Reaching gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removal by midcentury is essential to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change — but removal of that magnitude doesn’t happen overnight. Carbon180’s Road to 2030 provides actionable policy blueprints across ocean, technological, and agricultural carbon removal pathways. Charting the course to responsibly remove 30 million metric tons of CO₂ in the US per year by 2030, these roadmaps offer recommendations for concrete policy priorities designed for today’s political moment.
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has the potential to grow into a trillion-dollar industry this century, underpinned by scientific recommendations that addressing climate change requires both cutting emissions and actively pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and durably storing it.
The US has the innovation ecosystem, technical expertise, and geologic resources to deploy CDR technologies at scale and lead the global market. Despite a sizable industry presence of over 200 CDR companies and bipartisan support for continued federal investment, the policy landscape cannot currently support industry growth at scale. Authorized funding remains unspent and bipartisan legislation that would accelerate commercialization sits idle — all while countries around the world including Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the European Union plan to integrate CDR into regulatory frameworks that could provide a market for US developers.
Technological CDR is no longer an abstract scientific concept. Direct air capture facilities are coming online. Biomass carbon removal projects have been contracted to remove more than 20 million tons of CO₂. Now is the time to invest in these technologies that will advance our climate goals and create jobs in every region of the country. Despite early momentum, continued growth of this nascent industry will depend on policy.
Our newly released federal policy roadmap, Scaling Technology-based Carbon Dioxide Removal: A US Federal Policy Roadmap, is a concrete guide for policymakers to address the existing gaps to tech CDR deployment. It identifies the four barriers standing between where carbon removal is today and where it needs to be. These include:
- Public Funding. Early-stage R&D and large-scale infrastructure have no natural private funders. Without purpose-built policies that treat carbon removal as a public good, the sector will remain underfunded.
- Demand. Projects can’t reach final investment decisions without a deep pool of credible buyers. The voluntary market has been catalytic but is too shallow and concentrated to provide the amount of demand needed for the industry to scale. In 2025, Microsoft alone accounted for over 90% of total carbon removal purchases.
- Standards. At least 139 different MMRV protocols have been identified across carbon removal pathways. This patchwork undermines buyer confidence and creates accountability gaps.
- Community Trust. The loss of public trust is among the greatest risks to scaling carbon removal. Projects developed without authentic community engagement face litigation, delays, and opposition.
Our recommendations to address these gaps are built around existing statutory authority, unspent appropriations, and targeted reforms, organized around four enabling conditions that must advance in parallel. Boosting federal research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D), building infrastructure, creating durable markets, and strengthening standards. Advancing these goals concurrently will build the policy, infrastructure, and market systems required for CDR to scale. The table below includes a sample of our suite of recommendations.
| Enabling Condition | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment (RDD&D) | Amend the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to ensure the Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs Program achieves maximum impact by 1) reducing the annual capture requirement from 1 million tons CO₂/year to 100,000 tons CO₂/year; 2) expanding eligibility to include other durable CDR technologies; and 3) allowing alternative funding mechanisms. |
| Infrastructure | Increase funding and staffing at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to improve the efficiency of issuing Class VI well permits — the infrastructure that enables durable CO₂ storage and is regulated by the EPA to protect sources of drinking water. |
| Durable Markets | Codify a federal purchasing program with specific evaluation guidelines that set high standards for quality CDR and attract additional buyers from the private sector. |
| Standards and Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MMRV) | Invest in MMRV R&D to improve the science underlying protocols, enable inter-pathway comparisons, and establish an inclusive federal advisory process that brings communities, scientists, and policymakers together to define credible standards that reflect technical, social, and environmental considerations. |
The decisions made in the next few years will determine whether the US continues to lead in technological CDR or follow. If you’re a policymaker, researcher, or advocate ready to help move CDR forward, this roadmap is your starting point.
Edited by Ana Little-Saña. Image by John Ko.