Carbon Removal Taking Flight: Takeaways from AirMiners Conference

After listening in to different panels at the AirMiners Conference: Carbon Removal Taking Flight, I noticed it was helpful to draw parallels from carbon removal to other domain knowledge. Whether colocating energy for removal and storage for carbon like energy and storage at data centers, comparing CDR's adoption to solar's, or framing CDR as a waste management problem, these parallels help create familiarity within an emerging and changing field.

I join as Nathalie Casas from Climeworks explains why Iceland is an ideal location for carbon capture and storage. It comes down to a combination of renewable energy sourcing (99% of Iceland's electricity is supplied by hydropower or geothermal energy) and fast storage (CO2 mineralizes quickly once sequestered underground).

Panelist Ross Koningstein from Google jumps in, noting that the need to colocate energy input and storage reminds him of the problem of locating data centers. There's a clear advantage for having energy and storage in the same place, seeing as the limited ability to store and transport renewables like wind and solar from remote regions hinders the world from harnessing clean energy. Ross mentions how cheap hydropower gets in Labrador, Canada, where a kWh costs only pennies. Once you look to transport hydro, however, someone can slap a tax on it. The cost of energy depends on location.

A new question soon emerged: "If you could move energy anywhere you need it, where would you locate?"

Nathalie answers with what she calls the obvious locations—empty oil fields and gas fields, sites in energy-rich places like Iceland, places with capture-friendly conditions like Oman—but believes more research has to be done to optimize. These locations seem to fall under cheap land, cheap energy, or ideal capture or storage conditions, and are echoed by other panelists and audience members. Evan David Sherwin adds his thoughts. Building CO2 pipelines is super expensive, so optimize location for a solar resource. Rohit Vedhara brings up considering the social element of job creation, as well as how nature-based solutions can help to lower the costs of suboptimal location.

That said, Pete Smith chimes in, nature-based solutions shouldn't be pursued at the expense of technology solutions, but rather in-tandem. The co-benefits of nature-based solutions will be helpful anyway, even if they don't end up achieving larger climate goals. At the same time, Rohit says, we can't chase everything and we're not at the point where we have to qualify one CDR solution over another.

In another panel on policy, Chris Neidl of the Open Air Collective says it wasn't a coincidence that solar first grew in places with favorable tax incentives (California, New York, so on) at a local or state level. A lot of federal and state policy can be influenced in this way, as local policies evolve horizontally to other regions and vertically to the federal level.

But where CDR will need to diverge from its solar analog is the timescale of its adoption. Without distributed residential and industrial uses bringing cost down, widespread adoption eluded the solar sector for decades. So when asked about his ideals for greenhouse gas reduction (GGR) policy, Chris stresses that we can't let the long-term goal of gigaton-scale removal distract us from solving now. He'd like to see GGR policy that encourages the deployment of the "most ready" technologies, a priority common to Pete and Nathalie in their closing remarks: First, removal shouldn't replace immediate and aggression emission reduction. Second, where removal is concerned, technology needs to upscale quickly, even if it's expensive. This circles back to the trend away from anticipation of a slow-moving market and toward active market transformation, stimulation and creation I touched on in my last post.

Erin Burns of Carbon180 discusses some additional policy recommendations. Not surprising were federal funding for R&D, early stage development, and enabling infrastructure and federal purchasing of carbon removal. The bottom line was that GGR policy needs to be durable and thoughtful, and that even though incentive models work, understanding the perspectives of those opposite miners will be key to stimulating this space. One idea I liked was introduced by Eli Mitchell-Larson, who wanted to see standards and regulations on both the upfront and downfront of removal, especially in measurement, reporting, and verification (MVR). This area of the CDR space will be important to establishing miner legitimacy and maintaining transparency, which will be key to garnering public support at large.

The conference ends with a galvanizing keynote from Christine Harada, who had worked as Chief Sustainability Officer under President Obama. She advised air miners to derisk R&D and to beware of greenwashing, among other nuggets of wisdom that culminated in a clarification of the day's events:

"Climate change is the greatest commercial opportunity of our time."