We’re back!
It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us on either the newsletter or the podcast, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been twiddling our thumbs watching that listener number go up. Rather, we’ve been hard at work getting the building blocks in place for our next batch of episodes.
To do this, we’ve been travelling far and wide. We were delighted to be asked to host some panels at last week’s CO2RE’s UK Greenhouse Gas Removal conference in London, which Tom and Emily thoroughly enjoyed.
And today our hosts, along with Producer Ben and Researcher Henry, are setting course for Reykjavik for Iceland Innovation Week (May 16th-20th)! We’ll be hosting a carbon removal panel, visiting some of Iceland’s many carbon capture projects and, of course, going for a dip in the Blue Lagoon.
But we’re not just doing this for the mineral-rich geothermal spa water. We wanted to go to CO2RE and Iceland to speak to the people at the heart of carbon removal policy, research and implementation. We wanted to hear their takes on the state of carbon removal right now; to understand the recent progress and upcoming challenges from their point of view, and bring that to you.
We’re hoping to have that for you in the form of some lovely new episodes of The Carbon Removal Show shortly. In the meantime though, Tom has written about his experiences at the CO2RE conference. After a day full of conversations and new information, Tom left with plenty to think about.
Enjoy!
Tom’s diary
There’s this exhausted sense of achievement you get from spending all day at a conference. Your voice is hoarse from chatting to so many people, your legs ache and your mind struggles to make sense of all the information you’ve soaked up. I can’t say the same for my fellow attendees but that was how I felt at 5:30pm on Friday 13th May, at the end of the CO2RE’s UK Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) conference.
The CO2RE hub is funded through the UKRI SPF Greenhouse Gas Removal Demonstrators (GGR-D) Programme. It conducts research, coordinates demonstration projects around the UK, connects to other relevant national and international programmes, and commissions grants through a flexible fund. The GGR-D Programme also funds five GGR Demonstrator projects trialing the scale up of several GGR options: afforestation, peatland restoration, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, and bioenergy crops.
The day began at 9:30am at the IET London: Savoy Place, on the Victoria Embankment. One might think this regal looking building were too grand and traditional a setting for a conference on a nascent, highly technical industry cleaning up CO2 and other GHGs from the atmosphere, however, Director of CO2RE - Steve Smith neatly framed the relevance of the location in his keynote, siting Victoria Embankment as the centre of a similarly ambitious environmental project in 1870 - the great cleanup of the River Thames.
The title of the day was ‘The UK Greenhouse Gas Removal Landscape’ and things got started with a keynote from Prof Mark Taylor - Deputy Director - Energy Innovation, Department for Business. He detailed GGRs place in the UK government's Net Zero Strategy (page 28 of 368!). The Govt has set the ambition of deploying at least 5 MtCO2/year for engineered removals by 2030 and to deliver £100 million innovation funding across the spread of solutions. Considering we removed roughly 500,000tCO2 in 2021 globally, the ambitions feel high and certainly would cement the UK as a leader if we are to succeed these targets. This set the stage for the 5 demonstrator projects: afforestation, peatland restoration, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, and bioenergy crops, to showcase their approaches and findings.
The rest of the afternoon consisted of pan
el discussions, covering an ambitious range of topics:
Taking stock - the state of UK GGR research and policy
Green shoots - Scaling GGR rapidly, effectively, sustainably and equitably
Offshore - How is GGR developing elsewhere, and what does this mean for the UL?
Who is investing in GGR, and why?
The full agenda for the conference, speakers and exhibitors can be found here.
As a podcast covering this space, we had a field day with so many academics, policy makers and business minds. Over dinner the night before and some early morning planning, we put together a hit-list of attendees we hoped to grab 5-minutes with, and we were fortunate enough to have the help of the CO2RE organisers to corner these unsuspecting ‘guests’ for comment, on their panel or the day in general. It was the first chance we had being in the same room as so many influential industry voices, so we had to take the chance, even if that meant embarrassing ourselves and interrupting conversations.
We’ll be putting together a podcast episode on the day itself so stay tuned, but it made sense to end with a few key takeaways.
An industry that exploded over lockdown, only now connecting in person.
This industry has really exploded since COVID-19 and as such, we got the feeling that a UK specific conference on GGR was long overdue and the feeling was mutual from the attendees we spoke to
A mix of voices.
We were impressed with the range in voices in attendance. This event had almost every stakeholder in the room, from academia to business to finance to policy, however, the voices of the stakeholders that may be impacted by the growth of this industry i.e. farmers and even the voices of the youth were missing and this is something to shoot for in the next conference
Scaling equitably.
The panel which I chaired really focused on this aspect. Scaling this industry equitably affects stakeholders differently whether you look at more nature based approaches versus engineered. Nature based scaling is already facing major hurdles - land grabbing from rich businesses, buying up land to plant forests is outpricing the local communities that live in those areas and forcing farmers etc. If this is happening in the UK, what are the international effects?
Money is flooding in - should we be cautious?
2022 seems to have been a huge year already for GGR with regards to funding. Stripe launched a new $1Billion fund with the likes of Alphabet etc. and another fund Lower Carbon Capital also announced a $350million fund, whilst DAC company Climeworks raised $650million. This doesn’t show signs of letting up but should we be cautious of the amount of money that’s pouring into GGR? We also heard the ambitions of Banks like Bank of America on a panel discussing their interest and engagement with brinig institutional capital to the space. What are the potential knock on effects of this much money and is it going in for the right reasons?
It’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘how’.
An overwhelming positive I will be taking away from the conference was the feeling that conversations around carbon removal are no longer an if we should be doing this, but now a how. The latest IPCC report that dropped in April 2022 hammers home this feeling by making it clear that carbon removal is ‘unavoidable’ if we are to reach our net zero goals.
Special thanks to the CO2RE team for inviting us down and to all our unsuspecting guests we accosted on the day! It feels like the end of the beginning for carbon removal in the UK. The industry is certainly having its moment and we can’t wait to share it with all our listeners.