Can carbon removal become a trillion-dollar business?

livemint.com:

Climeworks, a Swiss firm, Global Thermostat, a Californian one, and myriad startups worldwide, are attracting capital. Occidental plans to build 100 large-scale DAC facilities by 2035. Others are trying to mop up CO2 produced by power plants and industrial processes before it enters the atmosphere, an approach known as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

In April ExxonMobil unveiled plans for its newish low-carbon division, whose long-term goal is to offer such decarbonisation as a service for industrial customers in sectors, like steel and cement, where emissions are otherwise hard to abate. The oil giant thinks this sector could be raking in annual revenues of $6trn globally by 2050. The boom in carbon removal, whether from the air or from industrial point sources, cannot come fast enough.

The UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes that if Earth is to have a chance of warming by less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, renewables, electric vehicles and other emissions reductions are not enough. CCS and sources of “negative emissions" such as DAC must play a part. The Department of Energy calculates that America’s climate targets require capturing and storing between 400m and 1.8bn tonnes of CO2 annually by 2050, up from 20m tonnes today.

Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, reckons various forms of carbon removal account for a fifth of the global emissions reductions needed to emit no net greenhouse gases by 2050. If Wood Mackenzie is right, this would be equivalent to sucking up more than 8bn tonnes of CO2 annually. That means an awful lot of industrial-scale carbon-removal ventures (see chart 1).