Partly funded by Stripe, Climeworks launched a new direct air capture and storage plant in Iceland last year and recently raised $650 million - the biggest funding round in the history of the carbon removal industry. So it is solidified a kilometer underground and thereby it is absolutely, permanently stored for the next hundreds of millions of years," said Jan Wurzbacher, Climework's co-founder and Co-CEO. That literally means the CO2, within two years after injection, is turned into stone. "The CO2 is injected into these rocks and is then mineralized. But in 2017, Climeworks began working with Carbfix, an Icelandic company that sequesters CO2 permanently by dissolving captured carbon in water and injecting it into basalt rock formations. Swiss company Climeworks initially went to market by selling captured CO2 to greenhouses in Switzerland, where it's used to grow vegetables, and to beverage companies, which use it to make carbonated drinks. The carbon is sequestered, but since the process produces more oil to be burned, it almost never leads to negative emissions, and is therefore not considered "carbon removal." Climeworks But until recently, there's been no incentive to simply bury that carbon, so they've had to sell it into various markets.Ĭarbon Engineering, for example, has sold its captured CO2 to oil and gas companies that use it for "enhanced oil recovery," in which carbon dioxide is injected underground in order to extract more oil from petroleum wells. They use giant fans, along with complex chemical processes or filters, to take CO2 out of the air. "To capture something like 30% of emissions in 2050, you're talking about building an industry that's three times five times larger than the global petrochemical industry today."ĭirect air capture companies like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering are some of the best known players in this space. "The scales these are going to have to be built out at almost defy comprehension," said Eric Toone, technology lead at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which has made numerous investments in the carbon removal space. But no matter the methodology, some subset of these technologies will likely need to scale up quickly to keep global warming below 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius in the years ahead. The technical approaches to permanent carbon removal vary widely, from pulling CO2 out of the air with giant fans and injecting it into rocks, to altering the pH of the ocean so that it can absorb more carbon from the atmosphere. In April, Stripe teamed up with Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey to launch an initiative called Frontier, which plans to purchase $925 million worth of carbon removal by 2030 from nascent carbon removal companies, in an effort to accelerate research and development efforts and lower costs. Planting trees is one way to go about it, but experts say that's not enough to address climate change. That's different than capturing emissions from a smokestack or recycling carbon to make temporary products like carbonated beverages, plastics or fuels. Unfortunately, because we've done such a poor job with that to date, we are now also going to have to do carbon removal," said Nan Ransohoff, head of Climate at Stripe, an online payments company that's invested millions in carbon removal technologies.Ĭarbon removal amounts to a process of storing carbon dioxide that's already been emitted. "We have to do emissions reduction at a massive scale, at a massive pace period. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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