Well done. I already am climate-active, but you inspired me to step it up a notch!
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Our carbon removal portfolios include Direct Air Capture (DAC) that sieves carbon dioxide from the air and pumps it underground to permanently and safely store it for millennia. It can't contribute to the continued heating of our planet.
How does it work?
Direct Air Capture is a carbon removal solution that falls into the fully engineered category. Meaning that it wouldn't happen naturally and it requires technology.
Carbon Dioxide, the largest contributor to rising global temperatures by volume, is in the air all around us in roughly 420 parts per million.
To remove this CO2 directly from the air requires large machines to suck in, filter, separate and capture the carbon dioxide, and then release the remaining air back out.
The captured CO2 is then pumped underground where it can't escape. It is removed from contributing to climate change for thousands, possibly millions, of years. It is effectively stored permanently out of the atmosphere.
Why do we like it?
DAC is an exciting carbon removal solution because it is highly permanent, highly additional and verifiable. When combined with decarbonization and other removal solutions, it promises to be an important tool in enabling us to remove planet-heating emissions from the atmosphere. For more detail on how we choose solutions, check out our Carbon Removal Portfolio Methodology.
We're delighted to be working with the incredible CarbonCapture Inc. Based in the USA, they are a leading developer of direct air capture (DAC) systems based on a groundbreaking modular open systems architecture. They have partnered with carbon storage developer Frontier Carbon Solutions to permanently remove five million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2030. The partnership, named Project Bison, will deploy CarbonCapture's DAC modules atop Frontier's CO2 transportation and storage infrastructure in Wyoming. Read more about CarbonCapture.
We're excited to be supporting Climeworks as they spearhead the DAC industry globally. They operate the world’s largest active DAC facility and storage installation - called Orca - in Iceland. Their global team of over 300 is determined to contribute to a net-zero future. Climeworks' DAC facilities run exclusively on clean energy, and their modular CO₂ collectors can be stacked to build machines of any capacity. Climeworks work alongside Carbfix, who pump the captured CO2 deep underground where it mineralizes into stone and geologically stored for thousands of years. Read more about Climeworks.
In addition to DAC's permanent storage we love CarbonCapture's and Climework's ambitious scaling plans. Alongside this, they are fully transparent with their measurement, reporting and verification of the tonnes of carbon removed through the full life cyle of their operations.
Learn more by clicking on a partner to discover how the solution works and their company's progress.
We love questions! We want you to feel 100% comfortable and excited about joining our Carbon Removal Portfolio. It's something we wished existed but couldn't find, so we made it!
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is anything that pulls planet-heating carbon dixoide out of the air and stores it safely for a period of time. The longer the better.
It's a range of solutions that include various Nature-based, some tech-enabled or nature-inspired and fully engineered approaches and technologies. For example:
Forests and oceans are crucial natural carbon sinks which already draw down and lock away huge amounts of emissions. They'll be a part of the solution, but likely only about 20-30% of the removal we need.
On the more technological and engineered side, you might have heard about things like Direct Air Capture, Bio-oil, Biochar or Enhanced Weathering or Ocean Blue Carbon. These approaches, and others being worked on, are going to be need to fill the gap.
Go deeper into the different types of carbon removal.
Our CDR portfolio is a blend of different carbon removal solutions, mixed together to make it an affordable cost per tonne. Here's more info.
We believe this approach is ideal, based on the science-backed pathways to support growing the global carbon removal capacity to gigatonnes per year.
Combined with large scale global decarbonization, we need to reach about 10 billion tonnes of annual removal by 2050. There is no silver bullet solution and no one category or company will be big enough, which is why we take a portfolio approach to invest in a range of approaches.
Following the science-backed approach to Net Zero we advocate for 90% emissions reductions and decarbonization from current levels (about 50 gigatonnes of CO2e per year). Then using high permanence removals for the 10% hard-to-reduce remaining emissions.
Our angle on CDR is that even for that 10% it's a huge lift from where we are. Investing and growing the industry now is crucial.
If our goal is to build up the carbon removal industry to be the size we'll need by 2050 it needs to grow about 40%+ every year. It's not something that we can switch on overnight, it's something we'll have to build-up over time.
Not so much. Offsetting has been traditionally used to counterbalance the continued release of emissions, which only adds to the challenge of slowing and then reversing the increase in global average temperatures.
The vast majority (cough - 95% - cough) of offsets available don't remove carbon. Some may be good projects and have other societal benefits that aren't primarily about removing the gigatonnes of harmful gases we humans have pumped out.
Where carbon removal is different is that the only reason many of the technologies exist is to take out and sequester carbon dioxide - from the air or elsewhere - for hundreds to thousands of years, so it can't contribute to the continued heating of the planet and all the impacts of that.
Carbon removal is what's called highly additional, meaning the primary reason it exists is to do exactly as its name suggests.
This said, carbon removal can be used to offset emissions, though this should be only as part of a concerted effort to reduce as large a chunk of emissions as possible. It can also be used to remove older emissions that happened in the past.
We think that now is the time to fund and invest in carbon removal. Even if it is still more expensive than traditional offsets and it's not always viable to buy the same tonnes, it works in the way we need by literally removing the carbon dioxide so it can't contribute to climate change.
Find out more about Avoidance Offsets and the Voluntary Carbon Market.
There are a whole range of reasons. To us, some of the most compelling are:
- So the industry reaches about 10 billion tonnes of capacity by 2050 - the "net" bit of Net Zero
- The ratio of carbon removal in the Voluntary Carbon Markets needs to increase (compared to other approaches like avoidance or reduction)
- No one carbon removal type or company is going to be big enough on its own, we need a range of solutions and providers
- When combined with reducing emissions from everything we do, carbon removal will be a key tool to slow and then reverse climate change
- Funding and investing in it now helps to reduce the cost per tonne it takes to remove the carbon. Decreasing the cost by increasing demand will support the growth in supply of high-quality carbon removal options and capacity volume.
More on why we should invest in carbon removal now.
Our ready-made, curated, portfolio of high quality carbon dioxide removal (CDR) solutions is live. It aims for the highest permanence-for-the-$-per-tonne that we can find.
We're excited to be working with an inspiring group of global CDR companies taking the fight to the Climate Crisis. They're doing amazing work that holds a tonne - pun intended - of promise.
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