🔥 The 2024 State of CDR Report is out! 🔥

❓ Are we actually on track to scale carbon dioxide removal (hashtag#CDR) to the levels we need? And how much exactly do we really need?

💡 The State of CDR Report (hashtag#SoCDR), now in its second edition, is your one-stop shop to answer these and many other questions. It brings together the brightest minds in CDR to compile an impressive 200 page report covering everything from policy, to R&D, to the market, and much more.

Here are some highlights I took away from reading it:

🎯 Targets: we will need between 3.8 Gt in 2050 (very unlikely) to 9.8Gt of CDR per year by 2050. The amount of CDR proposed by governments around the world falls way short of what is required to meet the Paris temperature goal – the so-called hashtag#CDRgap.

📊 Amounts: today, we remove over 2 Gt/year already. However, novel CDR accounts for only around 0.0013 Gt of this leading with biochar carbon removal (hashtag#BCR) at 0.79 Mt, hashtag#BECCS at 0.51 Mt, hashtag#DACCS at 0.004 Mt, and enhanced weathering (hashtag#EW) at approximately 0.03 MtCO2.

📈 Models: almost all 630 IPCC models include conventional CDR (620), most include BECCS (601), some DACCS (217), but almost none EW (15) or BCR (1). Shocking to me how low these last two numbers are given the potential of non-CCS CDR methods.

💱 Voluntary carbon market (hashtag#VCM): credits issued for conventional CDR fell in 2023 from 20.4 million to 13.3 million, while purchases of future novel CDR credits grew from 600,000 to 4.6 million. The VCM accounts for only 2% of total carbon trade, with compliance markets (emissions trading schemes) covering the other 98%.

💵 Price: on average, credits from conventional CDR methods (which ranged from $12 to $16 in 2023) cost three times more than credits generated from emission reduction or avoidance projects. The average weighted price for novel CDR credits (which ranged from $111 to $1,608 in 2023) exceeds the price for credits from emission reduction or avoidance projects by a factor of 100.

😍 Finally, I was glad to see a whole chapter dedicated to monitoring, reporting, and verification (hashtag#MRV). The report rightly points to the central role MRV will play in scaling CDR to climate relevance, as well as the huge complexity we currently see in the market. This is the raison d’etre of Carbonfuture, and we look forward to helping solve this challenge.

🔗 I highly recommend reading the full report - download it here: https://lnkd.in/dUb2KSrk

👏 Shout-out to the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment - University of Oxford as well as the lead authors for their outstanding work: Steve Smith, Oliver Geden, Matthew GIDDEN, William F. Lambi, Greg Nemet, Jan Minx, Holly Jean Buck, Josh Burke FRSA, Emily Cox, Edward Morgan, Sabine Fuss, Injy Johnstone, Finn Müller-Hansen, Julia Pongratz, Benedict Probst, Stephanie Roex, Felix Schenuit, Ingrid Schulte, Naomi E. Vaughan and all the incredible co-authors.

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