De-Risking the Path to Scaling CDR Through Shared Infrastructure and Long-Term Offtake Agreements

This episode features interviews with Rob Niven (CEO and Chair of Carbon Cure), Shashank Samala (Co-Founder and CEO of Heirloom), Natalia Dorfman (Co-Founder and CEO of Kita), Mike Kelland (Co-Founder and CEO of Planetary), Peter Reinhardt (Co-Founder and CEO at Charm Industrial), Adrian Corless (CEO at CarbonCapture), and Stacy Kauk (Head of Sustainability at Shopify)

This episode is sponsored by Carbonfuture.

Carbonfuture is an end-to-end platform for companies that want to participate in removing carbon from the atmosphere. Unlike conventional marketplaces, Carbonfuture’s monitoring, reporting, and verification platform solves carbon credit uncertainty for buyers like Microsoft and SwissRe while Carbonfuture’s support helps scale the world’s most promising carbon removal ventures for real climate impact.

2022 has been a big year for carbon removal. I remember saying the same thing about CDR in 2021, and I’m excited to see what 2023 will bring.

Since the launch of this podcast in June, I’ve interviewed scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy experts on what it’s going to take to reach gigaton-scale carbon removal (CDR).

In the US, we’ve seen the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that supports ambitious initiatives like the Direct Air Capture Hubs Program … and of course, the Inflation Reduction Act, a huge win for the climate, and for CDR through the expansion of the 45Q tax credit.

In addition, Frontier Climate, an advance market commitment that provides much-needed revenues to advance the CDR space, launched this past year and has supported a number of CDR companies with pre-purchase and long-term purchase agreements.

There is still a lot to be done to scale CDR, from policy to financing to measurement, reporting, and verification - especially for non-direct air capture CDR methods. But with early policy and financing wins in the books, and programs like DAC Hubs finally getting underway, the focus is shifting to implementation.

So I wanted to use this episode to highlight some of the excellent insights from entrepreneurs, and folks who support those entrepreneurs, from episodes that were recorded over the last year on what it will take to scale CDR.

I’ve had a ton of great guests on this show, so it wasn’t easy to put together a greatest-hits episode like this. So I wanted to use this opportunity to shine a spotlight on entrepreneurs in the space running CDR start-ups and organizations that will be critical in implementing CDR at scale.

In this episode, you’ll hear from (links to full episodes):

* Rob Niven, Chair and CEO at Carbon Cure

* Shashank Samala, Co-Founder and CEO at Heirloom

* Natalia Dorfman, Co-Founder and CEO at Kita

* Mike Kelland, Co-Founder and CEO at Planetary

* Peter Reinhardt, Co-Founder and CEO at Charm Industrial

* Adrian Corless, CEO and CTO at CarbonCapture

* Stacy Kauk, Head of Sustainability at Shopify

2022 was a busy year. Here are some of my favorite Carbon Curve posts, episodes, and projects from this last year worth checking out:

* 🇨🇦 Canada: The next leader in carbon dioxide removal?

* 💵 Rapidly reducing the costs of carbon removal (guest post by Grant Faber)

* 💵 Three innovative funding solutions for carbon removal (co-authored with Max Bode and Johannes Lohmann)

* 🎙️ My podcast episode with Peter Minor at Carbon180 on high-accountability measurement, reporting and verification

* 🎙️ My episode with Celina Scott-Buechler at Data for Progress on equitable CDR deployment

* ✈️ My report with Clean Air Task Force on decarbonizing aviation

* 🏭 My report with CarbonPlan on the barriers to scaling the CDR industry

* 🌎 Three countries positioned to lead on government procurement of carbon removal

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app or subscribe via The Carbon Curve newsletter here. If you’d like to get in touch with Na’im, you can reach out via Twitter and LinkedIn.

Na’im Merchant, Founder and Managing Director of Carbon Curve, is an advisor and thought partner to start-ups, policy groups, and research organizations on scaling up climate technologies to meet the monumental challenge of removing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. Every week, Na’im will release a short interview with individuals advancing bold new ideas and taking a collective action approach to scaling up carbon removal.

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