A new Bill Gates-backed project wants to make carbon removal more legit

Companies are increasingly turning to newfangled ways to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as a way to hit their sustainability goals. But who’s watching to make sure these tactics are working?

A new project called the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative (CRSI) launched today, with the goal of helping develop standards for efforts to draw down and sequester CO2. It comes as big names in tech scale-up investments in carbon dioxide removal (CDR), even though there are still concerns about whether those technologies will be able to prove themselves at commercial scale.

CDR can look like many different things — building an industrial facility to filter CO2 out of the air or seawater, for instance. While they can sound green on paper, there’s a danger that all the carbon accounting won’t add up enough to help stop climate change. Those new industrial facilities use a lot of energy, for example, and the carbon they capture could potentially be used to produce more oil and gas. There isn’t much oversight yet to make sure new projects are making good on their claims.

Policymakers are still trying to catch up with all these new technologies. The European Union is developing the first certification framework of its kind for carbon removal technologies. In the meantime, industry groups have set up their own initiatives to get the ball rolling on CDR. Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability launched one effort called Frontier in 2022 to connect vetted carbon removal projects with companies interested in paying for their services. 

Rather than developing its own guidelines for others to follow, CRSI says it’s taking a “bottom-up approach to standardization.” It’s setting out to provide technical assistance to regulators and other organizations working on carbon removal policies. It has already put together a publicly available database of academic papers, industry white papers, and other resources on the emerging landscape.

CRSI wants to set itself apart as a nonprofit that doesn’t accept corporate donations or rely on the sale of credits from carbon removal projects. “As the carbon removal industry grows, there’s a lot of self-regulation,” says Anu Khan, CRSI founder and executive director. “Industry will always be a part of standards development, but industry can’t be the only voice in the room.”

To be sure, CRSI’s initial funders include Bill Gates’ climate investment firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Microsoft has bet big on carbon removal, making one of the largest purchases yet in July from oil giant Occidental’s carbon removal project in Texas. Microsoft pledged in 2020 to reach negative carbon emissions by the end of the decade, but its carbon footprint has grown by around 30 percent since making that commitment. So, it’s not surprising that some environmental groups are worried that carbon removal could be a red herring, allowing companies to say they’re fighting climate change even though they’re still pumping out lots of pollution that’s making the crisis worse.

Khan says that carbon removal needs to grow beyond being a tool for companies to use to try to make up for their pollution. That means capturing carbon for the climate’s sake, without necessarily having to sell credits to companies that haven’t managed to slash their emissions. They’ll need strong standards in place first.

“I think it’s a really promising conversation,” Khan says. “But for all of these policies, we need to make sure that they are actually measurably, quantifiably drawing down carbon.”