Lots of news in carbon removal this past week! Frontier made their largest-ever purchase of $58 million from relatively new BiCRS company Vaulted Deep, Climeworks unveiled their Mammoth facility in Iceland, and Microsoft purchased 3.3 million tons of CO2 from BECCs in Sweden.
These deals represent significant private market volume in CDR. But a new report in Nature called The carbon dioxide removal gap” highlights some of the policy needs that remain to get carbon removal where it should be to keep us on track for our climate goals.
Listen in today to learn about VCM and policy updates from the world of carbon removal, and understand some of the biggest deals this space has yet seen.
On This Episode
Resources
Nature report, "The carbon dioxide removal gap”
Connect with Nori
Nori’s other podcast Reversing Climate Change
Nori’s CDR meme X account
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: I’m Radhika Milgafkar, VP of Supply and Methodology at Nori. Despite economic headwinds, announcements of big CDR deals keep coming. In the last week, we heard about Frontier’s largest ever purchase of $58 million from Vaulted Deep. The unveiling of Climework’s Mammoth and Microsoft’s purchase of 3. 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from Beck’s. While private sector interest in the industry continues, a new paper finds policymakers are trailing behind. A report titled The Carbon Dioxide Removal Gap was just published in Nature. It found that the amount of CDR governments have committed to so far falls well short of the amounts needed to meet climate goals.
That gap in CDR ambition ranges from 0. 4 to 5. 5 billion tonnes, depending on future emissions. That’s a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide that governments must account for if they want to meet their climate targets. So will policymakers step in to fill the gaps or will headlines of corporate plans continue to be the only big news in CDR action? Joining us today to talk about those two things are our policy panel of Will Burns and Holly Buck. Hello, both of you.
Unknown speaker: Hi. Hello.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, we’ll start with the Removal Gap paper. So Will, can you tell us how the authors conducted their research and what they found?
Wil Burns: Yeah, so the overarching purpose was to determine if current national proposals for carbon dioxide removal, and they gleaned that from things like NDCs and other communications to the Framework Convention, whether those proposals for CDR align with temperature targets, right? And so they mapped this on integrated assessment models. They ran... A number of different scenarios and assumptions about how society seeks to address climate change ranging from a really full-throated sort of commitment to demand reduction through a commitment to renewables through a focus on carbon removal. And then they try to ascertain if there is a gap Between what countries are committing and what would be necessary to meet the Paris targets under each one of these scenarios.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So obviously they found a gap in their analysis.
Wil Burns: Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it’s kind of an interesting sort of communication, right? There’s two things I thought were particularly interesting. One is that If you’re looking at the scenario in which there is a really fulsome support for energy efficiency, demand reduction, then there isn’t a whole lot of need for carbon removal, at least. That’s when we get to 2050, and most of it can be met by nature-based solutions. If you move to a focus on renewables, it escalates. If you move to a focus on carbon removal, then it escalates substantially.
Part of the message, I think, to society is what kind of society do you want, right? And if you can really commit yourself to things like energy efficiency that have a lot of other salutary goals, then we may not. We do not need massive amounts of carbon removal moving forward, right? On the other hand, if we do what we usually do, which is not commit to the right things, then we’re going to need huge amounts of it. And then the report indicates that we’ve got a huge gap. The other thing that I think it communicated clearly, and it’s not the first report to do that, is that there’s a lot of hand moving.
Part of the parties, both in terms of their 2030 commitments and certainly in terms of 2050 about how they’re going to get there in terms of car removal. Most of them quantify some nature-based, virtually none of them quantify any novel, despite the fact the study thinks that in the second half of the century, novel CDR, at least under the two scenarios that aren’t demand reduction, Are going to have to carry most of this, right? There’s just not a whole lot of specificity. And second of all, in the long-term emission strategies, which are going to probably be most critical from 2050 going on, there’s no modification.
No mandate of any real specificity about what kind of policies are going to be put in place to make this happen, right? And Greg Nemet, who was one of the authors in the paper, right, has done an excellent piece before explaining why if you don’t in the formative phase of carbon removal stand it up in a substantive way, meaning now realistically you’re not going to get multi-gigaton removal when you get to 2050 and beyond, right? So it just becomes a chimera.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So Holly, given the current policy environment, does this large gap surprise you? Was there anything you found in that paper that made you go, oh.
Holly Jean Buck: Honestly, I don’t think it surprised me or probably anybody listening to this podcast.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Anything that you found particularly interesting about the paper?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, it’s just good to have the numbers on the page. I think it tells the story that we know about the gap and that mirrors all the other gaps in climate.
Radhika Moolgavkar: You know, I was listening to Ezra Klein, who’s one of my favorite podcasters, and he was talking to an author in the climate space about sort of the idea of Hope, like the hope in politics is a good thing. And like the politics of restraint or taking stuff away is a bad thing. And sometimes when I think about these policies, that’s how I think about it. Like this idea of restraining our emissions is a hard thing to push forward versus this idea of CDR as a hope is an easier message to bring to the public.
Do you think about it at all like that, Holly? Or am I crazy?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I... I think that we need a mix of thoughts. And I think a normal person goes back and forth between these different perspectives, probably within the course of a day. I have a lot I could say about that. I don’t know how far off the rails we want to get.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, I’m always a little bit interested in getting off the rails. So just a tiny bit, maybe Holly.
Holly Jean Buck: So I was doing these two focus groups last night in West Virginia talking to people, members of the public who had never heard about carbon removal, you know, what they thought about it. Did they feel hopeful? And some of them were like, yeah, you know, if we could have coal miners doing these jobs, then maybe they could be a good thing for our community. So I guess I think about hope not in this like big, you know, global modeling sense, but You know, is there a way to connect to that particular sense of hope that’s grounded in particular communities and actually deliver on these promises that people have heard so many times before about new industries coming in?
That’s kind of where my head is at.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, and that makes so much sense. I spent some time in West Virginia and Kentucky, and I think I can relate to that conversation. Will, were you going to add something or I’ll go to my next question?
Wil Burns: Yeah, I mean, I just think it’s, you know, to paraphrase, I didn’t think I’d ever make this statement, but to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, right, instead of trust but verify, it has to be hope but verify, right, and, you know, I think I think a key takeaway of this paper was the need for states to start really getting serious about drafting substantive commitments that can realistically be tracked and operationalized, right? Or we’re going to get the worst of all worlds. We’re not going to do substantive demand reduction or the kind of commitment to renewables we need.
And we’re going to pretend that CDR is going to save our bacon in 2050 and we won’t have scaffold anything that we need to make that happen. And things will be far worse.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah. So you sort of touched on it, but what are some of the other policy recommendations that these authors talked about, Will?
Wil Burns: Well, that’s predominantly what they were talking about. They were saying that the long-term emission strategy is probably a critical framework for effectuating what has to happen in 2050 and beyond. And it needs specific binding sort of commitments as opposed to what you get now. And the other thing that it emphasized is While a lot of the scenarios assume through 2050 that so-called novel CDR provides an extremely modest amount of the CDR that will effectuate, even under the high CDR scenario that they run after 2050, nature-based is largely saturated and about 600, I think it was at least 650 gigatons of this comes from novel, right?
And that has to be... We need policies now to drive that, including government support and other kinds of things, maybe including my old favorite, mandates, right, if there’s any realistic chance for that to happen in the long term.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, mandates. That seems also not very realistic in our current system, but who knows, maybe. So Holly, as Will kind of talked about, the authors created a lot of different scenarios and obviously the assumptions mattered. But, you know, what are your thoughts on what policymakers should be thinking about, especially after you’ve just had these conversations in West Virginia? How do we convince lawmakers about the need to stand up CDR today? And what are some of the arguments you think would resonate with these communities?
Holly Jean Buck: Well, I can tell you that showing them a bunch of graphs, as I have done, doesn’t necessarily resonate super well. I mean, so this paper, just to go back to the first part of your question, right? It has three different scenarios. It has this demand reduction focus, this renewables focus, and this carbon removal focus. And it has those because it’s using these IPCC scenarios that are produced in the database, which people can look through those scenarios. And I encourage people to look Into the deep assumptions of some of them. So like, for example, the low energy demand scenario, it has a explicit exclusion of carbon capture and storage for fossil or bioenergy.
So that’s kind of part of why you get the pathway that’s in this paper. I think I would assume is because that’s what the scenarios assumptions were. And so then if you drill into that, you have to look at all the other assumptions in that scenario that are allowing that, which is like limitations on thermal comfort, 30 meters squared of space per person, you know, specific things about devices and so on. And so none of that is like transparent, you know, when you read a paper like this. And so you really, I mean, to get to the second part of your question, you’d really need a lot of time To drill into all of those choices and trade-offs with people in a community if you wanted to get anywhere with this conversation.
It’s going to be a very long process. And right now we’re at the point where people haven’t even heard of net zero by 2050 or any of that. So have to invest billions, as I say, probably every time we have this podcast in public engagement. Yeah.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I mean, I think the other thing I think about is you mentioned the time that people will have to take, but it’s also time the people who have to listen have to take, right? And do they have the space and ability when they are just trying to make ends meet and pay for their, you know, kids food and take them to like soccer practice, you know? So it seems like a really... Really hard, which it is, and I don’t have any good solutions, but just wanted to bring that up. So, you know, both of you have talked a little bit about maybe mandates and things like that, you know, and no country has committed to scaling novel technologies.
So what do we do? Like, we don’t have mandates in place. How do you see us moving this forward in any meaningful way? Yeah. With all the noise and everything else going on, I’ll start with you, Holly, maybe, and end with you, Will.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think it’s going to be very country-specific, what’s appropriate. And, you know, we could talk about a country like the U. S. I just think it would be useful to have a novel CDR target. But a mandate, you know, you need a much deeper policy framework for that. And eventually, for all this stuff, you need a high level of voter buy-in, so... I’m curious what Will thinks. Yeah. Will?
Wil Burns: Yeah. I mean, I don’t, you know, again, it’s an old saw, right? I don’t see us getting there through the voluntary carbon markets, right? We’re going to talk about Microsoft in a minute, right? But there’s 65% of the purchases at this point, right? There’s like a corral of unicorns that I can count on one hand that are buying any carbon, right? And I don’t see what becomes the magical moment where that corral opens and huge amounts of additional horses come flooding in. So I think ultimately it has to be a legal mandate.
And I agree with Holly, that takes a lot of structuring, right? Even in public discussions, if people are hopeful about carbon removal, right? I think part of our public dialogue has to be, if we’re going to get there, we are going to need policy measures, right? And these are some of the measures and what do you think about those, right? I think we need to reach a point to start discussing that and discussing trade-offs, right? And You know, I agree politically, it’s going to be extremely difficult to get there. Right.
But if we don’t start broaching that subject, right, it’ll it’ll never happen. Right. And, you know, I’m I’m heartened by the fact that governments are starting those discussions, right? Vermont is talking about charging companies under Superfund for damages associated with climate change, right? And they have substantial public support for that, right? And so I think if the public understands the exigency of CDR and the need to have Public mandates to get there, we might be able to engender the kind of public support that would help make it happen. But we don’t know until we start talking about it.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it does seem more likely to happen at a state level than a federal level right now. And maybe that’s appropriate with the broadness of the pathways for CDR that each state chooses what makes sense for them. All right. Well, we’ll kind of preview the next topic, which is talking about some of these gigantic voluntary carbon market sales that happened in the last week. So I want to start with Vaulted Deep. And Holly, this question is for you. First of all, what do you think of this CDR method? And were you at all surprised that, to me, what seems like a relative newcomer to the space got the biggest deal Frontier has ever done?
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, so I think it makes sense to use existing waste technology to get credits. I mean, you know, it’s not a new method. It’s giving credits to something that already exists. So it seems like fair game. But I do have a few questions about it. I guess the first one, I mean, three in particular. So this is my, I’m playing my, I’m just a sociologist card. Like what happens to the methane? Because I’ve seen other, Instances in which the company who’s, you know, processed this is underlying has talked about like having methane as a co-product actually and selling it on a renewable natural gas market.
So it makes me think that you do end up with methane or I mean, I don’t know. So somebody, somebody who knows can ping me and answer it. I also was wondering about the regulation of these wells because, you know, they’re not dedicated carbon storage class six wells. They’re class five, I guess, or some other waste disposal class. And I’ve seen text that’s like vaulted injects biosolid waste a mile plus underground. Thank you so much. A real debate around whether the state of Kansas was doing a good job regulating those wells.
So I do have questions like, do the states know about this new method and what would it mean to scale it? I’m not saying that isn’t a reason to pursue it. I’m optimistic that states can figure this out if they’re given resources, but... Third and final question I have about this, and it kind of applies to a lot of waste-based CDR, including forestry residue for bioenergy for bikers. Do we want to bet on having those quantities of waste streams when we might want to reduce the waste in the first place?
And I’m thinking about So, you know, do you want to build infrastructure or like a Crediting scheme that locks you in to the production of the waste is the third question I have. And I will finish my thoughts there. Thank you.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Oh, those are great questions, Holly. So if anyone has the answer, please, please let us know. But so, Will, I mean, I think that... Right. Makes me wonder. I mean, obviously, Frontier, they’re smart people, so they probably dove into this. But what do you think gives Frontier so much confidence in this company? And generally, these like waste pathways, to Holly’s point, seem to be catching on. But, you know, I’ve had some of the same thoughts in my own head. Like, wait, are we reducing or are we using waste? Has it become a commodity?
So like, how do you think about that?
Wil Burns: Yeah, I’m afraid I asked two more questions to Holly’s three questions, right? One is additionality, right? This company is already doing a bunch of this for the city of Los Angeles. And I just wonder if this pens out in terms of the additionality requirements that I think we should have in CDR. And second of all, I wonder if it’s the optimal use of the resource. I just published a piece in aluminum on bikers and I’ve got a lot of skepticism about this being the optimal use of these resources. I know that this company argues, well, these are nasty organic waste that we can’t use for anything else.
And so it makes sense. That may be true, but some of it, for example, is manure. And I just wonder if that’s the optimal use as opposed to avoiding, you know, the use of synthetic fertilizer in agriculture and whether... I know isometric are the folks that are verifying this. I’d like to see the methodology’s application here because they define waste kind of in the converse, right? It’s things for which there is not a higher use, right? And so I’d like to see how they came to the conclusion that there weren’t higher uses.
And then More broadly than them, it may make sense in the context of this company, but more broadly when we start talking about crop residues and a lot of other ways, whether it’s not better for the use of sustainable infrastructure. Aviation fuel, hydrogen production, and so forth, right? And I think the jury is still out in that context. You know, I can’t speak for Frontier. I don’t know how they vetted this, right? But I think those are all outstanding questions that I’d like to see the answers for.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, really good question. So Well, we have more questions than answers, but that’s good. I hope somebody who listens to this show can help us figure that out. And Holly, we’ll move on to Microsoft. After this huge Frontier announcement, Microsoft made the largest ever purchase of carbon removal from Stockholm Energy through a BEX offtake agreement. What do you think the scale of this deal says about Microsoft’s ambitions with CDR and also the readiness of BEX to meet that huge demand that we’re seeing?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think, you know, Sweden is a good country to try something like this out. I think maybe some listeners can relate. It’s like, how do you square the tech company investment in CDR with these endless stories about... You know, data setter demand and AI demand and, you know, the possibility of installing gigawatts of new fossil fuel, like gas infrastructure to meet that. I feel maybe like there’s more I need to think about when I read, you know, commitments from companies like Microsoft. Now I need to get into the details before I can make any strong claim about my opinions there.
But I do think it’s... You know, we need these kind of big deals to keep people from being disenchanted in the field, right? So maybe both of these reflect that, you know, that these people who are trying to really create this field through their initial investments see that, you know, proven technologies, maybe there’s a role for these big ones. Rather than the more speculative ones, because if you have these smaller, more speculative deals, it still makes it feel like a slippery fantasy topic rather than something with a lot of steel in the ground or whatever.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it’s funny that they don’t make AI companies make sure all their energy is green, but every DAC company has to figure out how to make the grid green. I think AI is probably going to use as much, if not more, than DAC in the short term. So, yeah, a good question to ask yet another. So listeners are really counting on you. So one of the questions that I had when I read about this is that like these are obviously gigantic amounts of funding, which allows these companies to scale in a way that other companies may not be able to who might be just as ready.
So. I’m wondering if you think that this is a sign that winners are being picked by the voluntary carbon market, the dreamlike nature maybe of small purchases that Holly was mentioning, should these dollars be spread more widely? So Will, I’ll start with you and then I’ll go to Holly.
Wil Burns: Yeah. If I can, one other thing I want to say about Bex, right, is I think there’s separate questions about whether this purchase makes sense and what the ultimate future of Bex is, right? I mean, it’s interesting. Bex is definitely taking a star turn this week, right? There’s a tribe in Canada that’s working with a company to develop a BEX facility that I think is going to sequester 700,000 tonnes. It’s going to be the largest project in Canada, right? And so we’re seeing And I think this project, I agree with Holly, Sweden makes sense.
And the feedstock that they’re talking about, right? Pult mill, forest residues, right? Makes sense. But if BEX is going to scale to a multi gigaton level, you’re probably talking about large amounts of dedicated energy crops and miscanthus and switchgrass and things like that. And you’re You’re indulging the fiction that you’re going to use all of this marginal land, often of which is occupied by indigenous people or isn’t marginal because it’s things like prairie grasslands that are rich in biodiversity. You’re probably going to divert a lot of croplands. And you’re probably going to raise food prices, especially for the most vulnerable, right?
And so weather backs make sense and also require huge amounts of water and fertilizer, right, for growing. So whether Beck’s makes sense in the short term with the kind of the easiest fruit to pick, right, which are true residues and whether it makes long term sense when you’ve got to move beyond that, I think is a big question. Um, that your direct question about picking winners and losers and putting a lot of money, I think, you know, these kinds of facilities are really capital intensive right there. It probably makes some sense to, uh, to put quite a bit into them.
If you, if you want to see if they’re going to, to work as opposed to spreading out. Small amounts to a large number of projects and none of them coming to fruition. It’s always a bit of a judgment call, but that doesn’t bother me so much. I’m just worried that BECCS really, in a sustainable way, can’t get us to that multi-gigaton level, and thus I worry about prioritizing it full stop.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Polly, anything else you want to add?
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think that we should have had much more public funding for the research for early stage technologies and have that been in firmly in the research domain rather than in this kind of nebulous. Is it research? Is it a business? We don’t really know. We should have invested like along the recommendations of the national extremists, for example, from the reports from many years ago. But we didn’t. So we are where we are. And if the government’s not going to invest at that scale, I think it’s I’m glad that the startups and, you know, people like Frontier are funding them to try this different stuff.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, final question, which, Holly, you already kind of touched on, but obviously, We have the removals gap paper we talked about first, where there’s no nation that’s really shown or we are aware of a plan to scale novel CDR. We have a handful of companies that are investing a huge amount of money in certain types of pathways. Is this market competition succeeding and then the policymakers follow along? Do you guys agree with that? Or do you still have hope that the policymakers will find us a path forward? Holly, I’ll start with you and I’ll end the show with you, Will.
Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think policymakers could find a pass forward if culturally we can find a way to talk to each other better about climate. And, you know, if there’s voter support, then sure, they’ll get it figured out.
Radhika Moolgavkar: But I think it really starts with the people. Will, anything to add?
Wil Burns: I just, I would like, I mean, I think this government has picked winners, right? I mean, you’ve got 35 million for oceans and 3. 5 billion for direct air capture, right? It speaks volumes about where we prioritize. I agree with Holly. I think that they should have looked at the Academy study, looked at more of the options and probably spread more. Uh, the, uh, the investments, uh, uh, more, uh, evenly than they have. Uh, and, uh, but that’s, that’s, that’s not what happened. Right. And that’s often what happens, right. The who who’s picked to run these, these agencies, who’s picked to run these individual projects and their individual biases usually drive.
Federal policy, given the fact that most people in the federal government don’t know what these things even are, right? So I think we need more diversity of voices in government that understand some of these other technologies and can be a voice for advocating for R&D.
Holly Jean Buck: Just to add to that too, I think, you know, I mean, it’s Congress that authorized the funds, right? So I think the people at the agency sometimes have... Not as much discretion as we.
Wil Burns: Yeah, but they, I think they, I think they, they spent a lot of the time telling Congress what they should, what they should spend the money on. Right. I think most people in Congress are largely clueless and we’re deferring to agency people that had been brought in that were largely direct air capture people. And lo and behold, you get a, a, you know, a full throated commitment to direct air capture and virtually nothing else.
Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, but we should be telling Congress what to spend the money on.
Wil Burns: Yes, no doubt. I’m going to work on that.
Radhika Moolgavkar: All right. Well, I thank you both as always for your time and insights and have a wonderful rest of the month of May. And I will talk to you in June.
Wil Burns: Thanks. Bye. Take care.
Unknown speaker: Bye.
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