Founder of Nori, one of the world’s first carbon removal startups | Obsessed with debt financing and financial innovation in CDR & FOAK | Creative communications and strategy expert
I really enjoyed speaking with Eric Matzner on this episode. As carbon removal develops, I personally think there will be a tendency towards coproduction. Companies fully dependent upon carbon markets will be vulnerable to price fluctuation. Right now many carbon removal transactions are over-the-counter or mediated by a marketplace. Prices seem to be set by the seller and negotiated. In the future I believe we will see more liquidity and competition within grades of CDR, and suppliers will take prices rather than set them (not always, but for much of carbon removal I expect this to have an effect.) At that point, companies will want to have secondary (or even primary business lines!) uncorrelated or even anticorrelated from carbon pricing. That is how to build a robust and scalable CDR industry imho. These companies that can coproduce should be able monetize the net carbon removed. My hypothesis is that if these companies can fully monetize all of these value streams they will scale quickly and profitably and inspire loads of imitators, which is what we need to get to gigatonne scale. Applying financial additionality against these companies will slow carbon removal growth and not give us anything worth the slowed rate of PPM reduction. There is so much more to say about this, but Eric and I discuss this dynamic in detail in this episode of Nori’s Reversing Climate Change podcast. I highly recommend checking it out. I’d love to hear your thoughts on my own personal speculation!
Should coproduction impact additionality claims for carbon removals? Coproduction is when a supplier of carbon removal credits produces additional revenue from another source. For example, a direct air capture facility that also produces hydrogen; or, as is the topic of today’s Reversing Climate Change episode, enhanced rock weathering that produces nickel. Most people agree that coproduction is good. However, it conflicts with financial additionality, which states that the carbon removal action would not take place were it not for the carbon credit. In this episode, Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon interviews Eric Matzner, an alumnus of Carbon Removal Newsroom and Cofounder of Project Vesta who has a new venture called Metalplant. (This is Metalplant's podcast debut!) Their innovative project combines hyperaccumulator plants and enhanced rock weathering to extract nickel from soil and crushed rock while removing carbon from the air. Much of the conversation focuses on a possibly looming intellectual crisis in carbon removal: what does the industry do when it realizes that many of its methodologies are co-producing value besides carbon? Will it try to find a way to square that with conventional applications of financial additionality, or will they abandon or amend additionality to make sure co-producers aren't held down while the world desperately needs them to scale their operations? So much to talk about, and there will almost certainly be more on this topic in the future! Listen here: https://lnkd.in/gYmKuZyG
