The Hype and Reality of Carbon Capture
Takeaways from the ClimateTech conference.
Is carbon capture to emissions what pyrolysis is to plastics waste? That is, an attractive idea that fails to deliver scalable results?
I’ve never hid my scepticism when it comes to carbon capture, if only because of all of the energy required to get that carbon out of the air, which feels counterintuitive at a time when most countries are going through an energy crisis. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognized the importance of Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) earlier this year1, especially for hard-to-abate industries.
The ClimateTech conference gave a lot of space to carbon capture, mainly through the eyes of people investing in it. There are there aspects of the conversations that are worth summarizing here:
The economic bonanza for carbon capture.
The importance of natural ecosystems in capturing carbon.
The potential of direct air capture and utilization.
And I will close with some thoughts those conversations sparked for me.
The economic bonanza for carbon capture
At the conference, we heard from venture capitalists and corporations directing significant funding towards carbon capture solutions (CCS).
Clay Dumas and Clea Kolster from Lowercarbon Capital2, which closed on $800 million in capital last year3, shared how they have witnessed a significant acceleration in the innovativeness, ingenuity and efficiency of solutions, especially since the publication of the IPCC report. A key point that they and other venture capitalists at the conference made is that they are not impact funds; they are investing to make returns. As such, they are looking to invest in companies whose technologies can scale rapidly to capture significant carbon while creating returns for their investors and becoming profitable. Their fund focuses on three areas: slashing new CO2 emissions; sucking up carbon; and buying more time for the people, plants and animals on the frontline of climate change.
Individual companies are also jumping on the bandwagon. Stripe is leading a joint effort to support capture technologies. Starting with a $1 million test, the company rapidly got interest from others who wanted to join forces. Today it created Frontier4, supported by, amongst others, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey, to buy $925 million of permanent carbon removal between 2022 and 2030. Nan Ransohoff, who is Stripe’s head of climate and leads the work of Frontier, shared some of their considerations to evaluate solutions. The first is that they must be permanent—think removing and storing carbon for at least 1,000 years—and have the potential to become cost-competitive in the future, linking to what Lowercarbon was saying. Their approach is to establish a set of criteria to evaluate solutions, rather than being technology-led. However, they recognize the current complexity in measuring the effectiveness of solutions, but emphasize that this should not represent a barrier to development.
The importance of natural ecosystems in capturing carbon
Ecosystems destruction and traditional agriculture methods have been proved to be major contributors of carbon emissions. Still, there is a growing body of evidence that nature could be a massive carbon sink5. During the conference, two aspects were discussed: soil- and ocean-based solutions.
For a long time, planting trees was seen as the best way to capture carbon. However, the conference explored many novel ways to achieve this. One is regenerative agricultural practices, which are gaining huge traction across industries. For example, the number of fashion companies that have committed to or started to use regenerative cotton, wool or cashmere is growing by the week6. There are other solutions around accelerating photosynthesis, Pamela Ronald from US Davis & Tomorrow’s table mentioned some of their work in the space, or through microbial carbon removal. To get additional inspiration on the topic, check out the companies in which Lowercarbon invested.
Now there are a lot of additional considerations that were mentioned, chief among which is how long carbon will be stored. For soil, that means how deep will it be stored, in what form, and how entangled will it be to root systems, for example. This is a very complicated topic and there are a lot of different evaluations for soil’s removal potential. I list a few resources that I find helpful at the end of this newsletter.
The other carbon sink that was discussed is our oceans. The conversations covered a few areas that are being explored. The first is algae, such as kelp, that can capture and store carbon in the ground, similar to a tree but underwater. The second aspect is to use the ocean itself as carbon storage. This is done by increasing the alkalinity to transform the carbon present in it into minerals that can remain trapped for a longer period of time, thus increasing the storage capacity of oceans. At the conference, we met CarbonRun7, a very interesting company which works to increase the alkalinity of rivers and transform them in carbon sinks, while improving the health of their ecosystems. In a similar way to the direct ocean capture, carbon is stored as minerals that will enter oceans and be stored there.
What I found interesting was how the scientific understanding of the carbon cycle can help identify ways to optimise and accelerate it, increasing ecosystems resilience. For example, CarbonRun stemmed from research on how to clean up and restored rivers. It turned out that the solution could also increase carbon capture.
The potential of direct air capture and utilization.
In all honesty, this is where I become a lot more sceptical. To reduce our footprint, we are going to build massive infrastructure where fans will capture CO2 from the air—CO2 that will then be processed to either be injected into the ground as gas or mineral, or turned into CO to be used as fuel, or turned into plastics. Let’s break this down.
The main technology I have seen for direct air capture is large fans that are sucking carbon out of the air. This carbon is then either directly pumped into the ground, with the hope it will stay there, or used in industrial processes. I recently listened to a podcast detailing plans to create carbon-neutral oil by using captured carbon injected into the wells to get the oil. (Link at the end of the post.) I rolled my eyes a few times listening to it, and one of the aspects that makes many sceptics even more so is that the companies most excited about carbon capture are usually oil and gas ones. Still, from a very pragmatic perspective, given the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, every bit that can curb their impact counts. Which is why the IPCC noted the importance of CCS for hard-to-abate industries.
During the conference, we heard from Twelve8, a company that transforms atmospheric carbon into chemicals, materials, and fuels. They are the company behind the Pangaia's CO2 Made Lenses9. They use a technology similar to electrolysis to transform CO2 into CO and O2. They can turn this CO into feedstock for existing industrial processes. One of the things that struck me the most in this presentation, and probably across the entire conference, was how they positioned their solution as a permanent carbon capture solution, since the products made out of the plastic they create would end up in landfill, which somewhat equates to sequestrating carbon in soil. I am not sure that the solution to the climate crisis is to worsen plastics pollution. This reminded me of the carbon tunnel vision illustrated in the below graph.
Food for thought
The conversations highlighted a few areas that would need further consideration and development. First. the importance of an effective carbon market to ensure the long-term viability of those solutions. Second, the complexity around measurement, reporting and validation for those solutions. And finally, and as always, the importance of making sure that solving for the climate crisis is not going to worsen other aspects of the planetary crisis.
All speakers recognized the importance of an effective carbon market and supportive regulations in the development of CCUS. There are a few key elements that were raised in that regard. First, that policy could help level up the quality of offset and support most effective solutions. Second, that an effective carbon market would help align existing business practices with the need to scale CCUS. As long that this is a voluntary market, it will be vulnerable to economic downturns. In addition, given its scale and cost, the development of the infrastructures that will be needed will greatly depend on governmental support. We will dive into the topic of policy in an upcoming post.
“What gets measured gets managed.” I have heard this quote from Peter Drucker so many times in conversations around sustainability. In many regards, it applies to a predicable and controllable context. But for new technologies where the benefits can be extremely hard to measure with precision, where should we stand? Most speakers agreed that the measurement of those solutions, especially nature-based ones, is extremely complex. I share a few links at the end of this post that start to show how greatly even the scientific community disagrees on the carbon storage potential of nature. However, all agreed that this was no reason to stop investing in developing those solutions and exploring ways to measure their impact as the technology progresses. As Nan Ransohoff put it, measurement reporting and verification are still challenging as those solutions are early-stage. The approach she recommends instead is to embrace uncertainty and risk by supporting technologies to get the best of their potential, while expecting value discounting for the tons of carbon captured based on measurement uncertainty.
Finally, the tradeoffs and decisions we make to solve for the climate crisis need to balance other aspect of the planetary crisis. For example, we cannot seriously defend that increasing plastic pollution is a valid approach to solve the climate crisis, and in particular, defending sending plastics to landfill at a time when there is growing global momentum to solve the plastics crisis. In a similar way, I often feel that the direct air capture relies on the idea of cheap and infinite renewable energy, from which are still very far, and as the conversation on the decarbonized grid showed, even if we are to source 100% renewable energy, this would not mean that the energy received at all times by the facility would be decarbonized.
To go further
Given my scepticism in the space, I have been listening, reading and watching quite a bit of content to better understand its in and outs, recognising that I am not a scientist! Here are some of the ones I found most helpful:
This video from CNBC is a nice lay of the land on carbon capture, looking and detailing different solutions, so of which we discussed in this post.
This video from Joe Scott details 7 ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
This video from the FT covers the hopes, challenges, and controversies around carbon capture.
This episode of the podcast Catlyst with Shayle Kann discuss discusses soil’s storage capability, and this article from the Guardian question how big a sink soil can be.
This episode of Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View invites Lanzatech to discuss their carbon utilization technology.
This is the episode of Bloomberg Zero on carbon neutral oil.
Finally, this article from the MIT Technology Review explores the potential of ocean carbon capture.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-3/
https://lowercarboncapital.com/
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/12/chris-saccas-lowercarbon-capital-has-raised-800-million-to-keep-unfcking-the-planet/
https://frontierclimate.com/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/restoring-soils-could-remove-up-to-5-5bn-tonnes-of-greenhouse-gases-every-year/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/style/fashion-regenerative-farming.html
https://carbonrun.io/
https://www.twelve.co/
https://pangaia.com/pages/lab-sunglasses