This week, Representatives Tonko and Peters and Senators Whitehouse and Coons reintroduced the Carbon Dioxide Removal Leadership Act (CDRLA), a thoughtful proposal to establish a federal carbon removal purchasing program. As we have written over the years, the federal government is uniquely positioned to support the responsible growth of high-quality carbon removal solutions, across technological pathways and in communities throughout the country. By authorizing a purchasing program with specific evaluation criteria and ambitious volume targets for the next decade, the federal government can provide the type of market certainty needed for this nascent industry to raise capital, expand operations and lower costs, and reach the scale needed to ultimately meet our climate goals.
Voluntary purchases have largely buoyed the industry to date, but the pool of purchasers is too small and too concentrated to drive industry growth at scale. As we have seen in recent months, individual voluntary purchasers can have an outsized — and potentially destabilizing — impact on the carbon removal sector’s trajectory. Congress has recognized this vulnerability and acted on a bipartisan basis to fund federal purchasing efforts at the Department of Energy. But the vast majority of that funding remains unspent, and existing guidelines for purchasing are too broad to support consistent administration throughout different political environments. Authorizing a specific purchasing program would provide much-needed certainty to accelerate the development and deployment of carbon removal across technological pathways. And new inclusions in this version of the bill propose to prioritize projects that demonstrate an ability to bend the cost of removals below specified targets and create meaningful economic benefits for host communities and across domestic supply chains.
The reintroduction of this bill is timely. The European Union (EU) just announced plans to integrate certain carbon removal solutions into its Emissions Trading System (ETS). While initial eligibility in the carbon removal program is limited to EU direct air capture (DAC) and bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS) projects, the pool could expand to include international removals and removals from a broader suite of pathways. The United States needs to invest now in the policy support needed to deploy the technologies that could potentially fulfill that source of demand. Consistent purchasing of carbon removal with transparent evaluation guidelines is a high-leverage federal investment to ensure US carbon removal developers grow responsibly and are positioned to lead this expanding global industry.
We look forward to continuing to work with Congress to advance the CDRLA and complementary legislation to ensure federal purchasing policy unlocks the full potential of carbon removal.
Edited by Ana Little-Saña. Image by Matthias Zomer.