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Insights

The great carbon clear-up

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Insights

The great carbon clear-up

Words Simon Lovick

October 30th 2024 / 8 min read

In early October, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced £22 billion in funding for carbon capture and storage facilities in the north of England. The project will fund two 'carbon capture clusters' in Merseyside and Teeside.

Depending on who you are, this will come as a welcome green investment in a once-heavily industrial area; or as a multi-billion pound kick in the teeth.

The announcement reopens a heated debate about carbon removal technologies, a technology surrounded by cautious optimism and controversy. Its supporters highlight the opportunity it creates to not only capture new emissions, but also to remove historically emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is already having a profound impact on the planet’s health. The IPCC views it as pivotal for reaching net zero.

Its opponents, meanwhile, point to its high cost, its energy intensity, and its notable failings at scale: launched well over a decade ago, and yet to reach meaningful impact by any measure.

So what does the future hold for carbon capture? Is it another failed cleantech experiment, or an opportunity to monumentally turn the dial in our movement against climate change?

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Carbon removal: a glossary

When talking about carbon removal, terms are often used interchangeably. To drill into the scale of the opportunity ahead, it’s worth first defining what we are talking about.

Carbon removal—the overarching term use to describe methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere
Nature-based carbon removal—using the Earth’s natural resources (mostly trees) to remove CO2 via biological processes
Tech-based carbon removal—using other, technology-based means to physically remove CO2 from the atmosphere. This includes…
Carbon capture and storage (CCS)—a method of instantly capturing the emissions coming out of factories or heavy industry, separating out the carbon, and pumping this into the centre of the earth
Direct air capture (DAC)—a method of sucking in ambient air, separating out the carbon through a chemical reaction. This can be put this into a pressurised chamber to turn it into liquid form, before being stored in the centre of the earth; or its converted into useful, high quality carbon for other purposes (e.g. Jeevan Climate Solutions, Climeworks)

Why is carbon removal controversial?

Like most novel technologies, carbon removal is overshadowed by considerable cynicism. Because of the high stakes of climate change, and the significant amount of investment going into the technology, this is intensified.

First of all, the cost. Unlike many other clean technologies like solar and wind power, the cost of carbon removal hasn’t really declined at all in price over the last 30 years. DAC, for instance, is estimated to cost between $300 and $1000 per ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere: for widespread adoption, it’s estimated this needs to fall below $200/ton. In the meantime, it's considered a highly costly route to net zero—a pathway that will cost around $30 trillion more than a low-carbon removal alternative.

Not only is it costly, it’s highly energy intensive. Current CCS machinery is estimated to use between 10 to 40% of the energy produced by a power station—something known as the ‘energy penalty’ that comes with implementing carbon capture. For this to have truly additional benefits requires upgrading to renewable, clean energy.

Closely related to cost, carbon removal is also largely unproven at scale. Globally, we’re only capturing around 50 million tonnes of CO2 every year—a shadow of the 35 billion tonnes we’re still emitting. This is in large part due to the relative infancy of the supply chain around carbon removal, which requires a complex infrastructure of transportation, processing, and storage in order to achieve meaningful scale.

Added to this, there are fears of unknown negative externalities associated with carbon removal. How sure can we be of the technology’s benefits when we don’t yet know the impact of large scale air capture, carbon storage, and so on?

The overarching criticism of carbon removal is more existential. The approach, many would argue, gives licence to the continuation and even growth of fossil fuel production. It fosters a mentality that we can continue down the exact same path, as long as we invest in technologies that can clear up our mess. Given the amount being invested publicly into carbon removal—like the £22 billion in the UK—could the money be much better spent elsewhere?

Why carbon removal is more important than ever

Despite justifiable criticisms, the case for carbon removal is still highly compelling.

For one, the sheer quantity of carbon in the atmosphere already means that just reducing emissions simply isn’t sufficient. In fact, even if we still cut all emissions today, there would still be roughly 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere—which is already having a profound impact on the environment. Carbon removal is, in simple terms, waste management: a proven way of cleaning up the mess we’ve already made.

Not only this, but we’ve seen that we can no longer rely simply on nature-based solutions, even though these have other natural co-benefits (like biodiversity). The Earth’s natural carbon sinks—from the forests to the oceans—are losing their carbon uptake and storage capacity, an outcome that few models would have predicted or factored into climate change projections. Radical cuts to carbon emissions are necessary, but not enough to address this in isolation.

Then there’s a consideration for emissions that we can’t abate. Companies looking to achieve net zero can reduce carbon emissions in their value chain by 90%; that last 10% is what we consider ‘hard-to-abate’ (due to manufacturing, reliance on heavy industry, etc), and must be achieved via offsets.

The Oxford Principles, the guidance for net zero-aligned carbon offsetting, determines that emissions must be offset in a like-for-like manner. Food and agriculture companies, for instance, can offset through land use projects (like forestation). Carbon based emissions from travel, fossil fuel extraction, and so on, must be addressed by long carbon cycle solutions—like CCS or direct air capture. Moreover many organisations, both public and private, are recognising they are due to fall someway short of ambitious 2030 targets. Investing in carbon removal technology, like DAC, is an efficient way of correcting that shortfall.

The final consideration is rooted in justice. Garrett Boudinot (pictured above, middle), CEO & founder of Vycarb, expands on this: “Communities that are most susceptible to climate change are typically not the communities who have contributed most to climate change.” These populations, typically in the Global North, therefore have a responsibility to invest in these technologies to correct the balance.

Overcoming carbon removal’s shortcomings

To realise carbon removal technology’s potential, we urgently need to address and overcome some of its key obstacles.

Bringing the cost down is an absolute necessity. Until we can do this, the market will continue to stagnate. Solar energy is a great example of how manipulating cost transforms uptake: where it was practically unaffordable twenty years ago, it is now one of the principal forms of renewable energy.

Overcoming this is in part related to the technology itself, finding new efficiencies and innovations that can help bring down the cost of delivery. For instance, Jeevan Climate Solutions has developed a novel DAC method which it projects will be able to capture CO2 at less than $100/ton.

“We’ve focused on drastically increasing the capacity and durability of our filter material, radically increasing its efficiency, and using parts and components in our solutions that are widely and globally available so we can more easily scale them,” explains Steve Siegel, Jeevan’s COO.

But to achieve a viable cost, the carbon market requires stability and consolidation. The price of carbon offsets is currently being priced at around a third of the cost it takes to deliver, and is fluctuating on a daily basis. Until this stabilises and becomes financially viable, wide scale carbon removal will be difficult.

There is also a related funding hurdle. Technologies like these require huge volumes of catalytic funding to get off the ground and reach a scale at which they’re affordable. Coalitions of public and private investment will be required to reach this. Regulation will help catalyse investment. The carbon removal market, until recently, has been voluntary for the most part. But EU regulation like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) coming into force, member states and incumbent companies are increasingly incentivised to engage with carbon removal, with penalties for not doing so.

“National governments must set clear dual targets for emissions reduction and carbon removal,” explains Gudfinnur Sveinsson, CEO & co-founder of Brineworks. “Policy support that incentivizes this dual approach would catalyse demand, creating a robust market, ultimately driving down costs to make large-scale carbon removal a feasible solution.”

This will also help contribute to building out the wider infrastructure around carbon removal, necessary for us to start extracting carbon at a scale at which it has meaningful impact. There are also acute innovations which can address challenges around transportation, for instance. Vycarb’s CO2 removal technology uses water as a carbon storage medium, making carbon removal possible wherever there is readily available water.

There’s also the potential for tech-based carbon capture to have co-benefits too. Brineworks, for instance, has developed a new technology for converting captured carbon into e-fuels, like green hydrogen. Their novel approach not only contributes to decarbonisation further down the value chain, it also unlocks new revenue opportunities around removing carbon.

When it comes to our collective ability to mitigate climate change, we’re past the point where we just need to reduce where we can. A threshold has been crossed—and to improve our planet’s prospects, we need to drastically undo the damage that’s already been done.

Carbon removal is far from perfect. But few nascent technologies are. As the technology improves, so will confidence, hopefully bringing the market to a point of maturity at which it is affordable and viable to remove atmospheric carbon by the gigaton.