Microsoft is reportedly restructuring its CDR strategy for future carbon removal contracts, while maintaining their existing commitments to carbon removal projects. It’s a setback for the field, but it’s one we always knew was coming. And we’ve got a plan.
Private markets have been extraordinarily helpful in scaling the carbon removal field, for the same reason they were never going to be enough to get us to gigaton scale. They can move quickly, be far more nimble than federal governments, and that same ability to launch purchasing at a breakneck speed allows them to change course with just as much speed.
That’s the gap policy is meant to fill.
There’s already an existing program at the Department of Energy to purchase carbon removal. This administration isn’t buying carbon removal with it, but Congress–on a bipartisan basis–is continuing to funnel money to it, including more than $100 million earlier this year. That money isn’t being spent right now, but it will be spent.
States are looking at carbon removal purchases, other governments around the world are doing the same. At Carbon180 (longtime fans of federal purchasing), we’ve just launched our CORE framework, intentionally designed to be useful far beyond private purchasers and to support more government buying across jurisdictions.
Microsoft and other private sector purchasers have done us a great service in committing quickly and early to buying carbon removal. And they’ve been clear from the jump that policy will be what gets us across the finish line. The thing to take away from this news is what they (and we and so many others) have been saying the whole time: the only path to gigaton scale is multi-decadal policy.