Who Will Pay for All the Carbon Removal? By Ed Ballard
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Who Will Pay for All the Carbon Removal?
By Ed Ballard
Kilian Jornet lives in Norway but was raised in the Spanish Pyrenees. He got reacquainted with the mountains last month, climbing the equivalent of four-and-a-half Everests in eight days.
PHOTO: NNORMAL/DAVID ARIÑO
Kilian Jornet has spent his life racing up and down mountains. These days that means watching the effects of climate change on the alpine environment. A winner of many of the world’s toughest mountain ultramarathons, Jornet has brought the same intensity to his quest to cut his carbon footprint.
He approaches the task with the meticulousness that underpinned his speed records up Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro and Denali. Jornet rations his flights, eats vegetarian and drives a second-hand EV.
He says his emissions are a fourth of what they were in 2019. To offset emissions he can’t avoid, Jornet funds carbon removal, the process of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Not many people go to Jornet’s extremes on the mountains or in reducing their emissions. That raises a question that hangs over the burgeoning industry of carbon removal—who will pay?
Jornet says he’ll pay carbon-removal startup Climeworks around €10,000 euros, roughly $10,670, this year. It’s compensation for the emissions he couldn’t avoid, like the estimated 0.13 metric tons of carbon from the support car during an eight-day, 177-summit hike in the Pyrenees last month.
Climeworks builds fan-like machines that trap carbon from the air so it can be stored underground. Bill Gates also pays Climeworks, as do nearly 20,000 other individuals, many contributing $15 or $20 a month, said Julie Gosalvez, Climeworks’ marketing chief.
The too-slow shift to renewable energy means that removing CO2 from the atmosphere, perhaps billions of tons every year, could be crucial to limit climate change. Options being considered make use of everything from crushed rock to the ocean’s chemistry.
“We need to reduce but that’s not enough,” says Jornet, who regularly interviews scientists on his own climate podcast. “We are way past that moment.”
Paying companies like Climeworks hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars won’t make a dent in the problem. It costs hundreds of dollarsto remove a ton of carbon. Even with costs below $100 a ton, the U.S. government’s target, the bill would run into the trillions. Goodwill won’t cut it.
But the carbon-removal ecosystem depends on goodwill—not just from individuals, but from a few deep-pocketed companies. Microsoft, Amazon, Airbus and JPMorgan have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to various projects. That could get technologies ready for primetime, but won’t fund an industry.
Eventually, governments could foot the bill or make companies pay. Either way, funding billions of tons of carbon removal would require people accepting that hauling away carbon is the same as hauling away trash.
Some governments are inching in that direction. The Biden administration introduced a tax break for carbon removal and is funding the creation of hubs to capture carbon. In September it announced a $35 million purchase of removal credits.
Puro.earth, a platform for carbon-removal credits, has started tracking regulatory carrots and sticks that could boost corporate demand. Policy makers in the European Union and elsewhere are considering dry but crucial questions: Which carbon-removal activities to endorse, how to quantify the benefits, how companies could hit emissions goals or comply with carbon regulations by funding carbon removal.
For now, the limited buyer pool is a problem, said David Stead, head of technological carbon removal at Vertree, part of trading house Hartree Partners. Vertree invests in carbon-removal startups and aims to sell their services to big polluters such as cement makers. Stead says they're reluctant to take the plunge.
"Every day I get technology startups crossing my desk who have a plan for carbon removal and need some capital,” he said. “I need customers to say ‘Yes, if you build it, we will buy it.’”