Google's historic carbon deal & other key climate innovation updates
The climate action landscape is rapidly evolving, from Google's record-breaking carbon removal deal using crushed rocks to new global trading standards at COP29. With Amazon exploring AI-designed carbon capture materials and fresh insights suggesting a more affordable energy transition, innovation and opportunity are reshaping our approach to climate challenges.?
Let's explore these developments in detail and examine what they mean for the future of sustainable business and climate action.
Google signs its largest ever carbon removal deal to capture CO2 in crushed rocks and soil
Google announced today an agreement for the purchase of 200,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits, to be earned through capturing CO2 in crushed rock and storing it in soil, with enhanced rock weathering (ERW) startup Terradot. Google has also announced an equity investment in Terradot.
The agreement, which will see the credits delivered beginning in 2029, marks the largest ERW deal to date, as well as Google’s largest ever carbon dioxide removal (CDR) purchase agreement, following a commitment announced in March by the company to contract for at least $35 million of carbon removal credits over the next 12 months.
Founded in 2022 by James Kanoff, Sasankh Munukutl and Scott Fendorf, Terradot provides a carbon removal solution based on transforming the natural process of rock weathering.?
The company’s solution speeds up the natural process through which CO2 from rainwater is locked into rocks over time, by crushing basalt rock and spreading it over vast areas of farmlands, with an additional benefit of improving soil health at the same time. The company is currently running scaled pilot operations in Brazil, which it notes is an optimal location due to a combination of tropical soils, strength in agriculture, and 93 percent clean electricity matrix.
Terradot also announced that it has raised $54 million in a Series A funding round, led by John Doerr, and participation by individual investors Sheryl Sandberg, Tom Bernthal, and George Roberts, as well as Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, Google, Cisco, and Venture Funds, Floodgate, Kleiner Perkins, Acre Venture Partners, Gigascale Capital, Valor Capital, Ponderosa Ventures, among others.
Critical analysis of the new global carbon trading market
Our planet’s future hangs in the balance due to the unabated greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Treating these emissions as something that can be owned and exchanged in a market has been touted as a solution since the early 1990s, when UN negotiations to agree a limit to global heating began. At the latest round of talks in Azerbaijan, countries finally agreed rules for a global carbon credit market.?
This analysis studies the world’s current largest scheme: the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS). The ETS, like any other market, is plagued by price speculation and fraud. If this template is replicated on a global scale it will simply waste precious time that could be used to arrest and reverse greenhouse emissions.
?The EU ETS is not the same as the UN carbon credit market. We still do not know what mechanisms the latter will use to generate a price on carbon. However, as both have their origins in the Kyoto protocol of 1997, the first global agreement to limit climate change which was replaced by the Paris accords in 2021, we can expect the UN carbon credit market to at least resemble the EU ETS.
The energy transition will be much cheaper than you think
Most analysts overestimate energy demand and underestimate technological advances. The Economist has looked at estimates of the global cost of an “energy transition” to a zero-emissions world from a range of economists, consultants and other researchers—the sort of estimates that routinely form the basis for policymaking. They range from around $3trn a year to almost $12trn a year, which is indeed a lot. But these figures are overblown in four important ways.
Xpansiv adds carbon removal trading on its platform
Xpansiv, a platform for spot exchange of environmental commodities, announced the launch of new features that enable the trading of carbon removals along with a sophisticated portfolio management system.?
With the new offering, Xpansiv users will now be able to trade and manage carbon removal credits in a discreet market segment on the CBL Spot Exchange, labeled as the world’s largest spot exchange for CO2 credits.?
To ease the management of activity, the platform also introduced the refined Xpansiv Connect? Portfolio Management System, which allows clients to access all, multi-registry, transfers in just one screen.?
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Global carbon market taking shape through approval of standards at COP29
At COP29, the Supervisory Body adopted two sets of standards. One set of standards addresses the requirements for the methodologies that are used to assess creditable emissions reductions or removals in the UN-backed carbon market.
For example, the methodologies should contain provisions to ensure that all emissions reductions or removals are real, transparent, conservative, and credible through third-party verification systems, data-driven technical performance standards, and transparent demonstrations of the changes in GHG emissions achieved by and attributable to the activity.
Furthermore, the methodologies must require the participant to identify the business-as-usual emissions or reference benchmark emissions against which the emissions reduction activity can be assessed.
The methodologies must also specify the approach to demonstrating the additionally of the activity and avoid leakage. Additionally must be demonstrated using a robust assessment that (1) shows the activity would not have occurred without the incentives from the carbon credits, (2) accounts for all relevant national policies, and (3) exceeds any mitigation that is required by law or regulation.
Switzerland to require companies to disclose 2050-aligned net zero roadmaps
The Swiss government announced the launch of a consultation on a series of new proposals to update its sustainability-related disclosure rules for companies, including a requirement for companies to provide plans to align with Switzerland’s net zero by 2050 climate target, and for climate-related reporting to be based on standards such as the ISSB or the EU’s ESRS.?
Amazon to pilot AI-designed material for carbon removal
Amazon plans to pilot a new carbon-removal material for data centers, which are at risk of worsening emissions from artificial intelligence systems they power, a startup behind the deal said on Monday.
In a twist, AI itself, from the startup Orbital Materials, is what designed the carbon-filtering substance, its Chief? Executive Jonathan Godwin said.
"It's like a sponge at the atomic level," Godwin told Reuters. "Each cavity in that sponge has a specific size opening that interacts well with CO2, that doesn’t interact with other things."
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Best regards,
Team Tracer
Developing solutions that are good for the bottom-line, the community and the planet.
2 个月Nice to see the legend John Doerr investing in carbon removal technology!
Digital growth executive
2 个月Terradot congrats!