For the first time, the U.S. federal government is purchasing $35M in carbon removal credits through the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase program and has invited companies to amplify and scale their impact with parallel initiatives. We’re proud to be the first company to pledge to match the DOE’s program dollar for dollar: through our own initiatives, we plan to contract for at least $35M worth of carbon removal credits over the next 12 months.
This model of mutually reinforcing public-private support is an important tool to commercialize 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 a commercial scale.
We’re working hard to reduce our own emissions across our operations and value chain, but we know that tackling global climate change will require a diverse set of tools to both reduce emissions and remove them from the atmosphere. As the IPCC highlighted in their most recent report, “the deployment of carbon dioxide removals to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions is unavoidable if net-zero emissions are to be achieved.”
We are excited to help accelerate the carbon removal industry. This builds on our recent purchases through Frontier, a first-of-its-kind advance market commitment to scale breakthrough durable carbon removal approaches, and participation in the First Movers Coalition, a global initiative of companies working together to send a clear demand signal for emerging climate technologies. We look forward to working with our partners to identify and scale the most promising technology-based and nature-based carbon removal solutions and hope that other companies will join us.