1) As a buyer I can definitely confirm that there are a number of pressures that ultimately lead to a tendency to "lean away from the messiness." The point you raised about how uncertainty discounting increases the cost of those tons is definitely one explanation, but I also think there is a really simple psychological explanation that has to do with the fact that open-system pathways feel like nature based offsets/removals and I've seen so many stories about those credits being worthless that it just feels safer to stay away from anything that feels like that. This was a really useful reminder for me as a market participant that we shouldn't just dismiss whole classes of removals out of hand for no reason.
2) It really does seem like if we want open-system pathways (OSPs) to be viable they'll have to be intentionally supported because they face such an uphill battle on several fronts. First, it's probably harder to raise capital for certain types of OSPs like soil carbon sequestration or burying biomass because there isn't a key piece of proprietary technology that serves as a moat — which will immediately turn off VCs. Second, despite the American media and public's current disenchantment with Silicon Valley, at the end of the day we are (in large part) a nation obsessed with cool gadgets that capture the imagination and who want to get as far away from the natural world as possible, so tech-based CDR will always get more headlines than OSPs. Third, it seems really difficult to find ways to get the funding required to reduce the size of the error bars on OSPs. There isn't a clear pathway or incentive for most buyers to contribute to academic institutions doing this research, and early stage companies trying to monetize these OSPs will have a hard time selling enough inventory to raise the funds to conduct the required research because buyers won't like paying more money for tons that are fundamentally uncertain, and if they do conduct the research there could potentially be huge conflicts of interest (because the companies will obviously not want to report that their pathway is actually LESS efficient than they thought).
3) To further develop your point about how we can't fully rely on CSPs to get to 10+ GT of CDR for thermodynamic reasons, it's also worth noting that the amount of tech-based CDR to keep us below 1.5C could consume as much as ~1/3 of global energy supply (Zeke Hausfather) and require us to devote a significant percentage of U.S. concrete, steel, and critical minerals to these purposes (WRI).
As carbon movement is a series of dynamic equilibria, if the situation is urgent, then surely there's an argument for using sufficiently fast/scalable 'temporary' CDR approaches as interim steps. I can see that this would increase the messiness, but is it reasonable to scope them out from the start? An incremental approach to guiding the carbon captured in phytoplankton into increasingly stable abyssal zones, could become increasingly long term.
Incredible article (as always)!
A couple of thoughts:
1) As a buyer I can definitely confirm that there are a number of pressures that ultimately lead to a tendency to "lean away from the messiness." The point you raised about how uncertainty discounting increases the cost of those tons is definitely one explanation, but I also think there is a really simple psychological explanation that has to do with the fact that open-system pathways feel like nature based offsets/removals and I've seen so many stories about those credits being worthless that it just feels safer to stay away from anything that feels like that. This was a really useful reminder for me as a market participant that we shouldn't just dismiss whole classes of removals out of hand for no reason.
2) It really does seem like if we want open-system pathways (OSPs) to be viable they'll have to be intentionally supported because they face such an uphill battle on several fronts. First, it's probably harder to raise capital for certain types of OSPs like soil carbon sequestration or burying biomass because there isn't a key piece of proprietary technology that serves as a moat — which will immediately turn off VCs. Second, despite the American media and public's current disenchantment with Silicon Valley, at the end of the day we are (in large part) a nation obsessed with cool gadgets that capture the imagination and who want to get as far away from the natural world as possible, so tech-based CDR will always get more headlines than OSPs. Third, it seems really difficult to find ways to get the funding required to reduce the size of the error bars on OSPs. There isn't a clear pathway or incentive for most buyers to contribute to academic institutions doing this research, and early stage companies trying to monetize these OSPs will have a hard time selling enough inventory to raise the funds to conduct the required research because buyers won't like paying more money for tons that are fundamentally uncertain, and if they do conduct the research there could potentially be huge conflicts of interest (because the companies will obviously not want to report that their pathway is actually LESS efficient than they thought).
3) To further develop your point about how we can't fully rely on CSPs to get to 10+ GT of CDR for thermodynamic reasons, it's also worth noting that the amount of tech-based CDR to keep us below 1.5C could consume as much as ~1/3 of global energy supply (Zeke Hausfather) and require us to devote a significant percentage of U.S. concrete, steel, and critical minerals to these purposes (WRI).
As carbon movement is a series of dynamic equilibria, if the situation is urgent, then surely there's an argument for using sufficiently fast/scalable 'temporary' CDR approaches as interim steps. I can see that this would increase the messiness, but is it reasonable to scope them out from the start? An incremental approach to guiding the carbon captured in phytoplankton into increasingly stable abyssal zones, could become increasingly long term.