Carbon Removal

“A reforestation project may have a much longer, naturally would want a longer term because if you look at tree growth cycles, you'd have carbon credit generation over a long period of time. Whereas an infrastructure style BEX project kind of needs a fixed, you…”

“The most common way we say no to a project is because it's too early.”

“We vary our contracting in two big ways. So if the project's ready for scale, we will work through a long-term off-tick agreement that's modeled off a PPA. If the project is not ready for scale yet... We'll sign a shorter form agreement.”

“There will definitely be a moment for government demand. I think when you look at the IPCC numbers for five plus gigatons, five to 10 gigatons of carbon removal, you need public procurement to play an essential role of that.”

“What's interesting about it is that relative to almost everything else, it's very carbon rich. And so the use cases that rely either on the chemical availability of carbon or on, ah, the sort of physical availability of carbon, those, or like in the case of ca…”

“If you compare it to, like, the cost of carbon removal, for example, on just a dollar per degree Celsius metric, it's, like, orders and orders of magnitude cheaper.”

“I think it's overhyped. I think it's overhyped sort of to the conversation we were having about sort of the consumer pull for big investments. Unless you can really drive down costs, such a sort of meaningful point that consumers are sort of comfortable paying…”

“And then on top of it all, there's carbon removal, which might be one of the most important technologies of the next 3040 years, that's also incredibly energy intensive.”

“Maybe post 2100, we'll find that we have scaled up nuclear fusion sufficiently, that we can have the free energy to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Till then, it's just very difficult to see How we can set up a scaled energy system that can actually pull ca…”

“It's contradictory to this idea of energy abundance, and so there's, like, very little strategic thought to these actions, and I think it could be extremely detrimental to bringing in investment for the set of technologies that this administration does want.”

“Microsoft has a really strong internal team doing that too. And they're the single single largest carbon removal buyer at this point by, I think quite a margin.”

“I'm definitely a believer in the fact that we have to augment reduction with removal, both the engineered and the nature-based systems for hem carbon removal will and will need to become an industrialized sector in their own right.”

“For me, in terms of what's hot, what's not, I really like carbon removal that enhances natural systems, because they use less energy, which makes them more cost effective.”

“And so we do a health check. And we do that health check every six months. And on an annual basis, we'll identify companies that, you know, we have concerns about. And then we look at, okay, well, they're in this vertical, they're doing this technology, we pro…”

“The reality is that carbon removal's in the VC world right now because there's no funding from elsewhere. And I don't see this being a long-term financing solution, because carbon removal is waste management. Like, it's just cleaning the air, like, we clean ou…”

“So in the longer term, I think this is going to be more of a public requirement Then it is going to be something that's got to achieve gigaton scale and make, you know, the ROI that the VC funds are looking for.”

“And, you know, there's, we think that the price is going to coalesce around 300 dollars per ton, given where the supply and demand, ah, is.”

“The simplest is you just take some plant matter, you take some biomass, you put it into a clay pit, and you bury it, and it stays there for centuries. That's wood vaulting or biomass burial.”

“I think eventually investors are going to look at, do you have a credible path to getting to like a hundred bucks a ton? Of removal. And I think there's a large number of players who don't have a credible pathway to getting there, even if you make big assumpti…”

“On the other hand, I have seen the climate math, and I recognize there's basically no way we hit our climate goals without building a kind of mind-boggling amount of specifically carbon removal in the next few decades.”

“And given that we don't have government mandates generally, or a compliance market for Carbon removal. That leaves voluntary procurement as the only current path to kickstart this industry.”

“DAC is actually currently Hovering around 7000 metric tons annually globally.”

“The Carbon Negative Shot program is actually a really important DOE initiative because it looks to deploy a suite of carbon removal solutions to reach a hundred dollars per metric ton of carbon removed. So that's an all-inclusive cost.”

“I'd like to think that by the end of the decade, We're gonna see even more wins because of these catalytic mechanisms that have paved the way for American innovation to really take the forefront. We are on track to reach that first billion metric tons.”

“One of the things that we do know as pretty likely is that it's possible you could do solar radiation management that would deliver substantial reduction in warming for a very, very, very low cost relative to all the other approaches that we're seeing out ther…”

“So, if I recall my UN science appropriately, we need probably 10 gigatons, that's ten billion tons per year of carbon removal in, say, twenty-fifty. And then, You know, you add or subtract that depending on how, how you think we're doing with decarbonization o…”

“All of those approaches work. They're all sound, but they have different price points. They have different durability. They have different customers. They have different regulatory frameworks, because they're happening all over the world. They're happening at,…”

“Organic carbon is not necessarily a long-lived sink for atmospheric CO₂, and at some level, I think that's the central thing to keep in mind, is that microbes like to break down organic matter. It's how they make a living and so any one of these practices migh…”

“Stripe is an example where they basically said, you know, we want to support permanent stuff because we know it's real and we know we need a lot more of it. So we're only going to buy stuff that represents a thousand plus years of durability.”

“What we are talking is the creation of a new industry of the size of today's oil and gas industry. That that's basically it.”

“Biomass is pretty crappy energy, but pretty good carbon. So, At almost any reasonable carbon price, it is more valuable to remove the CO₂ than turn it into energy. That carbon removal is actually more valuable than most energy products.”

“For some of these systems, it's like, 60 dollars a ton. It's just cheaper to bury the carbon instead of making something. And at a carbon price of, say, a hundred bucks or a 120 bucks, that's pretty much everything.”

“You need new dedicated land growing crops for that biomass, and I, you know, jury's still out, right, but I'm skeptical we're going to see that happen, and what that means is actually you have a run not, not on new land, but probably a run on what's called, wh…”

“So the obvious example of this is carbon removal, where I think anybody who looks at this would admit that in the longterm, this market does not scale without substantial policy intervention. Like this has to become mandated in some fashion or another. Otherwi…”

“There is no realistic pathway for us to get to one and a half degrees Celsius of temperature rise or even really two degrees without substantial carbon, carbon removal. There's just no way we're going to do it. And substantial being gigatons.”

“Carbon removal is never intended to be a substitute for emissions reduction, and, like, to that point is going to be dramatically more expensive than the vast majority of reductions, right? Like, that's just how this works. Like, not burning something is going…”

“Like there's going to be a lot of energy use and like no one's life cycle pencils without renewable energy use.”

“An emission is permanent, basically. Like, an emission of CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, not forever, but hundreds of thousands of years. And if you want to somehow net that out with a proportional removal, like, it's not propo…”

“We need, you know, maybe 10 gigatons of carbon removals By mid-century. 10 gigatons is ten billion tons. At a hundred dollars a ton, that's a trillion dollar market.”

“The challenge is that it is definitionally a cost. Like, it is definitionally a cost to remove carbon. And therefore, like, creating a market around that is a challenge, which is what, you know, the EU ETS did away with that by regulating it.”

“And the cost of all this stuff, as of today, is all over the place. It literally ranges from, say, 10 dollars a ton in parts of the forestry world to thousands of dollars a ton for some first-of-a-kind permanent removals.”

“We then, Stripe, aggregate those funds and use it to buy carbon removal from really promising solutions that are expensive today, but that have the potential to be really low cost and high volume in the future. So essentially we're trying to help we're like bu…”

“Our approach is let's look across The climate sort of ecosystem. Find what we think the biggest gap is and where we think we are in a somewhat good position to move the needle on it. And carbon removal where we're pulling CO two out of ambient air or out of…”

“One of our big observations over these past two rounds of purchases has been, you know, we have a massive supply shortage. Currently Stripe Climate is buying carbon removal years into the future. For some of these companies, 20, 20, 26.”

“So we Stripe don't care what the price is today. We are very focused on trying to understand what the glide path for each of these technologies looks like on the way to sub a hundred dollars and more than half a gigaton.”

“For most companies, we are giving them the same dollar value or just buying different number of tons from them. We sort of back solve the number of tons based on the total contract value.”

“I would say generally this field is not currently on track for carbon removal to make a material dense in the climate crisis. Like, even with the recent progress, even with all these companies that we're finding and funding and all the press and, you know, Str…”

“This field is going to benefit from a very similar construct of offtakes right? So these companies need, need to de-risk, especially in carbon removal when there, you know, isn't an intrinsic use like there is with energy. Banks want to understand that there r…”

“And I worry that there's a lot of pull to treat it like that right now. And there's a lot of pull to sort of to, you know, list everything on a carbon market and have it compete with 10 dollar per ton offsets. And that's, I don't think that's going to set it u…”

“A voluntary market of a trillion dollars a year is Is highly unlikely to happen.”

“We are actually evolving our Stripe climate purchase process this year to think about capture and storage separately so that there's going to be a storage track and a capture track, and we can help sort of mix and match those.”