On Monday, climate tech startup Isometric launched a publicly accessible platform to investigate the science behind the growing number of startups pulling carbon from the atmosphere.
Carbon removal will be key to avoiding catastrophic global warming in the coming decades. It also has the potential to be a trillion-dollar industry, according to BloombergNEF estimates.
But while a growing number of startups are promising to do just that, the emerging industry has no shared standards or protocols, or methodology for assessing the amount of CO2 removed by its processes. Isometric is one of a number of companies trying to change that. As the industry tries to scale and commercialize, experts agree that it’s critical that startups selling carbon removal services establish robust measurement, reporting and verification techniques to avoid greenwashing.
The London and New York-based startup, which also announced Monday that it raised a $25 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital and Plural, will launch its carbon registry later this year that will feature only credits fully verified and delivered from what you got. consider long-term carbon removal providers.
As a precursor, Isometric launched an online scientific platform, which is free and available for anyone to review or contribute. On the site, scientists and researchers can view and comment on data provided by carbon removal startups, which could range from early test results to a visualization of their removal processes. The aim of the platform is to accelerate the science of early carbon removal, in part by making it easier for scientists to collaborate, according to founder and CEO Eamon Jubbawy.
“The thing about the academy is that there is a very rigorous way of doing things. The peer review process and things like that are decades old and work pretty well, but they’re slow,” Jubbawy said. “It’s a months-long cycle of getting answers or coming to some kind of consensus versus what we want to do is reduce this cycle to days or even hours.”
The science platform has launched with six carbon removal companies providing data: Charm, Eion, Mission Zero, Planetary, Brilliant Planet and Andes. Jubbawy said others are lined up to join in the coming months. By sharing early versions of their protocols for review, these startups can gather feedback from the broader scientific community and help buyers understand their processes.
“[Isometric’s work is] It’s important because we need to know whether or not the money we’re spending on decarbonizing has an effect on the carbon cycle,” said Ryan Orbuch, a partner at Lowercarbon who leads the decarbonization work of company. “That’s why it’s all worth doing.”
He compared creating a registry to providing buyers with a receipt that said the tons of carbon they paid for removed from the atmosphere were captured and stored.
Currently, there is no registry equipped to support the young industry, Orbuch said. Traditional carbon offset registries such as Verra and the Gold Standard have not only been plagued by controversy over excess project credit and the generation of unwanted offsets that do not contribute to emissions reductions, but have not yet adopted carbon credits for new forms of elimination, such as direct. air capture and improvement of rock weathering. To date, most carbon removal purchases of this variety have been private arrangements between buyers and suppliers, with suppliers only beginning to offer third-party verified CDR services to their first corporate buyers.
“We see [Isometric] as an accelerator of the long-lasting, high-quality carbon removal trajectory,” Orbuch said, while calling the company a potential “industry arbiter.”
A role like this will become increasingly important as the carbon removal industry tries to scale up. Limiting warming to 1.5°C will likely require removing billions of tonnes of carbon from the air, but that only makes a difference if it actually happens.
