Kann: Every carbon removal method fails on cost, scale, durability, or verifiability
Shayle Kann · Mailbag episode! Interest rates, carbon dioxide removal, load growth, and more · Nov 9, 2023 · at 38:34
Shayle Kann, partner at Energy Impact Partners, explains why the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) market has not produced a single clear winning technology.
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“The reason for that is, the way that I Think about CDR is that you're looking, your mythical unicorn solution for removing CO two from the atmosphere has four characteristics. It is cheap, which is, you know, let's just call it sub a hundred dollars a ton, but like ideally sub 50 dollars a ton, who knows, but it's cheap by whatever metric. It is eminently scalable, so you can do gigatons worth of it without Disrupting some other ecosystem or causing some really big knock on effect. So it's cheap. It's scalable. It's durable. So whatever, you know, the mechanism that you use to sequester the CO two will remain sequestered for, and this is where there's debate, right? Is it hundreds of years? Is it thousands of years? Is it 10,000 years? I don't know, but it's durable by whatever definition you want to use there. And then it's eminently and easily measurable and verifiable. And If you take those four criteria as the four criteria, Basically, everything fails on at least one of them, or if not fails, then, like, struggles on one of them, right?”
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