A consensus of many environmental scientists contends that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are causing a global climate crisis due to the heating up of the earth’s atmosphere. Last year, a new record of atmospheric C02 was set at about 422.7 parts per million, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The Carbon Direct-Microsoft report on Criteria for CDR predicts that global communities must remove 100 billion to 1 trillion metric tons of CO2 by the year 2100 to limit “persistent warming” of the atmosphere to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (or nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit) above historic levels since the start of the industrial age. Higher temperatures in the air and oceans can feed more extreme storms in hurricanes, tornadoes and rainfall flooding, climate change advocates say.
“Over the past five years, Microsoft and Carbon Direct have observed a critical challenge in the emerging CDR industry,” reads the introduction to the Criteria report. “Recent policy announcements also highlighted the pressing need for evidence-based CDR criteria to guide action by both public and private-sector actors. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act continue to provide funding for CDR project development.”
However, the Trump Administration has taken cuts at the initial IRA and IIJA incentives for carbon removal. Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy terminated $3.7 billion in previously announced decarbonization project awards, including nearly $1 billion in carbon capture efforts by industries.
Effective project management for high-quality Carbon Removal
Microsoft is one of scores of companies, particularly in the new generation of digital infrastructure firms, committed to being net carbon negative in the next decade or so. This plan has led those companies to decarbonize, at least by offset agreements matching procurements to their actual emissions, through renewable power purchase agreements and on-site power including microgrids.
Carbon capture market commitments are less common than other decarbonization initiatives, but pursued by many in the digital, construction and industrial sectors. Microsoft, for its part, began procuring the removal of 1.3 million metric tons of C02 in 2021, increasing that to more than 22 million tons by the last fiscal year.
This commitment drew applications from more than 200 proposed market participants over fiscal 2024 and 2025. Nonetheless, total carbon removal and deployment is only a fraction of what’s needed, the report cautions.
“Effective project management is essential to deliver high-quality CDR projects,” the report reads. “Project developers need to incorporate the technical, environmental, economic, commercial, operational and political facets of a project into project management to ensure it meets relevant criteria for high-quality CDR.”
High-quality CDR, under the report, is defined as considering factors such as social harm, measurement, durability and economic leakage.
“There are two forms of economic leakage: activity-shifting and market,” the CDR report adds. “Activity-shifting leakage occurs when agents operating within a project boundary shift production to outside the project boundary. Market leakage occurs when a project reduces the production of a good, and this local reduction induces increased production of that good elsewhere to meet demand.”
Whatever the carbon removal project, those solutions must now facilities meaning collaboration with local and indigenous communities throughout the project lifecycle, the report reads.
Among the established means of carbon removal include reforestation and revegetation, mangrove forestation, soil carbon, enhanced rock weathering in croplands, biomass carbon removal and storage, abiotic marine CO2 removal, direct air capture and carbon mineralization such as projects which incorporate carbon into industrial feedstocks such as concrete aggregate.
Microsoft is not alone in its CO2 capture contracting. Others seeking help in carbon removal include oil and gas producer ExxonMobil, coatings firm Henkel, construction materials firm CEMEX, electricity generator Capital Power and Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC, among many others.
