Carbon dioxide removal will be required at a massive scale in order to achieve net zero. Today, 99.9% of carbon removal comes from land management practices, but to address our global emissions challenges, novel carbon removal approaches will need to be developed and scaled. We are in the formative decade for the development of innovative carbon removal solutions, so they can be deployed at meaningful scale in the coming decades.
The novel, durable carbon removal space is rapidly growing – from approximately $0 in purchase commitments in 2019 to more than $2 billion today, driven by interest from corporates like Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, McKinsey who formed Frontier Climate, as well as many others. We expect this market to be in the billions by the end of the decade; Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Boston Consulting Group think so, too.
We believe that for carbon removal approaches to be successful, they need to be cheap, durable, measurable, and have the potential to reach a meaningful scale.
One interesting approach has been ocean alkalinity enhancement, which involves adding alkaline substances to seawater to accelerate the absorption of carbon by Earth’s oceans. However, there are some risks and unknown unknowns involved in this tinkering, and these processes can be complex to measure and verify.
We are excited to share that Evergreen recently invested in Aquarry. Aquarry uses flooded open pit mines to capture and store CO2. Think of it as ocean-less alkalinity enhancement for safe, measurable, and durable carbon removal. Pit lakes are more of a closed system than the world’s oceans, and as former mines, the addition of alkalinity can actually help to remediate these sites.
We are impressed by the Aquarry team, who bring industrial R&D, startup, and deep technical expertise to solving this challenge. Their single step, low-cost, low-energy, durable, measurable process aligns well with what we consider to be important criteria for scalable carbon removal.
We are extremely excited to be working with co-founders Kate Murphy and Spencer Whitman as they develop this unique pathway for carbon removal.
Aquarry founders, Spencer Whitman and Kate Murphy.
