Climate tech leaders outline solutions to greenhouse gas removal challenges
Entrepreneurs and investors agreed that collaboration will be crucial for enabling the greenhouse gas removal industry to scale up “faster than basically any industry on Earth.”
Of all the challenges that companies must face to permanently remove gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year, entrepreneur James Kanoff, ’22, says the key factor is time.
Kanoff is co-founder and CEO of Terradot, a company seeking to pull carbon dioxide from the air through enhanced rock weathering. As a panelist at a March 18 event hosted by Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator, he said the research and innovation cycle for technology like Terradot’s would normally take decades, but needs to happen in a few years.
Then the industry must “scale that technology up faster than basically any industry on Earth has ever scaled before,” he added. “That challenge, fundamentally – it’s not just the conventional levers that we might have for policy or the ways we might have to accelerate research – it’s something, I think, entirely different.”
Achieving this speed will require collaboration among companies, researchers, governments, and academia, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability has “an amazing opportunity to actually lead in that front,” he said. “You all have the expertise to help develop the frameworks and accounting so that solutions that have massive potential but are really hard to measure can actually work.”
The panel discussion centered on how the greenhouse gas removal industry can approach a multitude of obstacles as it works to dramatically scale up operations, revenue, and impact on Earth’s climate system.
The innovative projects presented at the Accelerator event made it “very, very clear CO2 removal is very, very challenging,” said moderator Yi Cui, Sustainability Accelerator faculty director, and they need to reach “gigaton scale.” This refers to permanently removing greenhouse gases equivalent to billions of tons, or “gigatons,” of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually. Currently, more than 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions are added to the atmosphere each year, mostly through burning fossil fuels.
Noah Deich, climate fellow at Stripe and former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Carbon Management, said he believes gigaton-scale solutions are close, but policymakers need to get over the “sticker shock.” He encouraged audience members to frame greenhouse gas removal technology not only in terms of the climate crisis, but “like a kitchen-table economic issue, a national security issue, a financial stability issue.”
“This is where you start to actually get the type of interest and support for money at that scale,” he said.
Buyers on the carbon credit market also face execution and technology risks because it’s so nascent, said Erika Basham, director of investments and product strategy at Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. By publishing science and quality criteria, as well as white papers about lowering commercial transaction barriers, Basham said Microsoft aims to encourage more buyers and investors, creating supply and demand.
“I think it takes a concerted effort on all sides, which is why you have policy, buyers and investors, CEOs here all represented in the panel,” she said. “I think that type of coalition is how this gets done.”
Accurately measuring the effectiveness of greenhouse gas removal systems is another major hurdle. More than half of the cost of removal today is in measurement, reporting, and verification, Kanoff said.
Panelist Shashank Samala, co-founder and CEO at Heirloom Carbon Technologies, which uses limestone to remove carbon dioxide, said measurement, reporting, and verification are most important to his customers. But right now, there are multiple registries and protocols.
“It’s so important to have standardization, because that’s really the only way the industry can scale,” Samala said.
In closing, the panelists reiterated the need for collaboration, accurate measurement, and strategies for unlocking capital.
Deich urged the attendees to start by telling their policymakers about greenhouse gas removal efforts: “They have no clue that this room exists, that this energy is here, that this innovation is happening, that people are talking about the next moon shot.”
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