Carbon Removal: An industry that actually welcomes regulation

Big things are happening in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) industry.JPMorgan Chase recently agreed to spend $200 million on various technologies. The US is funding several research and development efforts, including its $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs initiative. Both a United Nations supervisory body and a European Commission group are developing carbon-removal methodologies, and it’s clear that the industry over the next few years will enter the mainstream. Thus, every effort should be made to ensure that we can trust it.

A few weeks ago, I got to tour Climeworks’ first-ever direct air capture (DAC) plant. Located on the roof of a municipal waste incinerator about half an hour’s drive from Zurich, the machinery was once deployed to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for use in an adjacent greenhouse and to carbonate water for Coca-Cola HBC Switzerland Ltd. Now it sits silently while its big brother Orca works on carbon sequestration and as construction continues on Mammoth, its even larger sibling, in Iceland.

Though the plant no longer operates, it wasn’t hard to be awed by what will likely be one of the future’s engineering marvels. Iterations of the same technology — with improvements made for efficiency and scale — could eventually suck millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for permanent storage deep underground. (Christoph Gebald, chief executive officer and co-founder of Climeworks, is aiming for a gigaton.)

However, though the symbols of carbon dioxide removal such as DAC’s containers will be the highly visible elements, much like wind turbines and solar panels are the stars of renewable energy, the really important stuff is more difficult to see, and far less sexy.

Monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) is essentially CDR’s
accounting and auditing side. At its heart, this process is to certify that the expectations — net carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere and stored durably elsewhere — have been fulfilled. It’s essential for scaling, forging trust around removals and avoiding the types of scandals that have hit carbon offset markets.

Removals are already starting from a better position than offsets, explains Anu Khan, deputy director of science and innovation at nonprofit Carbon180: “Reductions and avoidance credits by their nature rely on counterfactuals in their MRV. You have to sort of guess what would have otherwise happened.” Many removal methods don’t have that problem
because, absent the technology, the CO2 would otherwise be left in the atmosphere.

But removal technologies face plenty of other MRV challenges. For some, it’s simply a question of addressing executional uncertainties, such as “How much algae was grown?” For others, knowledge gaps in the basic science need to be answered, like “How long does biochar really store carbon?”

DAC has a relatively easy job here: There’s one point of capture and one point of sequestration. It’s fairly easy to measure carbon dioxide at either end. Open-system methods -  which operate largely outside of direct human control in open uncontrolled environments such as the ocean or a forest - have a harder job, though. Ocean-alkalinity enhancement and biomass sinking, for example, have to account for the fact that the ocean is enormous, water doesn’t stay in one place and CO2 removal will likely happen over long periods.

That’s why more money is needed for research into MRV, and it needs to happen quickly. Fortunately, there have been moves in this direction: the US government has awarded $15 million to four national laboratory-led teams to advance MRV best practices and capabilities. Several nonprofit organizations have sprung up to do the same such as [C]Worthy and CarbonPlan.

Settling MRV standards will require new approaches that some certifiers might not be used to: Louis Uzor, climate policy manager at Climeworks, says that one problem they’ve had when working with third-party voluntary carbon market standard-setters is that Climeworks’
own self-imposed guidelines are considered overly rigorous. For example, registries haven’t previously taken into account elements such as cradle-to-grave emissions (encompassing things like the carbon emissions from the production of DAC plant machinery), which are vital when assessing carbon removals. There’s also a debate over what MRV should include — some people believe it should encompass everything from carbon uptake to environmental harms. Others argue that it should only include elements that affect carbon uptake, with a separate environmental impact assessment for everything else.

But one thing is agreed upon: The entire industry is desperate for regulation.

Unlike other markets, there’s no way that the industry can self-regulate. “If you buy a widget and it doesn’t work, you know about it,” Khan says. “But if you buy a ton of carbon to be removed and it doesn’t work, you might never know, because the point is that the CO2 goes away forever.”

This lack of a robust, regulated MRV framework is off-putting to potential buyers of carbon removals, Amador says. And with private sector capital being kept on the sidelines, developers are asking for more MRV guidelines. “What they’re essentially asking for is a measuring stick, how tall do you have to be to ride the ride. Then everyone knows what data to collect, what technologies to use.”

One of most important parts, of course, is making sure that there’s no room for cheating or perverse incentives. Right now, Khan says she’s seeing a worryingly high degree of vertical integration in MRV, meaning that some startups are setting the standards, developing protocols, and doing the project implementation and outcome assessment. As a nascent industry, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing — third-party and governmental organizations will be able to learn a lot from what companies have developed themselves — but going forward, having a consistent,
overarching framework set by a governmental body will be important, with a nonprofit third party verifying company monitoring and reporting.

The next five years will be pivotal, and a lot has yet to be decided. But here’s something everybody should know: Without good, strong MRV, there is no carbon removal industry.

Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg