Google today announced a new commitment to contract at least $35 million in carbon removal credits over the next 12 months as part of a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) initiative aimed at helping scale the carbon removal industry. carbon, financing the carbon removal sector. innovations and technology.
In a post announcing the new commitment, Randy Spock, Google's carbon credits and removals lead, said:
“This mutually reinforcing public-private support model is an important tool for commercializing carbon removal solutions. As with many emerging technologies, governments and companies have a critical and complementary role to play in demonstrating promising carbon removal approaches and bringing them to commercial scale.”
According to the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate change mitigation study released in 2022, scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C include carbon dioxide removal methods that could reach billions of tons of removal annually over the next few decades. The report also noted, however, that while there are multiple solutions for capturing and storing CO2, most are in the early stages and currently on a limited scale.
As part of its efforts to help grow the industry, DOE launched Carbon Negative Shot in 2021, with the goal of supporting innovation in CO2 removal pathways – such as direct air capture (DAC), soil carbon sequestration , ocean-based CO2 removal and reforestation, among others – to enable carbon capture and storage at gigaton scales for less than $100 per net metric ton of CO2e by 2032. In September 2023, DOE announced the Award Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot, through which raised $35 million in available financing to purchase carbon removal credits to help support commercial carbon dioxide removal companies.
In an effort to expand investment to other companies and organizations, DOE today announced the Carbon Dioxide Removal Voluntary Purchase Challenge, calling on organizations “to make bigger and bolder purchase commitments public, as DOE did with its own $35 million carbon removal purchasing pilot,” and providing supporting materials for buyers to make larger carbon removal purchases, while also helping carbon removal credit providers find more customers.
The DOE said it will create a public leaderboard recognizing buyers and tracking voluntary carbon removal purchases.
Google is the first company to join the challenge, matching the DOE's own $35 million commitment.
In a post announcing the new Challenge, the DOE said:
“Working together, this public-private initiative has the potential to unlock game-changing capital for high-quality, affordable carbon dioxide removal in time to meet our climate goals.
“To that end, we are excited to see Google announce today that it is committing to match DOE's $35 million initiative to support carbon removal solutions. We plan to highlight similar announcements going forward.”
