Creating a technical backbone for the carbon removal industry

The carbon removal industry receives no shortage of criticism, on everything from measurement inconsistency to barriers to scale. But a new organization, launched today, hopes to address those challenges by building a technical backbone for industry policy.

The Carbon Removal Standards Initiative is an independent nonprofit organization funded by Carbon180, Breakthrough Energy, and the Linden Trust Foundation among others. It is setting out to develop independent standards for each carbon removal pathway, from direct air capture to enhanced rock weathering. 

The organization spun out of Carbon180’s Entrepreneurs in Residence program. But its primary origins are earlier, in a 2023 open letter from carbon removal stakeholders, calling for an independent standards body.

Signatories, including representatives from major CDR companies and offtakers, acknowledged that various methods are at various stages of maturity, and therefore required “a similar diversity of scientific approaches to verification…that enables comparisons across pathways and effectively verifies delivered removal.”

Firming up standards with industry

Anu Khan, CRSI founder and executive director, said that measurement, reporting, and verification (or MRV) is what connects supply and demand in a marketplace. Within the MRV processes, stakeholders need tools, standards, data management, and enforcement. And it’s in the standards component where CRSI is looking to fill a gap: developing consistent, science-based rules that are pathway specific.

“There’s a lot of work in the carbon removal ecosystem, specifically around the voluntary market, to create these meta standards, this bar for quality,” Khan said. “We are not doing that.”

Instead, CRSI is focused “in the weeds” of creating consistency in measurement.

“Standards are fundamental to growing the market, and to it operating efficiently,” Khan added. “I don’t mean that in the sense of one credit standard to rule them all — I mean all of the little pieces, when you’re writing a contract, when you’re doing procurement in your value chain. Standardizing all of that supports the market.”

That’s what Khan calls a “bottom up” approach. Instead of designing a “meta standard,” the organization is focused on building standards that are pathway-specific but also target CDR embedded in existing industries.

“We are sticking CDR everywhere we can and exploiting those opportunities to scale,” she said, pointing to industries like wastewater management, soil pH management, and mining.

That approach will also help to make CRSI work more immune to the changing political landscape, she added.

“The thing that’s really powerful about embedding CDR in other industries, using the standards and regulatory architecture of those industries, is that it doesn’t get undone,” Khan said. Those industry standards don’t tend to be targets for those looking to undo climate policy, she added: “It just runs in the background.”

Liftoff projects

At the time of its launch, CRSI already has a handful of projects already in the works.

The first is a database of existing quantification tools and approaches — a map of how various entities in CDR have approached MRV to date. The repository is broken down by pathway, and type of measurement (direct measurement, assumption, or proxy measurement, for example).

Another project is focusing specifically on jurisdiction-level monitoring of enhanced weathering, and developing quantification standards that will ultimately be needed to create something like agricultural subsidies.

There are two main components to that project, Khan said. The first is a technical framework, created in collaboration with researchers at Yale and Georgia Tech, which will focus on answering questions like how stakeholders will know if they’ve removed carbon at scale over multiple years, and what and how often to take measurements. And for the second, CRSI will work to develop policy recommendations for implementing that framework for jurisdictions including the U.S. federal government.

“What’s unique about carbon removal is that it’s a public good; there’s really no natural market for people to use it for something other than the public good,” Khan added. “That means carbon removal is going to be largely policy driven.” 

Based on the assumption that CDR will be largely policy-driven — a reality that is already starting to play out in both the United States via DOE’s procurement pilot, and Canada, where CDR is included in a sustainable aviation fuel purchasing mandate — CRSI is designed in part as a resource for the regulators and policymakers who will ultimately be writing rules for carbon removal.

Those are people who are unlikely to be experts in the intricacies of individual pathways, Khan said. “They’re going to need information about how you quantify carbon for a pathway that is evidence-based and reflects the best available science,” she added. And that information shouldn’t only come from the CDR providers themselves.

“We’ve seen over and over in the voluntary carbon market that industry can’t be the only voice in that conversation,” Khan said, pointing to nonprofit, advocacy, and community engagement groups.

But, she added, no one in civil society is currently equipped or organized to do the work that’s necessary at this early stage of the market’s development. 

“It’s pretty detailed, technical work, and it's not really anyone’s job right now in the CDR ecosystem,” she said. “So at CRSI we’re making it our job to provide that technical assistance, and that financially unconflicted voice to support standards, and support better, faster, more carbon removal policy.”