This marks a historic moment as the U.S. federal government takes a significant step towards combating climate change by procuring $35 million in carbon removal credits through the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase program. In a parallel effort, the government has extended invitations to companies, encouraging them to enhance and expand their contributions in this critical area.
In response, we are honored to announce our commitment as the first company to pledge to match the DOE’s program on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Over the course of the next 12 months, we intend to engage in initiatives that will enable us to secure carbon removal credits worth at least $35 million, thus doubling the impact of the government’s initiative and reaffirming our dedication to addressing the climate crisis.
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.
