Nov 18, 2021 · 39m · catalyst
Kickstarting a $1 trillion market for carbon removal
0:00 / 0:00
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Host Shayle Kann and Stripe Head of Climate Nan Ransohoff examine how catalytic corporate procurement, innovative market mechanisms like Advance Market Commitments, and technological diversification can scale carbon removal into a trillion-dollar global industry.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Shayle holds 41.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Shayle as informed peer 5.0 Guest teaching 3.1 Guest disagreement 1.0 Shayle pushing back 1.7
speaking balance: gold is Shayle, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 23:41 Pushing back against commoditizing frontier carbon removal prematurely
Nan rejects the premature rush to list nascent removals on commodity markets alongside cheap $10 avoidance offsets, arguing it threatens technological maturation.
Hardest push from Shayle ▶ 24:41 Challenging Stripe's bespoke approach in favor of standard buyer tiersShayle pushes back on the scalability of bespoke portfolio procurement, arguing mainstream corporate buyers require standardized heuristic tiers like gold/silver/bronze.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 32:21 Educating on Advance Market Commitments using vaccine precedentsNan gives a detailed breakdown of how the 2007 pneumococcal vaccine AMC catalyzed pharmaceutical investment, framing it as the blueprint for carbon removal demand.
Shayle holds their own ▶ 25:10 Demonstrating deep history of corporate PPA evolutionShayle demonstrates sophisticated energy market knowledge by breaking down how corporate renewables evolved from bespoke Google synthetic PPAs to standardized market products.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Shayle as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Shayle pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Host Monologue: The Gigaton Carbon Removal Challenge | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Host monologue setting up the gigaton-scale carbon removal challenge, technological approaches, and Stripe's catalytic role. Host-side scores are set to zero in accordance with monologue rules. | |
| Introducing Stripe Climate and the Early Adopter Model | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Nan outlines Stripe Climate's aggregated buyer model and 10-gigaton target. Shayle demonstrates clear domain knowledge by cleanly distinguishing permanent CDR from point-source flue-gas carbon capture. | |
| Stripe's Procurement Criteria and Diverse Portfolio Approaches | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Nan details Stripe's procurement criteria and highlights portfolio projects like Charm Industrial and Running Tide. Shayle contextualizes the technological divide between nature-hybrid approaches and direct air capture. | |
| Bridging the Supply Shortage via Early-Stage Accelerators | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Discussion centers on incubator partnerships and cost curves. Shayle probes the rationale behind the industry's $100/ton target heuristic and questions whether near-term off-market pricing matters. | |
| Scaling Bottlenecks and the Power of Offtake Agreements | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Shayle asks about commercial bankability and whether buyers will offer multi-year strip contracts. Nan candidly admits the sector is severely off track to scale and draws parallels to early Google clean energy offtakes. | |
| Sponsor Break: Bloom Energy Data Center Solutions | 7 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Segment includes an ad break followed by an in-depth discussion on whether CDR will commoditize. Shayle draws direct analogies to renewable energy PPA standardization, pushing on the necessity of simplified heuristic tiers. | |
| Technology Convergence and the Multi-Trillion-Dollar Scale | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Shayle does the math on scaling from 4,000 tons to 10 billion tons, asking whether a single technology could win. Nan explains the macro economics of a trillion-dollar market requiring parallelized approaches. | |
| Catalyzing Industry Participation via Advance Market Commitments | 5 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Shayle and Nan discuss the role of policy and startups. Nan educates Shayle on the Advance Market Commitment (AMC) mechanism modeled on pneumococcal vaccine development in the 2000s. | |
| Unaddressed Gaps: Carbon Storage, MRV, and Policy | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Nan outlines critical blind spots across carbon storage, MRV standardization, and squishy net-zero corporate claims, while Shayle explores whether transport and storage need separate market mechanisms. |
Statements from this episode (18)
Kann: Carbon removal costs range from $10 to thousands per ton
“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.”
Kann: Stripe publishes all carbon removal applications, pricing, and contracts
“Stripe, which has been leading the charge alongside, I would say, Microsoft and Shopify, publishes all the applications it receives, along with the details of what it's selected, The prices and the contracts.”
Ransohoff: Stripe Climate buys expensive frontier carbon removal to accelerate cost curves
“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…”
Ransohoff: Stripe prioritizes permanent carbon removal as the biggest climate solution gap
“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…”
Ransohoff: Stripe requires 1,000-year permanence and a sub-$100 price trajectory
“And what we're looking for is solutions that have more than a thousand years of permanence that have a pathway to sub a hundred dollar a ton removal, even if they're expensive Today, and we've paid more than 2000 dollars per ton from heirloom this last cycle. …”
Ransohoff: Stripe Climate faces severe carbon removal shortage, buying into 2026
“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.”
Ransohoff: Stripe offers $500k first-customer contracts to qualifying carbon removal startups
“And our partnership with Activate and with Deep Science Ventures is essentially saying, you know, we will, for any company that meets our Target criteria. We will give you a 500,000 dollar procurement contract to be your first buyer and help bridge that commer…”
Ransohoff: Stripe ignores current carbon prices to focus on sub-$100 glide paths
“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.”
Ransohoff: Stripe awards fixed-dollar contracts, back-solving volume for early startups
“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.”
Ransohoff: Carbon removal sector remains far off track to dent climate crisis
“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…”
Ransohoff: Carbon removal startups need customer offtakes to secure bank financing
“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…”
Ransohoff: Forcing early carbon removal to compete with $10 offsets undermines industry
“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…”
Ransohoff: Carbon removal prices will take decades to converge
“I just think that, you know, for them to be even in the realm of similar prices is going to take, you know, we are basically putting the first dot on the cost curves right now, and those cost curves look different for every single company, and it's going to ta…”
Ransohoff: Under 10,000 tons permanently removed globally across $30M historical spend
“For context, to date, probably about thirty million total has been spent on frontier carbon removal, and less than 10,000 tons that have actually been permanently removed”
Ransohoff: A $1 Trillion Voluntary Carbon Removal Market Is Highly Unlikely
“A voluntary market of a trillion dollars a year is Is highly unlikely to happen.”
Ransohoff: Stripe was the first customer for seven of ten removal applicants
“So far, the companies that have applied to our RFP are all startups, and we were the first customer for seven of 10. We're not opposed to buying from later stage companies, but we haven't seen them.”
Ransohoff: US lacks dedicated permanent CO2 storage infrastructure like Iceland's Carbfix
“Transportation and storage of CO₂ streams is something that we are seeing a lot of the companies that apply to Stripe Climate struggle with. You know, they will have a really compelling capture technology and can essentially use lots of different storage They …”
Stripe Climate is splitting carbon procurement into capture and storage tracks
“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.”