Joppa, Lucas; Luers, Amy; Willmott, Elizabeth; Friedmann, S. Julio; Hamburg, Steven P.; Broze, Rafael (2021): Microsoft's million-tonne CO2-removal purchase - lessons for net zero. In Nature 597 (7878), pp. 629–632. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-02606-3.

"Strengthen markets, measures and definitions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to fight climate change. In January this year, Microsoft made a major announcement: it had paid for the removal of 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Among its purchases were projects to expand forests in Peru, Nicaragua and the United States, as well as initiatives to regenerate soil across US farms. [...] Here we summarize the lessons learnt from Microsoft’s carbon-removal efforts, along with those from another early corporate procurement — the $9-million purchases of carbon removal in 2020 and 2021 by the US–Irish financial-infrastructure company Stripe. Although these are just two companies’ efforts, they are the first significant open solicitations focused exclusively on carbon removal. We write as a team composed of Microsoft staff working on the company’s carbon-negative programme and research scientists who analyse carbon reduction and removal strategies."

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"On Sept. 24, the Bridge initiative for Science and Technology Policy, Leadership, and Communications hosted a virtual kick-off meeting for their new science and technology policy study on carbon dioxide removal. The aim of CDR is to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using land management strategies, accelerated weathering, bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, and direct air capture and sequestration. CDR presents potentially important economic and policy opportunities for West Virginia."

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"We need to remove 100 parts per million of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That means removing about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide...and doing something useful with it! I've got an insatiable desire to help figure this out. The changing climate will create the first trillionaire."

Bennett, Jeffrey A.; Abotalib, Mohammad; Zhao, Fu; Clarens, Andres F. (2021): Life cycle meta-analysis of carbon capture pathways in power plants: Implications for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. In International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control 111, p. 103468. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijggc.2021.103468.

"Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) based electricity generation is one possible approach for delivering large-scale carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere. This study evaluates the environmental impacts of leveraging existing power plants for BECCS. We performed a life cycle meta-analysis of eight carbon capture technologies, including five previously simulated only for coal and natural gas, for both steam cycle and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plants. We found that IGCC plants offer the best balance of negative emissions, energy return on investment (EROI) and low water use irrespective of capture technologies. Planned IGCC plants tend to be large whereas biomass-fired power plants are often small and distributed in the landscape because of the distributed nature of the fuel. Steam cycle plants had larger negative emissions, but also lower EROI, and so blending with coal may be necessary to achieve a suitable EROI. Steam cycles were sensitive to capture technology type, and results found membrane and calcium looping capture technologies offer a balance between negative emissions, EROI and water use when fired using coal-biomass blends. These results suggest that steam cycle power plants may be the most desirable candidates to support early-stage deployment of BECCS."

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