Carbon dioxide removals – CDR – is second only to geoengineering in its ability to rile people up in climate circles.
It’s too expensive, uses too much energy. There are not enough buyers of removal services to make a sustainable market1. And because the technology has been embraced by fossil fuel companies like Occidental Petroleum using it for enhanced oil recovery, it’s morally suspect because people – not irrationally – believe those companies will use it as an excuse to keep emitting. And if the industry can’t demonstrate that it can actually do Carbon Capture from a point source (like the flue in a gas-fired power plant) at scale – and the track record is both awful and governments just keep making questionable choices about really requiring it2 – surely we’re just setting out a fake solution that will distract and delay the hard choices about how to reduce emissions and most of the options of how to do that involve really unpopular stuff. And in a Wild West type free-for-all, this year we already saw at least one prominent CDR startup – Running Tide – hit the wall. It won’t be the last.
See our conversation with Latitude Media’s Maeve Allsup at the time:
Yet, to make any climate model work out to Net Zero at really any point at all, some amount of it – in the billions of tons per year – is going to be necessary. Without assuming a global economic collapse, there’s no other way to make the numbers pencil out.
And that’s before we started talking seriously about the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C being toast. Because we need to get real. If people now talk about overshoot3, going past 1.5 but somehow getting back down under it, how’s that actually going to work and what’s going to happen in the meantime?
Which is why as we end this trip around the sun and start a new one we’ve been looking at the tech and policy areas that are going to be central to that conversation: CDR, along with adaptation, along with solar radiation management, along with using climate risk data to inform better decisions like whether a house is at too much risk from floods or wildfires or storms to be insurable – or at least to price risk more accurately. And in another conversation coming up soon with FlintPro’s Tina Morris we talk about how those more powerful data tools are starting to make a difference.
In this conversation I wanted to hear from someone in CDR who is a stubborn optimist. And Yehuda Borenstein – as someone who’s built or building multiple climate tech companies across lots of different domains – is nothing if not a stubborn optimisit. Starting one business is tough enough. Starting a bunch sounds like you have a high pain threshold, pretty thick skin, and (as they say in Ireland) a neck like a jockey’s bollocks.
His CDR company, RepAir, says it’s solved or at least made a lot of progress on the challenges that so far have made Direct Air Capture a bit pricey. According to CDR.fyi, the spot price for a ton of DAC removal was $470 – which is a lot higher than the $100 a ton that a lot of observers say is kind of the holy grail where you can think about how to scale that tech. So I wanted to get Yehuda to explain what they’re trying to do and what’s different about it.
Quick side note – I see Freya Pratty’s Climate Tech newsletter for Sifted this morning led with the debate about whether the term “climate tech” as a term is dead. Well for the record, we’re sticking with it and not joining the haters. But we do think what it means is already changing. And that’s why we’re bundling these areas together in a bunch of end-of-year episodes – adaptation, grid tech, CDR, SRM, climate risk data. That’s where we think the action is for 2025.
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Microsoft has purchased like 10x more than the next-biggest buyer of CDR credits, according to cdr.fyi.
https://www.source-material.org/bp-equinor-teesside-carbon-capture-guarantee/
Some of us have been covering this for more than a year:
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