“Over the years we’ve invested significantly in our field data team - focusing on producing trusted ratings. While this ensures the accuracy of our Ratings, it doesn’t allow the scale across the thousands of projects that buyers are considering.”
For more information on carbon credit procurement trends, read our "Key Takeaways for 2025" article. We share five, data-backed tips to improve your procurement strategy.
One more thing: Connect to Supply customers also get access to the rest of Sylvera's tools. That means you can easily see project ratings and evaluate an individual project's strengths, procure quality carbon credits, and even monitor project activity (particularly if you’ve invested at the pre-issuance stage.)
Book a free demo of Sylvera to see our platform's procurement and reporting features in action.
The path to one billion metric tons (a gigaton) of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere annually represents one of humanity's most ambitious industrial scale-ups.
This journey will be fraught with technical hurdles, economic constraints, and the ever-present risk of repeating mistakes from other industries' rapid expansions. Here's what the sector needs to get right.
The Gigaton Goal
Climate models are unambiguous: limiting warming to 1.5°C or even 2°C requires not just dramatic emissions cuts but also significant carbon removal. The IPCC estimates we'll need to remove between 5-10 gigatons of CO₂ annually by mid-century.
So, that first gigaton isn't the finish line, it's the proof of concept that industrial-scale carbon removal is possible.
The challenge is technical, economic, political, and logistical. We basically need to build an entirely new global industry, and we need to do it right.
Milestone 1: Establishing Robust Measurement and Verification Standards
The Foundation That Everything Else Depends On
Before scaling to gigaton levels, the industry must solve its credibility problem. Early carbon offset markets were plagued by over-crediting, double-counting, and projects that didn't deliver promised removals. Carbon removal cannot afford to repeat these mistakes.
Key actions include developing standardized protocols for measuring carbon removal across different methods, implementing third-party verification requirements that are genuinely independent, and creating tech-first registries that track every ton removed from capture to permanent storage.
Increasingly critical is the role of independent ratings providers that assess project quality and help buyers navigate an increasingly complex market. At Sylvera we’re building the due diligence infrastructure that allows buyers and investors to identify risks across the CDR market and ensure that every dollar spent is going to high-integrity projects.
For CDR to maintain public trust and policy support, verification must be ironclad from day one.
Milestone 2: Diversifying the Technology Portfolio
The carbon removal sector encompasses dozens of approaches, from direct air capture and enhanced weathering to biochar and ocean alkalinity enhancement. Each has different cost curves, scalability potential, permanence characteristics, and environmental co-benefits or risks.
The mistake to avoid is premature convergence on a single "winner." History shows that technological diversity is crucial during rapid scale-up phases. The energy sector's experience is instructive - solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear all play roles in decarbonization.
Similarly, CDR will likely need a portfolio approach.
Currently, nature-based solutions like reforestation are cheaper and faster to deploy but offer less permanent storage. Engineered solutions like direct air capture are more expensive but provide millennial-scale permanence. The path to a gigaton requires advancing both tracks simultaneously while remaining open to breakthrough approaches.
Milestone 3: Building the Physical Infrastructure
Reaching gigaton scale means constructing massive physical infrastructure: pipelines to transport captured CO₂, geological storage sites with monitoring systems, mineralization facilities, and energy systems to power it all. This infrastructure doesn't exist and will require investments measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.
The renewable energy sector's expansion offers both inspiration and warning. Solar and wind succeeded by dramatically reducing costs through manufacturing scale and supply chain optimization. But the buildout also faced permitting delays, transmission bottlenecks, and community opposition that slowed deployment.
For CDR, the infrastructure challenge is particularly acute because optimal sites for carbon capture (near biomass or clean energy) may not align with ideal storage locations. We need coordinated regional hubs that co-locate capture, processing, and storage facilities while minimizing transport costs and environmental impacts.
The critical lesson is starting infrastructure planning now, not after demand materializes. Lead times for major projects can exceed a decade.
Milestone 4: Securing Adequate, Sustained Financing
Carbon removal technologies face a classic valley of death: too expensive for pure commercial deployment, too capital-intensive for traditional venture funding, and too risky for conservative infrastructure investors. Bridging this gap requires creative financing mechanisms.
Advanced market commitments, where buyers pledge to purchase carbon removal at specific prices once projects deliver, have shown promise. Stripe's Frontier initiative, backed by major corporations, has committed nearly $1 billion to purchase carbon removal.
We’ve also started to see exciting developments in debt financing with banks like Standard Chartered, JP Morgan and Finalta Capital deploying crucial project finance.
However, the scale of financing needed dwarfs current commitments. A gigaton of removal at $200 per ton (an optimistic future cost) means $200 billion in annual revenue. Getting there requires patient capital willing to fund first-of-a-kind facilities that will be more expensive than their successors.
Governments also have a key role to play in derisking investment across the industry. Schemes, such as tax credits, compliance or direct procurement, ensure financiers have confidence that the developer will be able to deliver.
The solar industry's experience with feed-in tariffs in Germany and production tax credits in the US demonstrates how policy can kickstart industries.
The mistake to avoid is premature subsidy withdrawal, solar faced boom-bust cycles when support was pulled too quickly.
Milestone 5: Navigating the Permitting and Regulatory Maze
Scaling to a gigaton means operating in dozens of countries with different regulatory frameworks, environmental standards, and approval processes. Projects will need permits for land use, water consumption, geological storage, and environmental impact.
The carbon capture sector has already encountered regulatory challenges. Some direct air capture projects have faced multi-year permitting delays despite relatively small footprints. Underground storage sites require extensive geological surveys and long-term liability frameworks that many jurisdictions haven't established.
The lesson from infrastructure projects worldwide is that early regulatory engagement beats late-stage confrontation. Companies should work with regulators to develop appropriate frameworks rather than pushing for regulatory shortcuts that might undermine safety or public trust.
Community consultation deserves special attention. Renewable energy projects have sometimes failed due to inadequate local engagement, leaving communities feeling steamrolled.
Carbon removal projects, especially those involving pipelines, underground storage or land use changes, need social license to operate. This has already caused delays in some CCS projects, as communities have voted against pipelines due to safety fears.
Milestone 6: Driving Down Costs Through Learning and Scale
Every successful technology follows a learning curve: costs decrease predictably with cumulative production. Solar panel costs have fallen 90% over the past decade. Battery costs have followed a similar trajectory. Carbon removal must achieve comparable cost reductions to reach gigaton scale affordably.
Current direct air capture costs range from $400-$1000 per ton. Models suggest costs could fall to $100-$200 per ton at scale, but this requires deploying many facilities to generate learning. The chicken-and-egg problem is that facilities won't be built without demand, but costs won't fall without facilities.
This is where public procurement, grants and subsidies become critical. Government purchase commitments can provide the demand certainty needed for first movers to invest in capacity. Grants can allow research and development, accelerating innovation and driving down learning curves. Subsidies, such as the Contracts for Difference model proposed by the UK, open up high priced projects to a wider market, providing them with demand at a critical time.
The mistake to avoid is expecting linear cost reductions. Learning curves plateau, hit unexpected barriers, and require deliberate innovation, not just more production. Managing expectations about cost trajectories and scaling speeds will be crucial for maintaining support during inevitable setbacks.
Key Mistakes to Avoid: Lessons from Adjacent Industries
Over-Subsidizing Winners, Creating ‘Zombie’ Companies
The biofuels sector saw massive investment and subsidies flow to corn ethanol despite marginal climate benefits and problematic land-use impacts. Political considerations dominated scientific assessment. Carbon removal must maintain rigorous standards for what qualifies for support, avoiding the trap of subsidizing methods that don't deliver genuine climate impact.
Ignoring Environmental Justice Concerns
Fossil fuel infrastructure has historically been sited in low-income communities and communities of color, creating environmental justice issues that haunt those industries today. Carbon removal infrastructure must be deployed equitably, with meaningful community input and benefit-sharing mechanisms.
Letting Perfect Be the Enemy of Good
Carbon removal won't be perfectly clean, risk-free, or without tradeoffs. Waiting for ideal solutions means continued climate damage. The sector needs to embrace adaptive management: deploy the best available approaches while researching better ones, maintaining flexibility to shift resources as learning accumulates.
The Path Forward
Reaching the first gigaton of annual carbon removal will take decades of sustained effort, hundreds of billions in investment, and unwavering commitment despite inevitable setbacks.
Success requires:
- Establishing credible measurement and verification infrastructure immediately
- Maintaining technological diversity while driving down costs across multiple approaches
- Building physical infrastructure and supply chains at unprecedented speed
- Creating financing mechanisms that bridge the valley of death
- Developing regulatory frameworks that ensure safety without paralyzing innovation
- Centering equity and environmental justice throughout deployment
- Learning from other sectors' mistakes while moving with necessary urgency
The first gigaton of CDR won't solve climate change, but it will demonstrate whether carbon removal can scale at the speed and cost required. The challenge is doing it responsibly while keeping pace with what the climate actually demands.
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