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Microsoft signs 10-year carbon removal deal with Climeworks

Posted on July 14, 2022 by dishanth

The tech giant first announced an intention to source carbon removal solutions from Climeworks in January 2021, a year after pledging to achieve carbon-negative operations and supply chains by 2030. To achieve this 2030 goal, Microsoft – which is already carbon-neutral in operations – intends to halve emissions this decade and invest to offset and remove more carbon than it emits annually.

This week, Climeworks confirmed that it has entered into a ten-year purchase agreement with Microsoft. The investment in the deal has not been disclosed at this stage, but Climeworks claims it is “one of the largest” in the DAC space and will support the removal of “tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere”.

“Microsoft’s multi-year offtake agreement with Climeworks is an important step towards realizing the ‘net’ in net zero,” said Microsoft’s chief environmental officer Lucas Joppa. “Our experience in purchasing renewable energy shows that long-term agreements can provide an essential foundation for society’s race to scale new decarbonisation technologies.”

Pictured: Climeworks’ Orca DAC plant in Iceland. Image: Climeworks

Other corporate supporters of Climeworks include Ocado, Swiss RE, Audi, LGT and Stripe, the latter of which is spearheading a collaborative private sector commitment on scaling carbon capture technologies. Called ‘Frontier’, the collaboration is backed by $925m of commitments to purchase carbon removals using man-made technologies this decade.

Technology scale-up

Climeworks currently operates 17 DAC plants, including one, Orca, which is operating on a commercial basis. Orca came online in September 2021 and is based in Hellisheiði, Iceland. Its CO2 removal capacity is 4,000 tonnes per year.

Last month, Climeworks confirmed plans for its 18th and largest plant to date – Mammoth, also in the same Icelandic region. The plant is expected to begin operations in either late 2023 or early 2024. In the first instance, it will have a CO2 capture capacity of 36,000 tonnes per year. Climeworks is aiming to scale to two megatonnes of capacity by 2030, laying the foundations for scaling to a gigatonne of capture capacity by 2050.

Climeworks’ technology works by drawing air into a collector with a fan. Inside the collector, CO2 is filtered out. When the filter is full, the collector is closed and heated to release the CO2, ready for concentration and storage by storage partner Carbfix. The carbon associated with developing and operating the DAC facilities, Climeworks claims, is typically equivalent to 10% of the carbon that will be captured. This calculation considers the fact that the facilities are powered by renewable energy.

Microsoft’s Joppa has called DAC “a nascent but crucial industry” to achieve the halving of net global emissions by 2030 and bringing them to net-zero by 2050 – the levels recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for giving humanity the best chance to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5C.

Indeed, some climate scientists have concluded that large-scale carbon capture – whether man-made or nature-based – is needed at scale to avert the worst physical impacts of climate change due to historic and continuing emissions. The IPCC itself has stated that, by 2050, the world’s air-based carbon removal capacity should be 3-12 billion tonnes in a net-zero world.

However, as Joppa acknowledged, man-made systems are in their relative infancy commercially. Critics are concerned that they may not deliver their promised benefits and could be used as a means for businesses to avoid reducing their emissions in the first instance.

ETC report

In related news, the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) has this week published a new report outlining its recommendations for scaling carbon capture, storage and utilisation (CCUS) technologies while ensuring that efforts around zero-carbon electricity and emissions reductions are not de-prioritised.

That report forecasts that, in 2050, the world will need 7-10 gigatonnes of CO2 capture. This is at the higher end of the levels recommended by the IPCC. Reaching this scale, the ETC argues, cannot be dependent on action in the mid or long-term – concerted efforts are needed this decade, with the backing of both public and private finance.

Overall, the ETC sees a “vital but limited” role for CCUS. Its report sets out how the carbon removals provided by these technologies should be prioritised for sectors which are hard to decarbonise, such as heavy industry, and should be scaled most rapidly in the sectors and locations where CCUS has an economic advantage over other decarbonisation solutions.

The ETC has been a vocal supporter of CCUS in recent years. In March, it released a separate report recommending that the global CCUS capacity reaches 3.5 billion tonnes annually by 2030.

Source Edie

Tech companies just made a bold climate commitment

Posted on May 25, 2022 by dishanth

DAVOS, Switzerland — Davos is living up to its name as a place for movers and shakers. On Wednesday, a group known as the First Movers Coalition announced major climate commitments intended to create markets for everything from green steel and aluminum to carbon dioxide removal.

Microsoft, Alphabet and Salesforce are among the heavy hitters in tech at the forefront of the coalition that includes more than 50 companies with a total market cap of $8.5 trillion. That’s a large chunk of the U.S. stock market, and the pledge means those companies will start procuring climate-friendly products that are more expensive than their standard counterparts as well as services that don’t really exist at scale (yet). The companies’ commitments could give industries that we know we need to grow down the road the confidence that demand will be there.

The coalition launched last year at United Nations climate talks as an initiative spearheaded by Climate Envoy John Kerry and Bill Gates. The focus then was mostly on steel, shipping and aviation, all sectors of the economy that are incredibly hard and costly to decarbonize. Wednesday’s announcement threw CDR — Silicon Valley’s favorite climate solution — into the mix, along with green aluminum.

“Today is a great milestone in a very difficult long-term project,” Bill Gates said.

Indeed, the trio of major tech companies collectively committed $500 million to CDR between now and 2030. Alphabet joined a handful of other tech companies in pledging $925 million to purchase CDR services last month. It didn’t respond to Protocol’s request about if its First Movers Coalition money was the same as its commitment to Frontier, but Bloomberg confirmed the $200 million is the same money. Microsoft has also made its own investments in removing carbon from the atmosphere while Salesforce founder Marc Benioff has invested in companies that do so.

Right now, a handful of startups are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using techniques ranging from protecting forests to growing kelp to relying on machines to do the dirty work. Paying those companies to do that is currently pretty pricey, costing hundreds of dollars per ton. That adds up fast when you’re talking about a company that pumps millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year into the atmosphere when factoring in Scope 3 emissions.

Obviously Alphabet, Salesforce and Microsoft are good for it, though, and their early investments could help bring prices down by signaling there’s going to be a market for CDRl. At numerous events at the World Economic Forum this week, Kerry echoed a phrase coined by Gates called the “green premium,” which refers to the idea of paying extra for the more climate-friendly option. For companies, that can refer to paying a bit of extra cash for green steel or CDR. (Though to be clear, there’s no alternative to the latter outside cutting emissions.)

“No government has the money to be able to solve this problem by itself,” Kerry said. “No government can move fast enough to solve this problem by itself. We need you. We need the private sector around the world to step up.”

While that first point is a bit up for debate given that the federal budget for the military alone is north of $700 billion per year, it’s clear that procurement is a huge avenue for both corporations and the government to spur new markets and bring down costs of the technology we need to address the climate crisis. The Biden administration itself has pulled on some of those levers, notably with a plan to purchase only electric vehicles by 2035. With 645,000 vehicles, that would help drive costs down for batteries, charging and other parts of the EV equation.

The government is also investing billions in direct air capture R&D, which could bring down costs. But tech companies’ commitment to buying those services offer another avenue to do that. Right now, most tech can remove maybe a few thousands of tons from the atmosphere a year. To keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a key guardrail, the world will need to pull multiple billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the sky each year in the coming decades. Exactly how much will depend on how fast we deploy renewables, EVs and other climate solutions we already have at the ready.

Kerry noted that the government partners in the First Movers Coalition are also working to create more regulatory certainty and policies that can speed the adoption of new, cleaner technologies. Tax credits and even more R&D investments are some of the avenues that could open the door to reimagining polluting industries and creating new sectors of the economy to clean up the carbon pollution already in the atmosphere.

The new commitment from the First Movers Coalition will give CDR companies a little more certainty that the market will develop for their services. That, in addition to commitments for green steel and aluminum as well as other products, is, in Kerry’s words, the “highest-leverage climate action that companies can take, because creating the early markets to scale advanced technologies materially reduces the whole world’s emissions.”

Source Protocol