Stratos, 500 million ton per year air capture unit by Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin, Texas
What’s next for carbon removal? Undue false and widespread pessimism in the popular press.
Companies have still drawn down only enough CO2 to cancel out a few hours of US emissions. Here’s what it will take to really scale up the sector.
First published by James Temple at MIT Technology Review on October 24, 2025.
(Editor’s Note: There is decent content here, but it does not begin until way after halfway. The first half of the article is falsely pessimistic about the future of carbon capture. I have published this post to dispel myths about the carbon capture sector that have been propagated by this type of “reporting”. This category of popular writing is almost uniformly pessimistic, with echo-chamber content that repeats inaccurate and or dated concepts. These concepts are a results of a poor grasp of the science and industry of the sector, that can skew understanding with these longer articles that lead with the pessimistic group speak of our climate culture. They lead with undue shock and awe doom scrolling, so as to get views. 4r5t
This results in the burial of the real reporting, if any is actually included. This allows many readers that never read beyond the halfway point to reinforce the false pessimism of the popular press.
The first half of this article reflects the pessimistic AI interpretation of the sector, that is based mostly on popular press that has caused our climate culture’s predisposition to think any climate pollution mitigation actions but elimination of dirty fossil fuels is a moral hazard. It is not based on the science and industry, but speculation about what is perceived to be a nascent and dangerous sector, with complications from: the carbon credit market that is dominated by natural systems sequestration, by no governance, by normal early market venture failures that are interpreted as failure of the sector, by poor understanding of the science that is scenario-based where those scenarios only address 1.5 C or warmer scenarios and time frames of 2100, and where mature, 100-year old atmospheric carbon removal processes are almost completely disregarded. These pieces almost completely ignore ongoing industrialization of these century-old processes, that are not nearly non-existent, but massive. Possibly the most important issue is that there is little financial incentive, positive or negative, to remove carbon from anywhere, much less the atmosphere. This last issue is critical in that, carbon credit fees do not support capital investment. At the scale required to be successful, massive capitol investment is required because the vast majority of carbon that must be captured is from historic emissions, not the future. The carbon fees in the sector today are for future emissions almost exclusively. Apples and oranges are being compared. Failure of the carbon credit markets that are designed to address future emissions based on natural systems, cannot be compared to industrial processes that are designed to address climate pollution already in our sky.
One example will suffice in the limited space here: The lead of this article uses an obscure startup failure to set the tone for the piece, “The company, Running Tide, said it could sink enough kelp to the seafloor to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year, according to one of its early customers. Instead, the business shut down its operations last summer, marking the biggest bust to date in the nascent carbon removal sector. Its demise was the most obvious sign of growing troubles and dimming expectations for a space that has spawned hundreds of startups over the last few years.”
This startup was likely a scam to begin with, but the article’s wording contends this is the way the sector is proceeding with no other discussion than the quote above. Running Tide raised millions with a scheme to grow kelp and sink it to the ocean floor to store its carbon, but to fulfill their obligations for the millions of dollars it raised in carbon fees, it was dumping lime-kiln dust coated woodchips in the North Atlantic. This type of biomass dump has little positive science behind it. And, wood chips float, for some time usually. Running Tide could not fulfill their obligation with their nascent process and they defaulted on their investors. This article telegraphs this single failure as a market failure – it was not, it was a scam to start with.
The reality of the market is twofold: natural systems sequestration is poor because of globally declining permanence of storage because of ongoing warming-caused systems degradation that flips them from sequestration to emissions. Natural systems restoration then, is very questionable until current warming that is causing their degradation is removed. How can a forest with chronic mortality from persistent climate change caused drought that only gets worse; how can this forest overcome the climate change-caused degradation and return to sequestration? The second issue is that the two positive financial incentives we have for carbon sequestration, the California Low Carbon Fuels Carbon Sequestration Incentive, and the IRS Section 45Q Carbon Capture Incentive, have initiated scaled industrialization of the sector with cost effective mature processes that have been in use for over a century, with components of these processes that are even more widespread and that are pivotal to industrial processes worldwide. See the History of Carbon Dioxide Removal for more information.)
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MIT Technology Review
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.
In the early 2020s, a little-known aquaculture company in Portland, Maine, snagged more than $50 million by pitching a plan to harness nature to fight back against climate change. The company, Running Tide, said it could sink enough kelp to the seafloor to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year, according to one of its early customers.
Instead, the business shut down its operations last summer, marking the biggest bust to date in the nascent carbon removal sector.
Its demise was the most obvious sign of growing troubles and dimming expectations for a space that has spawned hundreds of startups over the last few years. A handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. Venture investments have flagged. And the collective industry hasn’t made a whole lot more progress toward that billion-ton benchmark.
The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, warns Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, a public-benefit corporation that provides data and analysis on the carbon removal industry.