In 2022, I took a period of leave from Carbon180 to lead carbon removal implementation in the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Carbon Management. The past three years provided me with a new perspective on the state of the carbon removal field. Here are 10 lessons I learned over my exciting, tumultuous, and challenging time in government.
1. Carbon removal has come so far…
Ten years ago, when I co-founded the organization that would become Carbon180, most of our work was engaging with academic stakeholders to answer questions like “Do we even need carbon removal?” and “What solutions actually work?” Few carbon removal companies existed, and there was little policy or private sector support for bringing solutions to market.
The ecosystem I engaged with at DOE would have been unrecognizable a decade ago. Hundreds of startups have raised billions in financing and delivered thousands of tons of carbon removal to dozens of voluntary carbon credit purchasers. At DOE, we collaborated with policymakers worldwide to advance carbon removal innovation initiatives and worked with many of today’s largest energy, industrial, and agricultural companies. We helped fund National Labs to develop carbon removal test beds and centers of excellence for carbon accounting. High ranking administration officials also participated in many key carbon removal milestones, such as Secretary Granholm cutting the ribbon at the US’ first commercial direct air capture and storage facility in California.
2. …and carbon removal has so far to go
Despite this rapid growth, the carbon removal industry is still in its infancy. In terms of technical, market, and policy maturity, the carbon removal field is decades behind other clean energy strategies. Our analysis at DOE found that in order to meet our national net-zero goals by 2050, we would need at least 30 million tonnes of carbon removal deployed by the end of the decade — roughly 1000 times current levels— with capacity doubling every four years thereafter.
Government and corporate efforts to scale carbon removal are moving too slowly to meet climate goals. Innovation funding must increase significantly beyond DOE’s current $100M annual budget. Policies must support smaller, high-cost projects now to help drive down costs and unlock future corporate and regulatory market demand. Additionally, clear carbon accounting standards, improved permitting and siting, and financial contracts need to be codified in a way that enables resources to support CDR deployment.
Over the next decade, I’ll be tracking how quickly the field can reach three key indicators:
- Raise at least $100B in new capital from public and private sources, in order to
- build at least 100 commercial scale carbon removal projects of at least 10,000 tonnes/year capacity that will
- deliver at least 100M tons per year of carbon removal collectively.
3. To scale carbon removal, we need new big ideas
The growing focus on implementation in the carbon removal field — whether by allocating government funding, designing corporate voluntary carbon removal contracts, or establishing carbon accounting standards — signals encouraging progress. But as the numbers above suggest, there’s a risk of losing the proverbial forest for the trees.
While voluntary carbon markets can help jumpstart the industry, they are unlikely to sustain large-scale growth. Existing government innovation programs and subsidies for carbon removal are great tools for piloting new technologies but currently lack the scale needed to drive down costs.
DOE’s focus on implementation wasn’t due to a lack of effort to push the political boundaries of what was possible. Rather, we lacked the backing of a sufficient political coalition needed to marshal the spending and/or regulatory changes for continuing to scale carbon removal. Which is why it is so important to (see #4).
4. Think global; act local
Paradoxically, at DOE, I saw the greatest potential for unlocking transformational policy not on international diplomatic trips but at site visits in communities building carbon removal projects today.
During these visits, we spoke with a wide range of stakeholders, including workers, union representatives, community groups, local officials, and businesses in project supply chains. While stakeholders were excited about the climate benefits of carbon removal, their priorities varied: high-quality jobs, investment opportunities, local government revenues for schools and infrastructure, clean water and air, protection from industrial accidents, and the list goes on.
Time and again, I saw that seeing is believing. While analyses showing DAC’s job-creating potential is valuable, seeing workers in hardhats talk excitedly about project development invigorates policymakers in a way that analyses about the macroeconomic or global climate imperative cannot.
Fortunately, with dozens of technology demonstrations launching in the coming years, we have a unique opportunity to showcase why carbon removal projects matter to communities. Ensuring these projects succeed not just technically, but also socially and politically, will help build the grassroots support needed to make the art of the possible align with the climate imperative of carbon removal in the future.
5. Fast followers from industry are essential for scale
One of the most encouraging signs for carbon removal at DOE was the interest from established industries. Banks are building out teams to finance projects and trade carbon removal credits. Multinational energy companies are investing in innovation and project development. Mining and agriculture giants are interested in monetizing their waste streams as inputs into CO2 mineralization supply chains. The early movers in carbon removal are some of the US’ largest businesses, and their investments have clear strategic value aligned with publicly traded shareholder expectations of profits. Their investments aren’t about philanthropy but about business.
I also learned just how hard moving early is for companies. For every early leader in carbon removal, there are dozens more interested but hesitant — struggling to justify investments in carbon removal before the field matures further. That being said, if we keep delaying investment to wait for the moment when the policy or technology mechanisms behind CDR are fully mature, the field will, at best, limp forward and, at worst, begin to deflate.
It is up to fast followers to join the first movers and recognize that their investments today hold immense potential returns. The capital of these large companies — financial, human, and political — is a needed asset in the effort to commercialize carbon removal at the required pace and scale. And the formula for success is straightforward: dedicated vision-setting and public commitments from the C-suite, plus persistent work from corporate managers to build carbon removal strategies uniquely tailored to a given business’s strengths.
6. DOE needs modernization, not destruction
While at DOE, I heard plenty of feedback from private sector stakeholders about how DOE can be more effective. Not once did anyone suggest slashing critical programs or reducing staff indiscriminately as a necessary measure.
Startups and investors saw DOE as essential for catalyzing private innovation. The private sector won’t fund efforts outside its risk-return profile — which describes much of the early-of-kind carbon removal activities that DOE funds. With the right investments, public funding can unlock opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs in a win-win-win for taxpayers, industry, and the climate.
However DOE was designed in the 1970s for a different energy landscape. Its bureaucratic grant and oversight processes hamper entrepreneurs and are poorly suited to support the growth needed for the carbon removal ecosystem. To keep pace, DOE must modernize. For example, DOE can:
- Leverage tools like Other Transaction Authority to streamline grants with less burdensome oversight.
- Fund the National Labs with the multi-year runway and flexibility needed to provide cutting-edge research in a rapidly evolving field.
- Coordinate cross-cutting initiatives to better focus on strategically important technologies, and direct funding accordingly.
- Improve interagency coordination to better align funding and invest in critical infrastructure like long-term funding for carbon monitoring, modeling, and accounting.
7. A strong civil society is critical for a flourishing carbon removal industry of the future
I’ll admit I’m talking my book now that I’ve returned to work on carbon removal from the nonprofit side, but my time at DOE made it clear that civil society is essential for shaping carbon removal’s future.
Without strong non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement, carbon removal won’t move fast enough. As more important and competing decarbonization priorities emerge, a loud and diverse advocacy push is needed — not just to influence government policymakers, but also to propel corporate voluntary climate initiatives, especially in regions where funding for CDR is newer or at a smaller scale. NGOs play a critical role in spearheading the new, transformational policies needed for the CDR field to scale.
Critically, NGOs are needed to work with communities to explain the potential benefits and risks of carbon removal projects. Successful project implementation now hinges on deep stakeholder engagement, yet existing government funding to execute such engagement is limited, and corporate-led efforts are often greeted with significant mistrust. Without trusted messengers delivering clear, evidence-based communication, mistrust and lack of buy-in will stall progress.
Finally, NGOs are needed to ensure projects serve the public, not just industry interests. At DOE, NGOs played a critical role in shaping policy implementation to prevent undue influence from vested interests. Without civil society voices, policymakers struggle to delineate between what industry wants and what industry actually needs for projects to succeed.
8. International coordination on carbon removal needs improvement
Carbon removal has many local benefits, but for its fundamental purpose as a climate solution, its benefits to the atmosphere are truly global. At DOE, I saw that the seeds for international diplomatic collaboration on carbon removal have been planted, but must be nurtured to get to scale.
For example, we currently don’t have a forum for negotiating how much carbon removal each country should be aiming to deploy over the coming decades. Initiatives like the Carbon Management Challenge provide a great platform for hosting these conversations, but they will need dedicated workstreams to help diplomats coordinate ambition on carbon removal. The IPCC has started a process on how carbon removal should be accounted for in national greenhouse gas inventories, but separate diplomatic conversations would be valuable on questions like the role that dual emission reductions or removal targets should play in national goal setting.
In addition, there currently isn’t a means to determine what actually counts as carbon removal today, nor synchronized carbon accounting standards across geographies. This discord goes beyond mere semantics; national actors need to have similar definitions to ensure that the market for carbon removal is consistent across international borders. Initiatives like Mission Innovation do a great job at coordinating research and development across borders, and progress on Article 6 helps with carbon credits more broadly. While this might sound like a trivial question, how lifecycle carbon accounting boundaries are defined can lead to very different outcomes for what projects actually count as carbon removal and what are emissions reductions.
Finally, international coordination will benefit national climate efforts in compounding ways. For example, well-designed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms can incentivize countries to deploy carbon removal to reduce the carbon intensity of their manufacturing and energy sectors. These mechanisms could generate revenue for carbon removal projects in lower-emission regions by collecting funds from higher-emission exporters.
9. There isn’t a universal answer for how to scale carbon removal
At DOE, we received a wide range of suggestions for scaling carbon removal. Some stakeholders pushed for expanding carbon markets, while others dismissed them as ineffective, advocating instead for integrating carbon removal into existing economic activities through pay-for-practice subsidies and regulations. And every solution developer thought we were spending inadequate money on their pathway (which was true,but not unique to any given approach).
At DOE, limited resources meant we couldn’t pursue every promising idea at once, yet we often had a patchwork of funding or external restraints that led us to advance multiple strategies simultaneously. A portfolio of solution pathways and policy approaches can not only coexist, but actually strengthens the CDR industry by enabling more stakeholders to participate and building resilience against setbacks. While prioritizing high-impact efforts is crucial, insisting on a single “perfect” approach is counterproductive and infeasible given policy restrictions.
10. The only certainly wrong answer is doing nothing
The biggest lesson I learned while at DOE is that the only wrong answer to the question “What should I do with respect to carbon removal?” Is taking no action at all.
Yes, the unit costs of early carbon removal projects are high, and methodologies for carbon accounting are still evolving. But that isn’t stopping corporate leaders from supporting voluntary carbon removal purchases today, driving down costs, accelerating learning curves, and ensuring future scalability.
Yes, the long-term demand for carbon removal remains uncertain. But that isn’t stopping institutional investors and large corporations from investing in projects and advancing technologies now — establishing the infrastructure and momentum needed for widespread implementation in the future.
Yes, the local political support that carbon removal projects will generate is still emerging. But that isn’t stopping visionaries from advancing policies that catalyze carbon removal, creating high-quality jobs and economic opportunities, strengthening community buy-in and making long-term deployment politically viable.
And yes, carbon removal will be easier to scale in the future as the field matures. But waiting for that future risks it never arriving at all. While the exact answer may not be clear, we can be certain that it starts with “yes” today.