Throughout this blog, we’ll draw on 📑 C-QuIP, our interactive knowledge management system. Learn more about the tool on our blog.
There is a multi-billion-ton gap between what current policy approaches to carbon removal can achieve and what climate science says we need. There’s growing consensus that filling this gap requires a creative approach to CDR deployment, embedding CDR solutions in every sector of society and leveraging existing physical and policy infrastructure to do more with less. But our initial research suggests that there are 📑 dozens of embedded CDR solutions, each requiring highly contextualized, jurisdiction- and industry-specific support.
How should the CDR community identify, prioritize, and activate these opportunities?
At CRSI, we’ve developed a simple framework to guide our work on integrated CDR solutions.
- First, find carbon removal flows inside existing industries.
- Second, match these removal solutions with the right policy support tools.
- Third, measure the resulting carbon to prove impact.
In this blog, we take a closer look at each step and what it means in practice.
The Find-Match-Measure Framework
Find
Carbon is 📑 cycling through the Earth system all the time, and many of these fluxes and reservoirs can be altered by carbon removal approaches such as enhanced weathering or BiCRS. We map where these flows intersect with existing industrial processes and assess the carbon removal potential at these intersections under different technology development, economic growth, and decarbonization scenarios. Once we understand physically where the CDR potential lies, we can also assess barriers, risks, and opportunities to scaling carbon removal flows, considering costs, co-benefits, value-added co-products, and environmental impacts.
Match
There’s a suite of 📑 CDR policies under development across 75+ jurisdictions. Separately, industries from agriculture to waste management are subject to sector- and jurisdiction-specific regulations and standards. Once an opportunity for carbon removal is identified within an industry, we look to that sector’s existing policy infrastructure to analyze appropriate support mechanisms for CDR integrations. With this information, we can help policymakers and regulators modify existing policies to enable CDR or develop new policies when needed.
Measure
Ultimately, the goal is to clean up carbon pollution in the atmosphere. 📑 Accurate quantification of carbon removal outcomes is essential. All CDR policies, integrated or otherwise, must be backed by fit-for-purpose carbon standards, tools, models, and monitoring systems. Where science is still evolving, we support foundational learning and data collection to fill knowledge gaps. Where we understand measurement and monitoring needs, we focus on leveraging existing public and private infrastructure to decrease cost and speed adoption of CDR solutions.
This table breaks out specific activities for each step of Find-Match-Measure.
Wastewater as an example integration
Across the globe, communities must collect, treat, and safely release massive volumes of water. Wastewater management is already a scaled, well-established industry in many countries, and is likely to grow as more of the world builds clean water infrastructure. Wastewater is also a large source of greenhouse gases, an estimated 1–2% of global GHG emissions.
Find
Wastewater treatment facilities use microbes to break down organic matter. It’s important to maintain pH in the optimal range to keep the microbial community humming. pH management is also important for keeping wastewater effluent (the stuff that flows out of the plant) at a safe level for people and the environment, usually codified in local and federal regulations.
This process is a carbon removal opportunity, depending on how you draw your boundaries and how much you shift the pH. Adding alkaline chemicals to these systems—commonly referred to as 📑 wastewater alkalinity enhancement—can convert carbon of biological origin into aqueous bicarbonate ions that flow to and are eventually stored in the ocean.
With this intersection of wastewater and carbon removal in mind, we and our partners across the CDR ecosystem can ask questions like:
- What is the carbon removal potential for wastewater alkalinity enhancement globally?
- What, if any, additional infrastructure is needed to enable this integration?
- What are the additional costs (both capital and operating) incurred in implementation?
Match
In addition to understanding the physical opportunities for and constraints on wastewater alkalinity enhancement, we need to understand the regulatory requirements that wastewater treatment facilities must meet and the policy support mechanisms in place to help facility operators meet those requirements.
The Carbon Removal Alliance and member company CREW Carbon analyzed US federal policies relevant to wastewater and found several opportunities, from technical assistance grants to large infrastructure investment funds and regulatory emissions limits. CarbonGap is similarly exploring policy opportunities for wastewater CDR in the European Union. Sub-national governments also play an important role in regulating outflows from wastewater systems and permitting facility updates, which will impact CDR outcomes.
Taken together, we see a range of possible policy support mechanisms for wastewater alkalinity enhancement, along the entire research, development, demonstration, and deployment pipeline, which requires a nuanced understanding of local history, politics, and economics.
Measure
Any policy support for wastewater alkalinity enhancement is fundamentally predicated on the assumption that this process removes carbon from the atmosphere and, consequently, reduces harm from climate change. WAE has the advantage that the key chemical conversion happens inside a closed physical system. Inputs and outputs can be directly measured before the resulting products are discharged to waterways, which simplifies quantification. At the same time, WAE projects take place inside a net-emitting industry, which raises important questions about where to draw accounting boundaries and how different entities (e.g. carbon credit buyers, municipalities hosting CDR projects) should calculate net removals.
Both process-specific quantification standards and policy-specific accounting standards must be carefully considered when designing policies for WAE.
Putting it all together
Carbon removal integrations need to happen everywhere. In the near-term, integrated projects help us permit and pilot CDR solutions quickly, leveraging existing physical infrastructure. In the long run, integrations diversify our portfolio of CDR approaches and tap into a broader range of policy mechanisms, reducing the overall economic and political cost of scaling the carbon removal industry.
We hope our Find-Match-Measure framework can be a useful tool for the CDR community to identify, prioritize, and activate embedded CDR opportunities. We also hope the framework can help CDR practitioners and experts in other industries find common ground and work towards mutually beneficial solutions.
To learn more about what this can look like in practice, read our latest paper, Enhanced Weathering and Working Lands, which applies the Find-Match-Measure framework to enhanced weathering and agricultural subsidies.