Name: An Introduction to Carbon Removals
Uploaded: 2025-02-18T17:16:10.328Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 40 s
Description: An Introduction to Carbon Removals

Transcript for "An Introduction to Carbon Removals": Hello, everybody, and welcome to this first, edition of our curated conversations from Curate. Anne Gabriel Walker. I'm cofounder and chief scientist of Curate. And I'm gonna spend the first, little while of this webinar talking you through, the one zero one of carbon removals, everything you need to know. And then after that, I'll have the immense privilege of discussing carbon removals and the different techniques and approaches in much more detail with two of my very valuable and valued valued colleagues from the science team. So let's just get started, first of all, on carbon removals one zero one. So here we go. I'm just sharing my scheme for you, and let's get started. So let me just say a word or two about Qurate. So Qurate is a market maker for carbon removals. We're mission is to facilitate, removing a billion tons of carbon remove, carbon every year. And, we work with, suppliers on, the science and the diligence of the supply and identifying which are the right ones to, put together into portfolios. We work with, buyers on the removals that they will need and putting together tailored portfolios and offtakes for them. We work on softwares to manage the carbon, removed credits after they've been bought, and we also work on financial products to do upfront carbon financing. So with that, I will go straight into our one zero one about carbon removals. So first of all, I have been working on climate change for more than thirty years. I'm a scientist. My PhD is in chemistry. And for most of that time, when I've been talking about climate change, it's really felt like it's an issue for tree huggers. I've given lots of talks to lots of businesses who kind of put climate change in general into their bucket marked CSR or nice to have or philanthropy. But a few years ago, just about the time that I started working on carbon removals, that changed. And here's one of the reasons why. This is Sarah Breeden, who is deputy governor of the Bank of England. And here's what she said. She said climate risks are uncertain but predictable. They will affect every consumer and every corporate in all sectors and in all geographies. And that shows that climate then became something that's actually serious for business. We began to learn that climate change is extremely bad for business, but acting on climate change and the solutions can be extremely good for business. I'm just gonna give you a quick glimpse of the bad for business bit first. Gets a bit ugly, so bear with me. This is a map of the world, obviously. Starting in 1880, this is when we started to have records of the temperatures from all around the world, from ships that were sailing around the world. And I'm gonna bring this forward from 1880 to the present day, and you'll see that if the color gets a little bit bluer, it's a little bit colder. And if the color gets a bit yellower or redder, it's a bit warmer. A thing to look out for is the the way that the signal is so varied. It's actually quite hard to see the signal of climate change in the middle of all the noise of all the changes in the weather that we've been having over this time. And that's one of the reasons it's taken us so long to act on it. So let's just move this forward and see what we see. So there you see it was quite warm in the southern parts of Africa, cold in the rest of the parts in the early nineteen hundreds. That was quite a cold period over the nineteen twenties. It's a little bit warmer than in the Arctic, but you can see how it gets warmer, and then it gets colder. It gets warmer and then colder. There's so much variety in this signal. And then you get to the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties and the nineties and the February and the February and the February. I wanted to show this as a reminder that this is no longer subtle. Whatever seems to be happening in the winds of the world, climate change is now with us. When I started talking about climate change nearly thirty years ago, it was actually quite hard to find pictures to illustrate the climate changes that were happening, and now it's actually hard to choose. So that's the context in which we're all working on solutions that can actually fix this problem. And that means that there's been this big drive towards net zero. So net zero, in about 2018 or so, it was really not very much heard of. But by by about 2020, '20 '20 '1, it was everywhere. Basically, this is the latest net zero tracker. This is global net zero coverage. If you look at this, 92% of global GDP generators have some form of net zero target. They either have their own target or they're operating in a territory that has theirs. Net zero has become the dominant target approach for how we deal with climate change. And I'm gonna talk about the net part of net zero in the rest of this this presentation. So, looking at the net zero part, most of the focus of attention has been on zero. It's how you reduce emissions, how you actually get, the emissions not to go into the atmosphere in the first place. And then this approach to net zero has has driven more attention to the net part of it, what you do with the emissions that you can't actually reduce. And what most people have done is go to the global carbon markets, and there has been this big kind of flurry of carbon neutral and then the big backlash against carbon neutral. When all these headlines started hitting the newspapers, more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets are worthless analysis showing junk carbon offsets and so on. And this has put so much pressure now on the carbon markets. You all know this. This is a picture of me walking, and I'm walking the Camino De Santiago in Spain. I put this in here because I think it's a good illustration of what actually went wrong with the carbon markets. So I walked the Camino De Santiago in 2020. It's a long walk. It's more than 500 miles, or 700 kilometers. And in ancient days, in the in the medieval times, you walked the Camino De Santiago as a pilgrimage. And if you walked the Camino De Santiago and you got to the end and you went to mass at the cathedral, you had all your sins forgiven. But if you were rich enough, you didn't have to walk it yourself. You could pay someone else to walk it, and you didn't have to. But because you paid the money, you got your sins forgiven. I think this is fundamentally what's going wrong with the carbon markets. We've got ourselves into a mindset of saying we can just pay the money and get our sins forgiven, but we don't have to do the work. And that was never going to work. That was never going to last. So let's look at different kinds of carbon credits and what's out there in the market and think about what they're actually trying to achieve rather than thinking about whether they help us wash away our climate sense. So first of all, there's reduction credits. So we have this. We have, the sort of credits where you're actually helping places that can't otherwise afford to do the infrastructure changes to stop emission emitting. So that's stopping fossil emissions. That's reductions. You have protection credits. These are the ones where you're protecting natural sinks, such as peatlands and and existing stands of rainforests. And then you have removal credits. These are credits that are removing CO2 from the atmosphere. So it used to be in the atmosphere, and it isn't anymore. All three of these achieve different things. So reduction in protection credits are important contributions to the world's goals and the things that all corporate should be doing. But removal is taking responsibility for cleaning up your own mess, and it's the only way to reach your net zero target. So what goes up? Us now. Come down. And this is my illustration of what carbon removals is really all about. We've put it in the atmosphere. We need to take it out. Now don't just take my word for it. Of course, the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel on climate change in 2022, said this extraordinary thing about carbon removals. Carbon removals are now unavoidable for three reasons. First of all, we have left it too late. We can't get down to net zero quickly enough to keep 1.5 degrees alive. So we've left it too late. We need to go faster down that curve. The second one is dealing with residual emissions even after we get there, and that's a very big focus and target of net zero plans. So you need to calculate what your residual emissions are going to be, and you need to make sure you've got enough removals to deal with those when you get there. And then the third reason, it's my personal favorite, which is once we have got there, this is the only way we can actually reverse climate change and restore nature. This is actually how we clean up our own mess. So what do carbon removals look like? When I say that I work on carbon removals, people typically say to me either one thing or another. They say, do you mean trees, or do you mean machines? Is it green, or is it chrome? Is it nature, or is it tech? Well, I have good news in a way in that the carbon removals sector has moved so far beyond this dichotomy of trees or machines as an entire spectrum of fabulous approaches, almost all of which use some combination of natural resources and human ingenuity. And we work on all of them, and we'll be talking about all of them during this webinar. So let's start with trees. So trees are fantastic carbon capture devices. It still blows my mind that trees make their entire bodies out of carbon. They just take it from thin air. So they're great, but you have to plant them in the right places. You have to make sure that they have a good chance of surviving. You can't do monocultures because they not just because they reduce biodiversity, but because also because they're they're vulnerable to disease. You also have to put them in places where they don't burn. So trees have to be done right, but they can be done right. But they're one part of the overall solutions. You can also put carbon into soils. You can actually inoculate the soils with, with, bacteria that have been taken out of the soil. They've got it rewilding with soil, and that can increase the amount of, carbon that's being taken up by them. You can also do this thing, which is biochar. This is actually taking wood off cuts or or the shells from nuts or or the husks from mice, which would otherwise just rot and go and have the carbon go back in the atmosphere, and burning them in the absence of oxygen. So they turn into something called biochar, which is a little bit like charcoal, and this locks up the carbon so it doesn't reemit. It's brilliantly clever because not only does it lock up the carbon, but it also improves the quality of the soil so you get better yields. In fact, the, native and the Amazonian, used to use this not to take carbon out of the atmosphere, but to improve the quality of their soils. It it increases the capacity of the soils to keep water, to keep nutrients, and you do get better yields from it. Then you can also do this stuff. You can take this stuff, which is basalt rock, which exists on most parts of the earth, in a process called enhanced rock weathering. It's taking a natural process, rock weathering, and enhancing it. And this is how you do it. You grind up the rocks, and then you spread them on the fields. And it's a little bit like I like I like to use this analogy of coffee for enhanced rock weathering because, the way that you speed up the reaction, it takes maybe thousands of years to happen in in, nature. And in nature, gradually, the rocks transform and and soak up carbon dioxide. But the way to accelerate it is a bit like the way we accelerate making a coffee. So if you've got coffee beans and you try to make your coffee out of it just by shaking up the beans in the water, it takes a really long time. But if you grind up the beans, then you get your coffee. And in the same way, grinding up the rocks, it enhances this natural process and enhances the rate at which it can take up carbon dioxide. And there it is being spread on the field. You can also increase the capacity of rivers to take up carbon dioxide. And, actually, what's what's a very similar process, but the rivers are quite well contained, and so you can measure more easily what's happening in the water and how the water's taking up more c o two. And you can also do this in the oceans. And the oceans are much harder to measure where the c o two is going, but, obviously, they're a much larger scale. And so in that case, you have the capacity to go to the levels that we're actually going to need at the order of billions of tons of CO two removal. And that's quite a nascent technology, but I think an exciting one. You can also do direct ocean capture where you literally pump ocean water through devices that capture the CO2, and then you release the water without the CO2. This has the the by benefit as as all ocean alkalinity, the one that I just described to us, but potentially also helping with ocean acidification, which is another great, disaster that's happening on the back of CO two in the atmosphere. And then we have the famous one, direct air capture. This is literally blowing lots of air over capture devices, capturing the CO two in a blimp and burying it, putting it back. I I kinda like the the poetry of this one. It's reversing the process, putting it back where it came from underground in deep geology. And this is, an example in Iceland where the the the CO2 is actually mineralizing in the rock. So the one on the right hand side is fresh lava full of holes. The one on the left hand side is where the CO2 has mineralized. This is not coming out again anytime soon. And this is an example of a much bigger plant, which is due to go into process this year. It would be the largest commercial plant in existence. This is gonna remove 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. And and this is particularly, I think, an interesting one because it's actually built in oil country, but it is putting the CO2 literally right where it came from. This is not just, though, a process that can happen in the global North and the industrialized North. So this is the the the great, Rift Valley in Kenya. And the conditions there, just like this in Iceland, are actually perfect for making direct air capture. And this is a site that is shortly to be developed into direct air capture air capture in Kenya as well. It's a way of realizing unused, renewable energy resources and also providing jobs and livelihoods in Kenya. So one of the things that fascinates me about the science behind carbon removal is it can actually be done almost everywhere in the world, and there's an immense cap capacity here to to marry together climate solutions with economic development. So in summary, there are lots of ways to remove carbon. You've got your biochar. You've got your, biomass burial and BECCS as well. This is BECCS is, burning carbon, offcuts, wood, whatever, making energy out of that and then burying the CO two that's captured. Got the direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, ocean based methods, and durable forests, and inorganic or organic soil carbon. And what we do is we put them together in portfolios. We'll talk a little bit more about why portfolios are important, but, really, this is a way to make sure that we spread our efforts at the beginning of creating this whole carbon removals industry by making sure that we're supporting all the different approaches that have the capacity to scale and also spreading the risk, spreading the durabilities, and spreading the costs. So that was me. I'm now going to take us back into the, webinar, and, hopefully, my wonderful colleagues will shortly be joining me, and we can dig into some of this in more detail. So, Paddy, Mowgli, would you like to step up to the stage, please? Hi, everyone. Hi. Hi, Paddy. Hi, Mowgli. So, this is this is my treat of the day. So I'm about to introduce you, ladies and gentlemen, to two of my favorite people, Magley Holmes, who leads our science team, and Patty Mortimer, who is an extremely important contributor to it. And they're going to talk us through some aspects of the things that I was just discussing in carbon removals. And one of our favorite things to do is sit around and talk science amongst ourselves, and so I hope you'll enjoy listening in. So first of all, let me just ask you both. So, Magli, Paddy, talk to talk to us about how you ended up working in carbon removals in the first place. Magli, why don't you stumble? Yeah. Thanks, Gabriel. So, my PhD is in microbiology, and I have started several science companies since then. And a number of years ago, I had a climate conversion like many other people have had. For a scientist, you get that conversion just by finally looking at the numbers. When you when you take your head out of the sand and look at, the rates of emission, the parts per million of c o two in the atmosphere, the temperature chart that you that you showed, it is hard to go back to working on anything else at that point. And, I I think I did what a lot of other scientists do, which is that I once I started digging in, I I wanted to find the highest leverage point, you know, which meant that I wanted to find the biggest unsolved problem in climate to work on. And, the biggest unsolved problem in climate is carbon removal. You know, the the the core problem, the first problem is reducing emissions, but that is not an unsolved problem. That's certainly not scientifically. We know how to reduce emissions. It just requires political will. Certainly not a science problem anymore how to do that. The carbon removal is the second big pillar, and there are lots of difficult science problems to solve there. Though in the years since I've made that decision, one by one, those scientific problems have gotten solved. And and now we're at the point where we're ready to just roll, which is very exciting. We'll come into that in a moment. Fadi, how about you? How did you end up in this mess? Yeah. Well well, similar to Mowgli, you know, an inevitability of thinking about the science. So I started my carbon removal journey with a PhD in the geological storage of c o two. So one of the things once we once you've captured the c o two, the idea is, in some cases, to store it in underground reservoirs, geological formations indefinitely over for over thousands of years. And I worked on some of the equations to describe how the CO two moves through the rock and and and and is captured indefinitely in those spaces. And that was always, to me, when I started on that journey, was a reduction problem rather than a room. You know, you capture it from rich streams of power plants or cement cement facilities. And as Malorie alluded to, you know, that's really well well understood. And then I did an interim couple of years working for Oliver Wyman where I wanted to learn about the economy and how corporate net zero standards were driving climate, impetus and net zero impetus. And then, you know, as Magalie alluded to, the big unsolved question for me was, you know, how what happens to that 10 to 20% at the end of the net zero journey? What I hope we got an answer for that. I mean, everywhere I looked, the the answer was, well, kind of, but not really. Like, the and there's a lot we a lot more we need to know. There's a lot more capital capital that needs to be channeled capitalically to get the removal market to scale. And the highest leverage point, as Maggi says, as a scientist with those sorts of inputs, was was to make the leap and work on removals, and I'm very, very glad that I did. Well, we're glad that you did too, Fadi. Okay. So let let's dig into now. I I I just gave a big overview about, you know, what what carbon removals are in a very kind of big picture way. But how do how do you go about thinking about what makes good carbon removals? Do you wanna talk us through the way that you you figure out what good looks like? Magdi, do you wanna start? Yeah. So, so working for Curate where our job is to select the best carbon removal projects that we have the most faith in, we've had to be very, very explicit about what makes a good project. And so we we have an elaborate framework for assessing them, but it breaks down into five main pillars. For us, those are impact, integrity, delivery risk, on carbon, and future potential. That's what we call them. What they mean is impact is, various ways of assessing how much carbon removal will really be removed over what time frame. And there are many things that go into that when you assess how durable things can be, what the reversal possibilities are, how fast the carbon is removed. Integrity for us is, about assessing all the things that companies can do better. And in particular, it has to do with being a very meticulous about measuring how much carbon you're doing and how well you're doing your carbon accounting. All you're addressing, all of the issues that led to that early backlash of the carbon markets where people looked up and said, people are they're not measuring this well enough. So we press that all falls into the category of integrity. And then we look at delivery risk. We we wanna make sure that we're delivering the carbon removal that we promised our buyers. And so there are many things that could lead a company into trouble that could make them late with succeeding at the carbon removal that they're doing. Many of these technologies are proven now. But the most exciting ones, we're still working on some of the kinks in. And so, if we wanna contribute to them, we're taking on slightly more risk because we maybe we know they work, but we don't know that they work at the scale that we're aiming for yet. Or we don't know what the measurement challenges will be. Maybe something will be delayed. So that's delivery risk. And then we look at co benefits, essentially. Like, what what are the impacts on the environment? What are the potential environmental harms that could result? And in many cases, there are very strong environmental co benefits or social justice co benefits. So biochar, for instance, is very, very good for farmers. And, ecosystem restoration approaches that store carbon and trees are very good for carbon, but they're also very good for biodiversity. So we look at all of that. And then we look at future potential, which is an assessment of whether we're investing in something that is gonna generate a few carbon credits now or whether we're investing in something that is gonna generate billions of tons of carbon removal in the future. And, obviously, we wanna be investing in catalytic solutions. So that is sort of the exhaustive list for us and what makes good carbon removal. It it's a long list. I think one of the things I like about this, and I'd like to from the beginning as we've been setting this up collectively, is that issues like the Beyond Carbon are not sort of there to say, oh, and on the side, it might be nice to have a co benefits. It's actually, for for from the way that we see it, a key part of the overall quality of the project. It's actually likely to to be sustainable. It's likely to persist if it really has, the those additional beyond carbon benefits rather than something that's that's kind of narrowly focused on that. Thoughts about that, Paddy? Yeah. I absolutely agree. And I think across we call them five models of quality. And across those five models of quality, of course, there's table stakes. You know, there has to be minimum thresholds that that we deem acceptable for it to be a quality project. But and and and we'll move on to portfolios. When you start to bundle projects together, you can start to get a view of where you index particularly well on integrity, where you're indexing particularly well on future potential, and beyond carbon. So you start to build a more holistic picture across a portfolio, and and and making sure that your removal strategy is bringing along all those amazing core benefits because it would be a massive missed opportunity if if those core benefits weren't captured, you know, in in removal strategies in the in in the next you know, in the coming decades. What about trade offs? Yeah. Absolutely. There's certainly trade offs. So there there's trade offs, in in projects that have incredible potential for scale, but they may be very nascent. So they would index really well on future potential. But the, you know, the earlier stage is harder to index them up on things like impact. They're more difficult to measure. You alluded to oceans and and rock weathering being at the moment, it's difficult to distinguish we call it signal from noise, but what we really mean is do we know whether the carbon removal is actually happening? There's a big rush to understand these methods and make sure that we can constrain that signal much more readily so that we can demonstrate removal. But, you know, there are definitely trade offs, but there's there's other ways of looking at it. Right? Where where projects have and for that specific example, where projects have immense future potential, we should be exploring ways where we can better constrain the carbon impacts and the integrity of the projects as well. Sure. So so now we You you Go ahead. Just as an example, if you wanted to invest in carbon removals, we you put all your money into DAC, direct air capture. That's a very safe solution. We know that it works now. The delivery risk is very low. We understand technologically how to do it. It is the one of the few solutions where a lot of finance has been funneled into it, and so we know these projects are gonna get built. But it's expensive, and it takes a lot of energy. And, you pay a lot for each ton. Whereas if you sort of diversify how you're doing it and put some money into ecosystem restoration or forestry carbon, those solutions are much, much more affordable, and they are removing carbon immediately from the air. And they are a very near term solution that we have to have globally. But, of course, there there are risks involved. You know, the direct air capture stores, c o two underground for tens of thousands of years. Trees, we select the absolute safest projects we can find, but we certainly don't know that they're gonna be in place for more than a hundred or two hundred years. So all of these things are just shaped very differently, and we need to put our energy into all of them. So you're not saying we should take one or the other? One one of the questions that's coming in, by the way, get your questions coming in, please. This is a great opportunity to be able to to quiz all of us experts who are on the call. But one of the questions which is a classic one that constantly comes up is is which is the best. So it's a it's a better question than that because the question is which of these processes is the most sustainable in terms of the resources required? And that's an interesting question. But, you know, it also comes in with a which one should I do, and and I what I'm hearing is it it shouldn't just be one. Right? Yeah. Also, there is no single solution that can reach the scale we need. We can max out the capability of each one of these solutions, and it won't get us there. You know, each one can do maybe 20% of the total amount of carbon removal that we need. Sure. Patty, what were you gonna say? No. Well, exactly that. You you you have to add them up sequentially. There's no one that's gonna get to that sort of 10 gigaton number that we talk about at twenty fifty for net zero. And, also, if you're if you're overexposed in one pathway that, you know, delivery risk is one of our pillars. Is there's a diversification argument, particularly at this stage in the game where a lot of the technologies are relatively mature. We wanna make make sure that we're, we're supporting all the all the solutions that have the potential to get to scale as well as, as I said, realizing all the core benefits that are that are, you know, are very different across each of each of the pathways as well. Sure. Well, while we're on the questions, another question came in, across the framework, do you weight the dimensions differently given the trade off? So how how do you how do we handle the weightings? Yeah. We there's a there's a complex weighting structure, because everything matters, but some things matter more or less. So, we we absolutely have waiting within the individual subfactors, and then waiting at the factor level as it rules up to the category level, and we're constantly reevaluating that. But, certainly, some some issues within delivery risk are are more challenging than others and are weighted more strongly. So and and I think one one thing to add to that is that, the the different different people you you might have a different thesis. You might have a different approach. You might have different kinds of removals might make more sense for your business. And so when putting together a portfolio, you know, we we have our weighting according to the different characteristics and delivery risk is certainly a high one. We hear that a lot. But then you can also select trade offs to say, I want I want to major more on this part because it makes more sense for my business. Right? So but just a specific question, is there are there one or several, approaches that are sort of, less intensive and resource use? Or does everything have its own challenge? I mean, everything has its own challenge. That's the the clear question. They all have different challenges. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, clearly planting trees is is is very low resource intensity and direct air capture is very high resource intensity, but we just won't get to the both the scale and the durability thresholds that we need to get to if if, you know, if we're not supporting a number of different pathways with with, you know, with varying results intensities. And I'd also point out, of course, that direct air capture requires a very small land footprint whereas, of course, many other approaches are a big land footprint. So, really, my answer to to the question, the inevitable question, which one is best? Is it it's not just it's like my mom used to say when my brother and I would say, which one do you like most? And she'd say, I think they're both nice. No. No. Which one? Actually, as it happens, every single carbon removal approach has its own glory, and every single carbon removal approach has its own challenge. And and we don't know yet which of these are going to be able to scale at the pace that we need, but we can make some very educated scientific assessments of the likelihood of those, and that's why we're putting our efforts. But, really, we'd be foolish. The world will be foolish now to try to to to pick winners at this early stage. And, honestly, it looks like even when we get closer to twenty fifty and to having to build this entire sector, there's not gonna be one winner. It's gonna have to be a a combination, isn't it? So let's just dig a bit more into some of those approaches then. We had some hints at it, but some Magdi, talk us through some of the more the ones that are where the measurements are a bit more challenging. So that's your trees, oceans, and and hand struck weathering. What what what what what's challenging about the measurements in those, and and and what can we do about it? Yeah. So, I I think the important thing for people to understand is that, this measurement issue is at the core of why, the first wave of carbon markets was challenged. There's no question that it's valuable to to plant trees or to make sure the trees don't get cut down. But measuring what you've actually done that's different than what what would have happened is is quite hard. So you you have to measure tree growth. You have to have a mathematical model that forecasts future tree growth. You also have to do some other things that don't sound like normal measurement. You have to do a quantitative assessment of what would have happened on that land had you not intervened. Because the carbon removal that you're doing is only the difference between what would have happened and what you're making happen. And that's a question called additionality. You there's many, many things that need to be quantified besides just going out and measuring what's in the field. And, all of those are challenging, but we're getting quite sophisticated at assessing all of those. In solutions like ocean alkalinity enhancement or enhanced rock weathering, you're doing a a complex intervention, or maybe it's a simple intervention. You're just spread for enhanced rock weathering, you're just spreading rock dust on fields. Farmers already spread rock dust on fields because it helps to change the pH and it's good for plants. If you spread a slightly different kind of rock dust, it also captures carbon, and it is still good for farmers' yields. But you're you're working in an open system. So the carbon leaches into the soil and is swept out into rivers and ultimately into the ocean. And in this very broad complex system, you can't put a sensor in the ground every 10 feet and know exactly what's happening. You are reliant on a combination of measurements and modeling that, we are just now getting good at. It's the same in the oceans. When you, do something that changes the alkalinity of the oceans, the oceans then have to respond by taking up more c o two from the atmosphere, and that is a process that takes place over many months in over thousands of square miles. So they're hard to measure directly, and we have to combine measurements with complex models that help us track the system. But one thing that is really important to to keep in mind and one way that we're getting more sophisticated is that the the most key innovation in a funny way, is getting smart about uncertainty discounts. So we know with enhanced rock weathering, what the total amount of c o two that a ton of basalt rock could absorb is. What we don't know is how close it gets to that maximum. But we do know that it probably gets seventy, eighty, 90 percent of the way to that maximum. And so, the registries that control carbon markets, are getting smart about applying big uncertainty discounts. And if you apply an adequate uncertainty discount, you start having a solution that you know is doing what you say it's gonna do Because the problem is overestimating. We we don't wanna be claiming to do carbon removal that's not actually happening. And so being very conservative about how we settle on the final number is the way to solve. Got it. Fadi? Yeah. I mean, I I think but my my husband's covered it really well. These open systems, again, we need projects to be radically transparent about that challenge of realizing the maximum CDR potential reporting to registries. We need registries to be really science based, open methodologies that are getting as much scientific context and contribution as possible. And we need the data. We need to really understand what's happening, you know, to rock dissolution in fields, around the world to understand of other geological preferences. You know, how how much does the feedstock matter? It probably matters a lot. How much does, you know, the temperate nature of the climate in that region matter? It probably matters a lot. But at the moment, it's very much in the world of theory, and and we need to realize where the airbounds are and then reflect that in the methodologies to make sure that we're not over crediting. You know, that that this is fairly fundamental to open systems. It's much more tractable in in projects like biochar and bikers. Just sorry. Just to move us over there. To to that world. So biochar and bikers are are are the bell of the of the of the delivered carbon market, if you like. The vast majority of issuances in the carbon market for the on the removal side are are through biochar. But that's not to say that and that's because, you know, that the industry is is using relatively legacy technology. People have been pyrolyzing. What that means is burning biomass in low oxygen conditions for for a long, long time. So the techno technological readiness is just way more advanced than some of these systems. You can measure all the inputs and outputs with a strong life cycle assessment. And if you're delivering, credits, so that that there's registers that will check your homework and and and and tell you that that you're delivering credits, and then you can tell them. So it's just in a way further down the line in terms in terms of understanding and the advancement of the technology. That's not to say that it's without its challenges. So particularly on biochar, some people will often raise questions about additionality. So what additionality means is, would this have happened anyway if we didn't intervene with carbon finance? If I didn't buy this carbon credit from this project, would the carbon removal happen anyway? And that's interesting with biochar because you can sell biochar. It's useful. Farmers use biochar, spread it on their fields, and it improves their crop yields. You can also generate energy as a byproduct of the pyrolysis process. You can use the heat to either back into your system or you can sell it back to the grid. So if those, you know, two routes to market or revenue streams were, you know, economically viable in and of their own, there's an argument to say, well, why did they need the carbon credit in the first place? What we're actually seeing in the market is that the the projects that are delivering credits today actually are reliant on all three revenue streams. So they need to sell the biochar, They need the energy arbiter to run their system or to sell it back to the grid, and they need the carbon removal credit at anywhere between a hundred to 200 plus dollars a ton. So that's the state of the market now, but it's a key watch point for us going forward as these projects scale. We need to make sure that add additionality argument is still really tight. Similarly, in stocks for biochar and bikers, so they're using biomass feedstocks. As the project scale, are they still using genuine waste streams or even invasive species? You know, so, you know, that that's terms of leakage in the carbon market. So if if it if it wasn't a genuine waste stream or if it wasn't an invasive species and it was, and it was an unsustainable form of biomass, then you risk, increasing, increasing emissions elsewhere in the value chain, it it wouldn't be part of your project boundary. So it's another thing that we we keep a really tight eye on. But as as the biochar and backers market scales as it will, we have to make sure that that that we're monitoring for leakage risks. And and then you get to projects like or methods like DAC. And it's the most famous That's direct eye catcher. Yeah. Direct eye catcher. Yeah. Sorry to use to use the industry lingo, but it's it's the most famous. And the and the biggest question I get asked, to be honest, in in my conversations with people in and outside of of the voluntary carbon market is will DAC ever work? And the answer to that is, resoundingly, yes, but it will consolidate around winners and losers. We don't know what who those winners and losers are going to be, but it's the key question. Who are the winners gonna be? Where is the key path to scale? And our approach to this is we're looking for suppliers that have a really well considered path to scale. So have you considered the challenges of scaling of your solvent supply? Have you considered the challenges of realizing process efficiencies to bring your cost down? Or you're co locating your operations next to geological storage that's abundant and available. But even with that approach, it's clear to us that it's unlikely in the medium term that the debt market is gonna consolidate around one form of capture and storage hardware. So it's likely that there's gonna be a number of approaches that that reach scale, and our job is to make sure on the buy side is to make sure that we're appropriately we're discerning, but we're appropriately hedged around who those projects are. And one of the things we try to do is help buyers navigate those challenges and make sure that their capital is being deployed in the projects that have the best chance of getting to scale. Sure. Well, one interesting question that just came in is can can direct air capture systems reach a size where they could be deployed on the top of buildings like solar panels? So that could you could you envisage a world where you'd see direct air capture's, containers, boxes, more everywhere? It's a great question. And the modular dock is certainly something that's emerging, and you will see modular dock credits come online towards the end of this year and certainly at at larger scales in '26 and '27. What I mean by modular is they are exactly that. They're shipping containers that, you know, if you wanted if you have one shipping container, you want to look at the capacity of your plant, add another shipping container. And that's great because you can co locate the shipping containers readily in places that either have excess renewable energy or they have abundant access to storage, but it also means you can iterate much more rapidly. So if there's a big jump in the advancement of solvent technologies and something's way more efficient, you just gradually phase in those shipping containers and phase out your legacy shipping containers. So, yeah, to to the great question in the chat, I'm sure at some point, somebody will stick a duct container on a roof, and it'll be charged by solar panel. I I I completely love the idea, actually, of having a having a duct container in my house and that someone just, you know, like, they used to deliver the milk in the old days. Someone just comes around and takes away the filled up one and sticks another one on and takes off the c o two to be stored. I think that would be terrific. But, we're not they we'll watch this. There's a few questions coming in about claims, about rules, about SBTI and I'll come to those in a moment since they're not strictly science but this is in a thinking about futuristic DAC has taken taken my mind to where are the cool new things happening because when I gave my TED talk about carbon removals in in the end of twenty twenty one, there are really just a handful of of companies. And now we have more than 2,000 on our books. Is that right? So so there's a massive sorry? I think it's 2,200 carbon removal companies that we're tracking. 2,200 carbon removal companies. So that obviously means there's lots of exciting new approaches. There's lots of exciting new possibilities in there. So so what are your favorites? What what are you keeping an eye out on on what's coming next in the carbon removal space? Yeah. So there's innovation across every single method. In the in the DAC world, there's new sorbent technologies that are coming out. There's maybe no end to that innovation pipeline. In the bikers world, that's biomass, carbon removal, and storage. People are figuring out very innovative ways to take biomass waste streams and convert them into things that can be injected underground or stored in various ways. Obviously, one of my favorites is ocean based carbon removal, which is what I worked on before I came to Curate. And and because of the scale of the oceans, there's every reason to think that if we can solve those, they will be the most scalable. The the oceans have the ocean store an incredible amount of c o two safely for long periods of time, and they have vast capacity to store more. So there are a lot of interesting innovations in figuring out how to get the oceans to do that. And you talked about ocean alkalinity enhancement, which triggers the oceans to take more take up more c o two. You also talked about direct ocean capture, and that technology is coming along fast right now. The reason why it's so good is that, c o two is just much more concentrated in seawater than it is in the air. So that technology looks very much like DAC, but the efficiency of it is really a function of how concentrated the c o two is in your input stream. So you can strip c o two directly out of the seawater very effectively, for less energy cost than with direct air capture and bury it underground in the same way. So that's one of the most exciting new things, I think. Paddy, how about you? Yeah. I I think my answer I fully agree with Margaret, but I think my answer to this may come as a surprise certainly to Margaret. But I think that, there's actually a lot going on in biochar that's super exciting. We we shouldn't think of biochar as something that's just solved and there's no more innovation to happen. One of the really interesting innovations that I love for a couple of reasons is the development of high-tech biochar in the global South. So, traditionally, in the biochar market, there's been a bit of a trade off between, okay, the well constrained industrial units in Germany and Spain and in France that with that we can, you know, we can measure to a a very high level of certainty, the CO two drawdown. But what but in those projects, you're not necessarily benefiting from the revenue sharing co benefits, you know, the the community the broader community co benefits that, you know, members of lower resource communities in the in the global South are benefiting from. That trade off is in the process of being solved where we're getting really strong community co benefits in, you know, in projects that are really well constrained from a carbon point of view in places like India and elsewhere in the global South. So I think that's super exciting, and it's super exciting from a buy side as well because although the biochar market is relatively mature, it's not matured enough yet that all the core benefits and all the markers of quality are filtered through to prices. Now this is a challenge sometimes for suppliers when you have this amazing project. It's got a heap of core benefits. It's thousand year durable, and you're charging a price point that you think is commensurate with that. But if those if those markets quality haven't filtered through to that price correlation yet, that's a challenge for you. But it's also an opportunity for buyers to sort of be competitive, navigate the market, and understand where they can get the strongest access to the best projects, to the best value for money before the market matures and all and those markers and quality start to be reflected in price points. So I think it's a really interesting time to be exploring the biochar space as a buyer. And then that that's my that's my that's my pitch for next for next year for for for biochar buyers. I can give you a I can give you a more kind of unexpected example of innovation that I think is happening. I see. So, strangely enough, the the oldest method, which is planting trees, is seeing an incredible amount of change that is gonna make it finally really work. So, we talked about how in the legacy carbon markets, people would do forestry carbon projects, but they wouldn't be well measured. And the registries weren't didn't have strong methodologies that required them to measure well, and so too many credits were issued. And we're now seeing just a wave of innovation of people solving all of those problems. And there there are many to solve for any given project. But people are being very, very smart about solving each one of those so that they're building forestry projects that we truly believe can stand for a century or two. And that means that they're getting smart about planting a diverse species mix that will help with biodiversity and be sustainable. They're being smart about making sure that it's integrated into the community. They're getting very high-tech about using lidar and satellite imagery to do absolute quantification of the trees. And the registries are developing a wave of new methodologies that require elaborately complex baseline comparisons that minimize overcrediting. And and even governments are putting in regulatory structures that protect trees for very long periods of time. So all of those things are coming together to make forest carbon an innovative and reliable solution in a way that it was not before. I'm really glad you said that because I was gonna say it. So that that was good to be my favorite. I I think, you know, existing approaches that we have a long record for are getting a lot of of of dissing. One of the questions in the chat was, what was it that made 90% of the of the previous credits, worthless in the in the views of that, that newspaper article? And, basically, the answer is overcrediting. That it's just it's in any case, in in in many cases, it was, for avoiding deforestation. It's actually quite hard to measure something that didn't happen, and you have to measure, you know, what you protected against, what you didn't protect. But but the kind of the the overcrediting in some cases, optimistically, in some cases, frankly, fraud is what's made the bottom drop out of that market. And but but but trees are fantastic carbon capture machines, and they're also glorious things. And so I'm I'm really delighted to see the renaissance of, integrity in the whole, the the the ecosystem restoration and and tree planting space. I'm gonna throw in my favorite since, chair's privilege, since you've already covered a couple of the things that I might also have said. In a way, my favorite is the way that it's so clear that carbon removals projects happen can happen everywhere. I mentioned this in my little presentation at the beginning, but it completely blew me away. There is this kind of sense that in the global South it's a bit more about nature and then the global sources North it's all about techno wizards thinking machines can solve everything as a kind of classic narrative that's out there. And it's completely false. Across the global South, there's fantastic possibilities, not just for tree planting, but not just for artisanal, biochar and but also for spreading and enhanced rock weathering dust across fields and, of course, direct air capture. I was I was captivated going to Kenya and seeing all the sites where carbon removals can happen there from direct air capture across the spectrum. One of the the the guys I was visiting there, he looked me in the eye and he said, Gabriel, this is not going to be done to us and this is not gonna be done for us. This is gonna be done by us. And I think another thing that I love about these new developments in in removals is the way that they play into economic development. And economic development in the global South and in the global North, the the the jobs that they're bringing, the industry that they're creating, it feels very exciting to be at the beginning of that. So I'm I'm just I'm just gonna comment quickly on a couple of the questions that that came in around the, there's a pricing question. There's a couple of questions about claims. So so the pricing question is, why should car why do we think carbon removal's prices are going to be going up when as as as there's more demand for them, prices ought to go down? So, does one of you want to comment on that? Patty, you wanna take that? I know you've been thinking hard about this. Yeah. Well, the the the very easy answer to that is is is supply constraints. If we see a wave of demand aligned with, you know, an SPTI world or a net zero world, then it's very likely that much of the supply won't be online yet. So even though costs come down on actually margins, in some cases for suppliers, Internet zero one will actually increase, and prices will increase, and would like and are likely to stay elevated for a number of years until the supply comes online. It's, it's it's it's just the the supply demand curve, and and and and it reflects where we are and the necessity of the market in terms of capacity that's actually built to remove c o two. That's actually one of the reasons that we are recommending to, to buyers to to get started in this and actually to start to secure supply. The the cost eventually will go down, but but it's really looking like there might be a crunch, before that. A few questions have come in. Let's just spend a moment on those about about the different rules, about, the SBTI. Is that holding the the industry back and, we're not having clarity around what companies should actually do in their removal space? And then also questions about when do we think or do we think there's ever gonna be a situation where it's actually mandatory as part of your net zero plan to incorporate carbon removals? And that's related to some questions that are coming as well, which is other kinds of credits are much cheaper. People are used to buying much cheaper ones, and so how do you get people to think about paying much higher prices even when you've spread them across portfolios for carbon removal? So so just, I have some thoughts on that, but just, I agree. Patty, do you want to say anything first? Patty? Yeah. I'm a bit very interested to get your thoughts on this because you are about as close as anyone to this world. But, yeah, I mean, absolutely right. Corporate net net zero standards are a primary driver of carbon removal demand. And the more mandatory it is, the more, you know, whether it's in whether it's social license to operate or whether it's actual license to operate, it's clearly gonna be a primary driver of demand. I think recent updates from SBGI are encouraging. And, of course, from an industry industry participant, I would encourage standard settlements standard setters and governments to go further to make sure that we're, you know, we're building this industry because we're gonna need it. Sure. And so I I I will say as you as you know, Patty and Magli, I've been working extremely closely with lots of the, rule setters around carbon removals to address specifically this issue. And the challenge that we've had, of course, a few years ago was that there was a a realization that carbon removals are an essential part of net zero. You can't actually get net zero without the net part, and you can't get the net part without taking responsibility for your own emissions so that what goes up comes back down. However, there was a sort of sense that that's something we can worry about later, and let's focus on reductions now. And, what's changed, I think, over the last year and a half, two years that I've been working on this has been an increasing realization that if we're going to build this industry out of nowhere, we need to start now. We're gonna get onto an exponential curve. The most important part of an exponential curve is the beginning, and delaying it by any amount of time makes it increasingly difficult to get to where we need to go. And I think what what I would say is very encouraging is that I'm certainly hearing this in in many of the kind of the voluntary standard setters and also that strong perception among many governments as well. So the, SBTI will be coming out with a revised version of its net zero standard, which I I I hear is very likely to contain interim targets for carbon removals for SBTI companies. The ISO net zero aligned organization standard is investigating the same thing. The Oxford offsetting principles have said you need to start buying carbon removals now, and I think that's actually starting to change the landscape, the realization that this needs to be part not just sort of an eventual purchase, but as a a part of a transition plan. So I think that's gonna make a a big difference this year, and all of these revisions are coming out in 2025. But the other thing I'd say about this is is it gonna be mandatory? And, basically, the whatever happens with any of these voluntary standards, the fundamentals still apply, which is that we need to get down to a place where we are not putting any net emissions in the atmosphere or the temperatures will continue to rising and the catastrophe of climate change will continue to accelerate. So that's something that the world has actually agreed on. Everybody knows that. That's not a question of science anymore. And that means that anything that still goes into the atmosphere after that point has to be taken back out again. So, fundamentally, whether this might seem a good idea, that might seem a good idea, I think we've now moved far beyond the do I prefer this or that? Is are removals better or worse than something else? And the realization is the IPCC said that removals are now unavoidable to a very large scale. And so the question is now how do we build this industry? So that brings me to what I think might be my final questions are coming to the end of this webinar, to both of you, and I'll probably, chip in as well, which is it is actually really quite exciting to be at the beginning of this process. We are there at the beginning of this exponential curve, but trying to see where it might grow. So so what's your what's if you're looking into your crystal balls, both of you, you're right on the cutting edge of all the science of this. You're talking to suppliers all the time. Where do you see this going? How do you feel about that, and what's your advice to suppliers who are trying to make this thing happen? Magda, start with you. Yeah. I mean, when you do the math about how much carbon we have to remove, and and it's not just the residual couple of gigatons that will be left over at net zero. We hit 1.5 degrees last year. Essentially, every ton that is emitted from here on has to come back out again. We've already passed this critical threshold. And when you do the math about how much has to be removed in total, that means that this has to be a trillion dollar industry. It has to be a global industry on the scale of today's oil and gas industry, ideally replacing today's oil and gas industry. We are many orders of magnitude away from hitting that. And so, when I look at suppliers today, and they're doing very small scale projects that will generate several hundred or several thousand carbon credits, and I and and there's not any conceivable path from that to being part of a global trillion dollar industry that is pulling gigatons out of the atmosphere, then I I get less excited about it. I I I wanna see suppliers that, are doing something with some feedstock that they know there are there's billion tons of that feedstock, where they're doing something in a certain kind of land area where there are hundreds of millions of acres of that kind of land area. We we need to be building things that can, in a decade or two, go up maybe three orders of magnitude over what they're doing now. So that's what matters to me. Yeah. Yeah. And just very quickly to chip in, you know, understanding what a % of you reminded me, understanding what this industry looks like at scale and designing your processes around what the industry looks like at scale and then being radically transparent about your process and the limitations of making sure that you're surfacing all your learnings that have, you know and and and not in a uncompetitive way, but but being super clear about what the challenges are about your specific project and what you need to get to scale so the community around CDR can support you to get there. From a QA perspective, that's we will have suppliers that are super transparent about what their bottlenecks are and how we can support them. And that's that's part of our quality framework is Yeah. We we very much, reward in our rankings projects that are transparent, that show us exactly how they're doing the science, that are very open about things they don't know. That matters a lot. Well, thank you both to to to both of you. That was a fascinating discussion. I said that, I it was my favorite bit of the day. I get to hang out with you two and and talk about the science of carbon removals, which is my favorite topic. I'll I'll answer my own question for myself before we finish, which is, you know, I have been working on climate change for a really long time. And in the thirty years that I've been working on it, I've worked on more or less every way to reduce emissions. I've worked with more or less every sector, and I've looked at the science of all of it. And I I have to say that the whole, you know, making a trillion dollar industry out of nothing is daunting. It's it's it's sometimes terrifying how how far we have to go. It's challenging as well to have help people understand how they can engage with this space and and and how to make sure that they feel safe enough to be able to do so, which is one of the reasons we pay such attention to science. But broadly, I just I'm realizing in the last, couple of months, this is the most exciting thing I've ever touched. This is a time when we, individually, with our actions, can make the biggest difference to the outcomes. The most important and interesting part of the exponential curve is right at the beginning, and we are right at the beginning of this. And so so thanks for fascinating conversation. Thanks for all your efforts, and thanks everybody for your listening and for all your questions. And if you want to know anything more about this, then do get in touch. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thanks, Gabriel.