Is “Carbon Removal” tech viable yet?

The role of carbon-dioxide removal (CDR) has long been a topic of discussion within the climate-tech community, but 2022 boosted the profile of this suite of both proven and nascent technologies.

This year, direct air capture (DAC) projects saw a wave of significant investments from both private and public sources. In the second quarter alone, VCs invested $841 million in carbon-capture and DAC startups, nearly double the total VC funding for the sector over the previous four quarters combined, according to data from Pitchbook.

• Corporations looking to reach their own net-zero goals also came together to try and provide a guaranteed customer base for CDR startups.
• In April, Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability announced Frontier, which aims to do just that and plans to spend $925 million collectively over the next nine years on permanent carbon removal.

Even still…CDR remains unproven at scale and prohibitively expensive for most buyers. Even if it does overcome those hurdles, it is unlikely to ever be the most efficient solution for decarbonizing our planet.

But 2022 may prove to be a turning point in how governments, companies, and investors think about CDR and the importance of scaling this technology—from less than 10,000 tonnes of CO2 removal this year—to several billion tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050.

Read the full breakdown on-site.—GD