CarbonShot: Federal Policy Options for Carbon Removal in the United States
Key learnings include:
- Options to remove carbon dioxide would require up to $6 billion per year in federal funding over the next 10 years, with the lion’s share in this first decade dedicated to restoring trees to the landscape. We expect the need for public funding to increase, especially for technological pathways, to support scaled deployment beyond 2030.
- Compiled deployment scenarios through 2050 illustrate needs and trade-offs to achieve a 2 GtCO2 per year benchmark by 2050—an illustrative but ambitious objective for the carbon removal portfolio and roughly commensurate with the emissions left unabated by 2050 in the U.S. midcentury Strategy for Deep Decarbonization.
- Advancing a broad set of natural carbon capture and technological carbon removal pathways can significantly reduce the total expected cost of carbon removal, mitigate the risk that some fail to scale to the levels needed, and increase cumulative removals through 2050.
Published January 31, 2020