Kyle Harrison
talk

Frontier Carbon Removal Event

Build a Climate Startup, Carbon Gap, Hello Tomorrow November 30, 2021 View original ↗

Frontier Carbon Removal Event

A virtual event on frontier carbon-dioxide-removal pathways, run by Build a Climate Startup, Carbon Gap and Hello Tomorrow. Three parts: a panel on CDR in 2022 and the need for frontier pathways, then deck-driven sessions on Direct Air Capture (Eve Hanson, Third Derivative) and Ocean CDR (Brad Ack, Ocean Visions).

The most reusable part is the vocabulary, written out properly and rarely stated this cleanly:

  • CDR — carbon removal and storage. Taking carbon out of the air, via photosynthesis, chemistry, or trees and soil microbes.
  • CCU — carbon capture utilization. Capturing carbon and using it for a process, sometimes as a fuel that re-burns it. A fuzzy term.
  • CCS — carbon capture and storage. Captured from an existing emitter (a factory, a power plant) and stored. Not carbon removal — nothing comes out of the air — but still an important pathway.

And the diagnosis of why CCS never scaled, which is a market story rather than a technology one: at the time of deployment there was no market for decarbonized assets because it required retrofitting, renewables were getting cheap, and so was capital. CDR is different because the demand exists first — Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft committing north of $500 per ton removed against a nominal $100/ton price, with US sequestration tax credits at $180–200/ton pulling the same direction.

Kept verbatim in full, including the audience Q&A. A public event with named speakers — nothing here is private.

Notes

  • Agenda

  • Attendees
    • Julien Fredonie from Berlin doing climate tech corporate venture at Honda
    • Gabriel Zanko, renewable energy investor
    • Daniel Cano at CPM working on CCU tech for point sources of emissions
  • Participants
  • CDR in 2022 & The Need for Frontier Pathways
    • Participants
      • Moderated by Benjamin Tincq at Build a Climate Startup
      • Clea Kolster at Lowercarbon Capital
        • Raised $800M fund
        • Her thesis was focused on Carbon Capture
      • Eli Mitchell-Larson at Carbon Gap
        • Spent time as an impact investor and social entrepreneur
        • “CDR is a set of solutions we NEED. If you’re happy with today’s atmosphere something is wrong.”
      • Remi Bouteille at Climate Pathfinders Foundation
        • Focused on “well spent” capital in emerging climate solutions
        • Spend time focusing on CDR, methane, and solar radiation management
        • CDR
          • Research checks for early solutions in the lab
          • Facilitate scientists with bright ideas to form businesses
          • Support the ecosystem from research to policy
          • Will start new organizations when they feel like they’re needed
            • Carbon Gap
            • Climate Organization
    • What is CDR?
      • Carbon Removal is shorthand for “carbon removal and storage”
        • Photosynthesis to help us
        • Chemical process to enhance these efforts
        • Use trees and soil microbes to store carbon
      • CCU = carbon capture utilization
        • Fuzzy term for using carbon for a specific process
        • You could capture carbon and then use it as fuel to re-burn it
      • CCS = carbon capture and storage
        • Capture from an existing source of emissions (e.g. factory or power plan) and then storing it
        • Not carbon removal cause you’re not taking it out of the air but still an important methodology
    • Why are you investing in CDR in the first place?
      • Even if we reduce emissions massively we still need to remove carbon from the atmosphere
      • 1.5 degree temperature rise is where you start to experience dangerous impact
      • High emissions since the industrial revolution have come in the last 30 years so thats how fast emissions are growing
      • The economy hasn’t taken into account the externality cost of climate change and that is changing (e.g. cost of climate retrofitting, wiildfires, etc.)
      • ==There is $100B of demand for== Carbon Offsets
      • 10B tons of removal in the next 10 years and 100B tons in the next few decades
      • Increased computational power, cheap DNA sequencing (synthetic biology helping) = cheaper solutions for CDR that you wouldn’t have thought of a few years ago
      • That + a massive and growing market of demand from the private sector is really helpful

    • Size of the market and challenge

        1. IPCC
        1. x

      • Array of solutions

      • Scale

        • Even if we scale existing solutions perfectly it won’t be enough
        • Which opens the floor to emerging solutions

      • Lessons learned from Solar

    • Why CCS hasn’t really taken off?
      • There are several discrete CCS projects around the world but no large scale projects at scale
      • At the time of CCS deployment there wasn’t a market for decarbonized assets because it required retrofitting
      • The cost of renewables was lower and the cost of capital was low
      • With CDR you see a market
        • Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft are all committing to pay north of $500 per ton removed
      • The cost of CDR is arbitrarily set at $100 per ton of carbon removed
      • There are a lot of regulations and policy willing to value CDR much higher
      • Carbon sequestration tax credit in the US priced at $180 per ton of carbon, another at $200 so we’re starting to see people value these projects more highly
    • Big bottlenecks in increasing emerging pathways?
      • There are critical things to help CDR get up the readiness curve
        • For example, the billions of dollars from the EU Innovation Fund
  • Q&A
    • Rob C @ Pinwheel: Do the panelists see a role for members of the public to take part in CDR - through advocacy for it and even supporting it financially? If so, how should we build that public interest and willingness?
      • Absolutely! Some emergying CDR techniques may lend themselves to distributed, quick-to-deploy, small-scale models. There are some early efforts here with DAC in HVAC systems of homes & office buildings, for example. Open Air Collective is an incredible grassroots community that is finding ways to engage members of the public to advance CDR policies & activities. Carbon Gap is participating in one of their efforts to pilot a CDR feed-in-tariff in Luxembourg. The public can of course buy CDR carbon credits, or donate directly to CDR providers or advocates with a CDR focus like Carbon Gap (us!), Negative Emissions Platform, Bellona, Clean Air Taskforce, and others. I think you’re absolutely right that finding ways for the public to be directly involved in CDR advocacy and even deployment is a fantastic way to accelerate this community! Please reach out if you have some specific ideas or want to discuss further :-)
    • Clea commented on point source capture technologies, I am working on a process to de-carbonize cement and ceramic processes, what has been the most challenging for the development of this technology has been the high temperature capture process with good efficiency. In order to de-carbonize heavy industries, I believe that the technologies with the greatest potential for application in the short term could be the onces that could be build and operate in situ. Have you seen a greater potential in Point Source of Emission vs. Direct Air Capture technology?
      • Basic logic is that the higher purity of CO2 in a stream of gas, the cheaper/easier it will be to separate that CO2 from the other components. So yes, in-situ capture of CO2 from industrial ppint source (NOT CDR) will often be the lowest hanging fruit. Air is 0.04% CO2, power plants are ~10%, cement 30%, chemicals manufacturing sometimes 95-99%! Look especially for high-purity CO2 streams that are ALSO biogenic (from plants originally) like fermentation! This is cheap to capture, AND it constitutes negative emissions/carbon removal, so a win-win!
    • What do folks think of remoracarbon.com - non-stationary CO2 capture - and the other one in KSA
  • x

  • Direct Air Capture by Eve Hanson at Third Derivative

  • Ocean CDR by Brad Ack at Ocean Visions