Companies are increasingly turning to innovative methods to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as a way to achieve their sustainability goals. But who is monitoring to make sure these tactics work?
A new project called Carbon Removal Standards Initiative (CRSI)) was launched today with the aim of helping develop standards for CO2 reduction and sequestration efforts. It comes as big names in technology are ramping up investments in carbon dioxide removal (CDR), although there are still questions about whether such technologies will be able to prove themselves on a commercial scale.
Who is watching to make sure these tactics are working?
CDR can take many different forms – for example, building an industrial facility to filter CO2 from the air or seawater. While it may seem green on paper, there is a danger that all the carbon accounting won’t add up to enough to help stop climate change. These new industrial facilities consume a lot of energy, for example, and the carbon they capture could potentially be used to produce more oil and gas. There is still not much oversight to make sure new projects live up to their promises.
Policymakers are still trying to catch up with all these new technologies. The European Union is developing the first such certification framework for carbon removal technologies. Meanwhile, industry groups have launched their own initiatives to get CDR up and running. Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability launched an initiative called Frontier in 2022 to connect approved carbon removal projects with companies interested in paying for their services.
Rather than developing its own guidelines for others to follow, CRSI says It is taking a “bottom-up approach” to standardisation. It aims to provide technical assistance to regulators and other organisations working on carbon removal policies. It has already developed a publicly available database of academic articles, industry white papers and other resources on the emerging landscape.
CRSI wants to differentiate itself as a nonprofit that doesn’t accept corporate donations or rely on selling credits from carbon removal projects. “As the carbon removal industry grows, there’s a lot of self-regulation,” says Anu Khan, founder and CEO of CRSI. “Industry will always be part of developing standards, but industry can’t be the only voice in the room.”
Among the first CRSI funders is undoubtedly Bill Gates' climate investment firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Microsoft has bet heavily on carbon elimination, making One of the biggest purchases so far in July. Oil giant Occidental’s carbon removal project in Texas. Microsoft pledged in 2020 to become carbon-negative by the end of the decade, but its carbon footprint has grown by about 30 percent since making that commitment. So it’s not surprising that some environmental groups are concerned that carbon removal could be a red herring, allowing companies to say they’re fighting climate change even though they’re still generating a lot of pollution that’s making the crisis worse.
Khan says carbon removal must stop being a tool that companies can use to try to offset their pollution. That means capturing carbon for the sake of the climate, without necessarily having to sell credits to companies that have failed to reduce their emissions. They will first need to set strict rules.
“I think it’s a very promising conversation,” Khan says. “But for all of these policies, we need to make sure that they actually reduce carbon in a measurable, quantifiable way.”
