Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
Permitting is holding back the carbon removal sector, according to industry execs.
Why it matters: Scientists and executives see the nascent sector as a key method for reducing emissions and holding the Earth's temperature below a critical threshold.
Driving the news: Executives in the space spoke at the SOSV Climate Summit this week and pointed to permitting as one of the biggest barriers to growing the deployment of the tech.
- "There's a huge amount that needs to change about permitting to actually enable this to happen," said Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Charm Industrial, which turns biomass into a bbq smoke-like sludge that the startup injects underground.
- Reinhardt specifically pointed to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which he said is "just shooting ourselves in the foot" in terms of deploying climate technologies quickly enough.
- "The same toolkit that environmentalists use to hinder fossil fuel production, [NEPA] is also the same toolkit that we have to permit these solar, wind, nuclear [and] CDR projects. . . There's something wrong there," said Shashank Samala, CEO and co-founder of Heirloom, which accelerates the natural process of limestone to absorb carbon from the air.
Yes, but: Clean-energy advocates have long lamented the lengthy permitting process for projects, and Congress has tried to streamline permitting across nuclear, hydro and battery-minerals mining.
- But engineered carbon-removal technologies like Charm Industrial and Heirloom are at an early stage relative to wind, solar, hydro and nuclear fission and could need more environmental review.
- A report from a United Nations body recently included language saying engineered removal technologies "pose unknown environmental and social risks."
The big picture: Permitting is a bit of a red herring for the sector.
- Companies are caught in a chicken-and-egg scenario, where to be cost effective, carbon removal technologies, which can include dozens of different types of natural and engineered technologies, need to be deployed at a much larger size.
- Reinhardt said that carbon removal needs to be able to remove 10 billion tons of CO2 annually — or 25% of all the emissions the world makes every year. But today only about 10,000 tons per year of carbon removal is being deployed.
- "[W]e're talking about many orders of magnitude growth. Something like 70% compound growth for the next 27 years to get to that scale. . . .That's twice as fast as software grew over the last 30 years," said Reinhardt.
Thought bubble: Growing engineered carbon-removal tech twice as fast as software isn't likely to happen.
