Building a High-Quality, Permanent Carbon Removal Industry: Chapter 1

Celebrating good work and looking ahead on CRA’s one-year anniversary

Written by Giana Amador and Dana Jacobs

A year ago, the Carbon Removal Alliance was formed to narrow the gap between policymakers and innovators. We united 25 of the most promising carbon removal companies under a shared vision for high-quality carbon removal. From there, our goal was to work with the government to kickstart this critical industry.

You may be curious about what we’ve been up to.

We weren’t the only carbon removal organization that launched last year. Some new organizations focus on specific pathways, some on setting standards, some on international policy — and then there’s the Carbon Removal Alliance. Industry associations come with their fair share of skepticism, something we’ve considered since our inception. We’re trying to build something different: an organization that is structured and funded to shape better policies and a better industry. We set a high bar for our membership and the policies we endorse, guided by our principles.

There’s long been recognition in this field that the first generation of carbon removal policy wasn’t right-sized to the capabilities and needs of the industry: we set capture thresholds in policy too high and focused too narrowly on specific pathways. The next generation of policy must be attuned to the realities of commercialization and steadfastly oriented towards quality. We’re focused on making that happen which is why we’re equally as connected in the halls of Congress as with carbon removal projects themselves.

Our north star — now and in the future — is building a market for high-quality carbon removal. Carbon removal isn’t replacing an incumbent industry, so our members are building the physical processes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere without long-term certainty about customers, project financing, and market dynamics. The public sector has a substantial role to play in supporting their growth, unlocking private sector capital, and delivering carbon removal as a public good. Critically, that public sector demand must set robust standards and incentivize only the highest quality projects. We see federal procurement programs, tax credits, and prizes as the first step in this journey.

You’ll see Alliance fingerprints across federal carbon removal programs in the last year:

Federal procurement legislation

Procurement is a critical market-building tool. Government purchasing can spur deployment of a diverse set of necessary carbon removal technologies, and more importantly, make sure that these technologies are scaled with climate, economic, and community impact in mind from the very beginning.

In 2023, we helped secure procurement dollars in the current FY24 Senate Energy & Water Appropriations bill with dozens of requests and direct engagement with offices. Ongoing negotiations on the hill will determine the government’s near-term purchasing plans. We were also able to partner with legislative staff on the Carbon Removal and Emissions Storage Technologies (CREST) Act and the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act (CDRLA), two of the first carbon removal procurement bills currently considered in Congress, which represent a major milestone for the industry.

Dept. of Energy Purchase Pilot Prize

Our commitment to championing federal procurement for carbon removal also helped shape the Department of Energy (DOE) CDR Purchase Pilot Prize. Announced in September, the Purchase Prize is the first government procurement initiative for carbon removal in the world. Funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, it will award up to $35 million to suppliers that deliver independently verified, US-based removals to DOE.

We’ve been heavily involved in the foundational design and rollout of the prize. We acted as a bridge between companies navigating the application and DOE administrators pioneering this first-of-a-kind program so that it represented high-quality carbon removal and was workable for the carbon removal companies themselves. In terms of the prize itself, we specifically offered DOE insights into selection criteria, permanence thresholds, and longer, more realistic timelines. For our members, we helped demystify the application, providing more clarity on monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) and offtake agreements. Today, the program reflects our principles for a responsible CDR industry, including considerations for additionality, net-negativity, permanence, verifiability, tech-neutrality, and community benefits.

Investments in innovation & science

We’ve pushed for continued federal research, development, and deployment (RD&D) funding in the annual appropriations process totaling $150 million across DOE, specifically for CDR suppliers looking to prove their technologies and deployment strategies.

The Department of Energy’s Carbon Negative Shot aims to support carbon removal technologies across technology-readiness levels. We helped shape their initial thinking on how to best support pilot programs, from the size of demonstration funding to test sites to technology types.

So what’s next?

In districts and states across the country, carbon removal pilots, deployments, and commercial projects are underway. That hasn’t always been true. Soon, we’ll be able to point to real, exemplary projects that anchor the high-quality carbon removal field.

With these projects comes an immense opportunity to build sustained political support for carbon removal — which is necessary to pass demand-side policies and remove billions of tons of atmospheric carbon. We’re focused here. Increasingly, you’ll see us articulate regionally relevant and tangible impacts of carbon removal beyond climate so that stakeholders across the country can better understand why they might want to host a given carbon removal project. It’s a long-term campaign to make champions out of Congressional leaders and in turn, pass the next generation of carbon removal policy.

We also believe demand-side policies won’t work unless they’re backed by robust monitoring, reporting, and verification that ensures we’re incentivizing the highest quality tons. In practice, that means federal agencies have the staff and infrastructure to set and measure against standards and select high-quality projects for federal support. We’re galvanizing our membership around deeper investments into federal MRV schemes and helping fund federal agencies with the goal of more transparency and better federal projects.

Team CRA has grown in the last year — we’ve welcomed a Chief of Staff, Deputy Director of Policy, and Deputy Director of Partnerships who feel just as strongly as we do. They will be essential in championing policies that can help maximize carbon removal’s impact while curbing its risks. We know that carbon removal has an important role to play in our fight against climate change, but only if we push for regulations and policy frameworks that prioritize permanence, quality, and trust. Ultimately, all of our progress in 2023 would not have been possible without our members who have been engaged and collaborative in the Alliance but also hard at work meeting their own milestones.