An assessment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) reveals that removing 1 billion tons of carbon annually in the United States will cost about $130 billion and can be achieved through the use of renewable energy sources, carbon uptake by available forests and agricultural land, and geologic storage, among other CDR solutions.
The report, Roads to Removal: Options for Carbon Dioxide Removal in the United States, was completed by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and scientists from more than a dozen institutions. Researchers used granular analyses assessing current estimates of resource demands, costs, and impacts of carbon removal approaches by county. The report was jointly commissioned by several offices within the Department of Energy.
Overall, the report found that the U.S. must use all carbon removal methods available, such as ocean, forest, and soil sequestration, biomass, and direct air capture, to achieve the scale of carbon removal reportedly needed to meet net-zero goals by 2050.
The study uniquely included energy, equity, and environmental justice indices to help identify counties that may benefit most from various carbon removal strategies with minimal risk. Researchers incorporated all 3,143 counties across the U.S. in the study, considering ecological effects, populations involved, infrastructure, and costs of CDR for each.
Findings covered both immediate action as well as long-term investment involved in taking carbon out of the air. The U.S. may add 440,000 new jobs, improve air and water quality, and reduce emissions-caused environmental damage by implementing CDR solutions at scale, according to the report.
In the short term, the report emphasizes the need to immediately implement carbon sequestration solutions in agricultural soils, including investment in planting cover crops along with perennial carbon crops and field borders. The report also explains the importance of effective forest management as a short-term solution.
“Effective forest management can change the CDR conversation,” said co-author Sara Kuebbing, a research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. “Our forests are both a sink and a source of CO2; essentially our green infrastructure. But they are in trouble, and we must act now.”
Direct air capture (DAC) solutions were identified as a long-term carbon removal solution, largely because additional investment in research, development, and deployment are needed to scale such technologies. The report also identified where to best geologically store carbon across the country, finding that over half of the U.S. land area may potentially be used for such purposes.
The report emphasizes that the U.S. and developed nations will need to rapidly scale-up decarbonization of industrial sectors, deployment of renewable energy, implementation of short-term CDR, and investment in long-term DAC to meet zero emissions by 2050.
