised jobs didn’t deliver. And, you know, the world has been like that for a long time. And so when there’s deep mistrust and when there has been abuse, it’s very, very difficult to get beyond that. When you said the tech, what I would say is that there’s a whole, there could be a challenge if an oil and gas company goes along to a community that is already feeling battered and bruised and says, you know what, we’re going to bring some more machines that are going to do this thing that you don’t understand.
You won’t get any benefit from it. You won’t get any jobs. You won’t get any profit sharing. And it’s probably going to be scary. Then, you know, I would frankly oppose that. If it’s a biochar or enhanced rock weathering where this is an opportunity to increase the yield on your crops and also to contribute to solving climate change, which you’re already recognizing as having this impact, that’s a very different story. And so, you know, I think that’s where the range of carbon removals actually comes into play. And then on top of that, I would also say that, um, I, you know, I’ve done a lot of work with oil and gas companies and continue to work with some of them, but there’s some that I stopped working with and I’m really, really disappointed.
I have looked those CEOs in the eye. I really believed what they were telling me and I do not believe that they’re committed to this. I think they’re good people. And I think that they’ve told themselves a story, they’ve drunk Kool-Aid and now they’re just running back in a way that I find very disappointing. So, you know, I feel burned by it. Nevermind. So I recognize that, that sensation. I went to visit two places in the UK, East Anglia and Aberdeen, both very big kind of energy centers for us. Aberdeen for North Sea Oil and Gas and East Anglia similarly for oil and gas off the coast.
And what was really interesting was the number of oil and gas service companies there that are now pivoting to service offshore wind. And they’re doing many of the same things. So there’s a kind of blanket, it’s oil and gas or it’s nothing. But actually all around the oil and gas companies are many service companies that are now taking the opportunity to pivot. And they really understand the subsurface, can do some of these projects. So I don’t know what role most of the oil and gas majors are going to play in this.
And I think they’re foolish if they don’t play a role. But I do think many of the service companies could be the ones that would be in play.
Radhika Moolgavkar: That’s cool. That’s interesting. Never thought about that. All right. Well, last big topic, which is sort of news of 2024 or of, I guess, first quarter plus of 2024. You know, every organization needs a good communication strategy, including those in carbon removal. So we’ll take a look at some of the biggest CDR stories of the year because you’re also a storyteller, not just an expert in CDR. We know that the XPRIZE just last week released the 20 finalist teams for their $50 million grand prize. What should the public know about the diverse range of approaches and companies vying for the competition?
Gabrielle Walker: This is so brilliant. And I love the XPRIZE guys. They are fantastic in what they’re doing. And one of the things that’s brilliant about what they did, of course, is that they had four different categories for their competition. The pathways in which the teams could pitch the air, rocks, land and oceans. And that already demonstrates one of the things that I’ve been saying earlier, which is that carbon removals are not just trees or machines. And this already demonstrates the range of ways that you can store carbon and do carbon removals.
Then the other thing I’d say is that they have a really good, they have some of my favorite companies and they’re not allowed to say which obviously, but they do have a demonstration of the ranges that I was speaking about earlier. So like within the direct air capture category, they have companies located in Canada and the US, but they also have a company located in Kenya and one in Oman. And so it’s already sort of demonstrating that this is not something that’s just a kind of industrialized country’s point of view, straight away from the range.
And then, you know, with enhanced rock weathering as well, they have Australia and the US, but they also have India. And so I think, and China, in fact. So I think that one of the things about the range of projects that they’ve chosen, clearly chosen them, are very much of merit. And I think they were brilliant. But it’s a range of approaches and it’s certainly a range of geographies. And that’s sort of starting to demonstrate how carbon removal is a set of solutions for the world and not just for certain parts of it.
There’s really something in this for everybody. And just back to Africa for a moment, one of the reasons I started working with my friends in Kenya was I met the very brilliant James Wawangi, who’s the mastermind behind Africa Climate Ventures and Climate Action Platform Africa. And he said something very brilliant to me. He said, there’s this whole narrative around Africa being this kind of passive victim of climate change that needs aid to be helped out of this issue. And he said, we in Kenya, we’ve got this incredible young population, entrepreneurial Dynamic youth who are ready to pour their hearts into something, we can be providing the climate warriors of the future.
And he said, Gabrielle, this is not going to be done to us. This is not going to be done for us. This is going to be done by us. And that’s a very different narrative. And I think that’s what the XPRIZE range really demonstrates. Yeah, taking control. They’re taking control.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, let’s move on to the EU, which has a different approach. It’s more working through a policy framework. And so they’ve been taking action to incorporate CDR into their corporate carbon trading scheme. How are you feeling about Europe’s policy action so far? And, you know, what do you see the next maybe year bringing?
Gabrielle Walker: It’s very good. It’s happening a bit faster than I expected, but it’s not happening fast enough. It’s so good. So let’s look at them. So you’ve got the CRCF, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework, which was a very good, it was an uneasy compromise in some way. It’s clearly not perfect. But one of the things that’s very good about it is that the removals, the specification for high durability removals managed to stay tech neutral instead of choosing winners. And I think that was a really good thing. And, you know, they’ve been doing the work that this is ongoing, but I think this has the potential for really outsized impact because the European Union is doing it first, but then other territories are going to say, well, OK, well, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
We can take it from them. So I think it’s going to have outsized impact. And I think it’s, you know, it’s not perfect. Not the way that I quite have done it, but it’s got a lot that’s very good about it. And then how that rhymes with the green claims directive, which is an attempt to stop greenwashing is also interesting and complicated. And there’s lots of kind of, we need to make it better in these directions, conversations going on. But nonetheless, actually having laws in place to say, we’ll come after you if you’re greenwashing is actually quite helpful.
The UK is likely to put carbon removals into their emission trading scheme before the European Union does. And there’s even talk that might happen as soon as 2026. In the European Union, it’s likely to be later. But I think that the faster we can accelerate both understanding of carbon removals The scale in the voluntary carbon market and what’s demonstrably working methodology standards, these are the kinds of things that are going to be necessary to be able to accelerate the pace at which removals can go into the ETS. And when they go into the ETS, that’s a really big market.
So we’ve got to break a careful eye on the compliance markets too. And then the other thing to mention is that the European Union has now set its recommendations for its 2040 target. So it’s already got the 2030 target. And for 2040, the aim is 90% emissions reductions with the implication there. That there’s actually a specific carbon removals element. So I think this is all really interesting because we’ve been long arguing that we needed twin targets, reductions and removals, both to avoid the issue that removals allows people to take their foot off the pedal of reductions and vice versa, but also to make sure we’re tracking, are we getting enough?
And so I think that we’re starting to see that a bit in the European Union as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right, pivoting to something in private industry, Frontier recently announced a huge award to VaultaDeep. And you were talking about the challenge of suppliers having enough financing. So I think an award like this allows a company like VaultaDeep to maybe leap forward through other suppliers. So how do you think about these big awards? And what is sort of the right mix of investment without picking winners too soon? Given the limited dollars we have right now.
Gabrielle Walker: So another great question. And I think. We have actually been very interested to see the kind of the balance of. Either bilateral agreements or a slightly multilateralism with Frontier or kind of more portfolio approaches among big corporate buyers. And one thing I’d say, I don’t actually know the structure of the Frontier deal. Is it money up front or is it money when the credits are delivered?
Radhika Moolgavkar: You know, I’m not sure myself. That’s a really good question. It’s an update. As I understand it.
Gabrielle Walker: So part of the issue is not just, you need the offtake as I described earlier with the Q8 financing instrument we did, you need the offtake as a kind of basic minimum viable product to be able to get money in the hands of the suppliers, but it doesn’t automatically happen as soon as you get the offtake. If the payment isn’t upfront, then you still have to, you know, buy the shovels or build the machines and have the money to do that. So I think one comment to make here is that quite a lot of the Big corporates that have made big purchases so far have done it on bilateral deals.
And I understand why they want to do that. They can use their brand, they can get leverage, they can do better negotiations. It’s risky because it is putting all your regs in one basket and it’s a very, very young industry. And it’s also not necessarily spreading the love when it comes to trying to get as many suppliers as possible, accelerating as fast as possible. And it’s also not necessarily putting the money in the hands of the suppliers. So I think it’s going to be very important to have sensibly put together portfolio purchases.
And we haven’t seen big ones of those yet. We’re certainly working on that at Curate. And also tied along with the mechanisms that the money gets in the hands of the suppliers straight away. And that’s going to be how we scale this industry.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Final question for you. So we’ve talked a little bit about some of the maybe headwinds against carbon removal and some of the unflattering media coverage that it has had because of bad actors. But as you look forward and you think about in 15 years, I think we’re we’re going to have projects that fail not for a Lack of trying to do everything correct, but it’s a new industry. We don’t know everything. So how do we protect against unflattering coverage in 15 years when people can look back and say, oh, you should have done that.
You should have done that. You know, they have the benefit of hindsight.
Gabrielle Walker: Yeah. So there’s also the challenge of quite a few less sophisticated players will sort of say, oh, is that, I thought offsets were bad. Isn’t it an offset or? And I actually feel on the side very worried about what we’re going to do about deforestation. It’s not a large amount of money that goes into avoided deforestation from carbon credits, but it needs to increase very many other mechanisms for that. So I’m really worried about the kicking that these kind of poor quality credits are getting and therefore delivering to some of the other projects that are being tired by association.
And maybe therein lies the answer because I think that there is still a sense that among many people that there are perfect solutions out there. And if you don’t find them, it means that you didn’t work hard enough. You didn’t do enough due diligence. And that’s not true because if we wanted perfect solutions, we would have started 30 years ago and would have been building them carefully in the lab and then doing the field projects and the pilots would have known So much about them that we would be in a great place to be able to say, you know what, this is a good one, this is a bad one.
And if that was the case, I would not be working on this. I’d be working on something else that was harder. So I think that nothing is perfect. There are going to be bullets. There are things that will fail. There will be bad actors. And I think the best guard against this, and this is what we do at Curate, is we make our decisions based on the evidence that we have at the time. We do our level best to get the very best possible evidence. And we write it all down.
This is what we decided on the basis of this information for this reason. And we’re monitoring it constantly with backup plans in case something goes wrong, because I don’t know where it’s going to go wrong, but I know it’s going to go wrong somewhere. So that means that we can be ready. We can be ready to understand what we need to do about it, what we need to swap out, how we need to change the narrative about it, how we need to explain why we chose. And I think one of the things that’s gone wrong with the Voluntary carbon market today is that there was a lot of everything is perfect.
Oh, no, everything is terrible. And so I think I’m more nuanced. We recognize that we don’t have the answers to this yet, but we’re making this decision on this basis. And, you know, really grown up decisions are always made on the basis of lack of entire information. And that’s how we navigate our lives. And I think that’s how we need to navigate this space as well.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, Gabrielle, thank you so much for the conversation. I enjoyed it immensely, and I agree with everything you said. So thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to seeing what your organizations do in the future.
Gabrielle Walker: Absolute pleasure. Thanks to you too.
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