This is the third installment of our Climate Interventions series, where we look at the scientific understanding and uncertainties around a range of interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and cool the planet, along with a robust discussion on ethics, risks, and governance.  

As Colorado works to achieve its climate goals to reach net zero emissions by 2050, carbon removal and storage are prominent conversations and policy considerations. This panel discussion focuses on Colorado-specific nature-based and technological solutions, policies, community engagement, economic incentives, uncertainties, and risks. 

Featuring: Dominique Gomez, Deputy Directory, Energy Office, State of Colorado; Ashleigh Ross, VP and Head of Commercial Development and Policy, Carbon America; Lauren Gifford, Associate Director, Soil Carbon Solutions Center, Colorado State University; and Wil Burns, Co-Director, The Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal, American University and Visiting Professor, Environmental Policy & Culture Program, Northwestern University.

The discussion is moderated by Kristan Uhlenbrock, Executive Director of The Institute for Science & Policy. 

Watch a video of this panel discussion on our YouTube channel.

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Carbon Removal and Colorado

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: Thank you for joining us, I’m Kristan Uhlenbrock. I lead our Institute for Science and Policy here at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. This is part three in the series that we've been doing called Climate Interventions. Part one talked about solar radiation management. Part two was carbon removal at scale. And then today, we're bringing it home to our state of Colorado and talking about carbon removal specifically in Colorado.  

I want to thank Wil Burns, who is my partner in this series. Wil is a co-director at the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal out of American University. He also is associated and is affiliated with Northwestern University, and he's been making these trips to Denver month after month to be on this panel with me. It's been great to have him there.  

So, let me introduce the panel. We're going to try to cover a lot of ground in an hour and we have some great people to queue us up to do that.  

Sitting next to Wil is Lauren Gifford. Lauren is local here to Colorado. She is the Associate Director at the Soil Carbon Solution Center up at Colorado State University. Next to Lauren is Ashley Ross, Ashley is the VP and Head of Commercial Development and Policy for Carbon America. And right here next to me is Dominique Gomez, and I've known Dominique for a little while. Dominique is the Deputy Director at the Energy Office in Colorado. 

So, we have a pretty good diverse range of expertise. We're going to talk about a lot of different things. Folks may disagree at times, which is the point of these conversations. We're going to talk about some of the technology. We're going to talk about policy. We're going to talk about economics. And if we ever find the people who agree on all of those, that would be a quite big surprise! 

Wil, why don't you kick us off. Every time we've had one of these panels, we want to start with the why. 

Why are we talking about, doing, thinking about, and implementing carbon removal? Give us the why we're doing this, and talk about some of the differences between CDR, Carbon Dioxide Removal, and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). 

WIL BURNS: The simple answer on why carbon removal is: we didn't get our act together in terms of addressing climate change when we should have, right? My parents' generation, my generation, and this generation have not reduced greenhouse gas emissions to the point where we cannot avoid passing critical temperature thresholds. So, we have an international agreement, the Paris Agreement, that says we should be holding temperatures to well below two degrees Celsius, aspiring to hold it to 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

But the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions means that we will exceed those thresholds. And indeed, temperatures could rise three or four degrees Celsius under a lot of analyses.  

We are now looking at technologies that can draw carbon from the atmosphere, and reduce what we call radiative forcing, the trapping of those greenhouse gases through those technologies and in the short term, we're hoping it buys us some time to not pass critical temperature thresholds. 

In the medium term, we're looking at carbon removal as a means to help us balance the emissions that would still exist because there's certain sectors where it's going to be virtually impossible to eliminate all emissions and get to what we call “net zero”. And then in the longer term we hope to go “net negative” and draw down greenhouse gases to the point where we can return concentrations of greenhouse gases to a point in history where it was safer because we're already seeing manifestations of climate change, obviously, even at 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And so, we could create a safer world in the long term if we could continue to draw down emissions after we get to net zero. 

The distinction between carbon removal and carbon capture and storage is carbon removal seeks to remove legacy emissions -- emissions we've already put into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and other activities. Carbon capture and storage seeks to capture the carbon at the source at the point of combustion, for example, in a coal fired power plant or a natural gas production, and then sequester or utilize that carbon. 

And that's the primary distinction. If you're getting the carbon from the atmosphere, after it's already been released, it's carbon removal. If you're capturing it at the source, it's carbon capture and storage.  

KRISTAN: Very direct. Thank you. Dominique, will you talk to me about the state's interests and priorities and how carbon removal, carbon capture and storage, and carbon management quite broadly are part of our net zero goals?  

DOMINIQUE GOMEZ: As Kristan mentioned, I'm Dominique Gomez with the Colorado Energy Office and we help coordinate the climate agenda for the state and run a lot of the programs. 

I'm not a carbon removal expert, but I know my fellow panelists are. But I thought it would be helpful to just give some context, piggybacking on what Wil said. We are interested in carbon management and carbon removal, but it is not the primary way that we are thinking about addressing climate change. 

I think it's just really important to put it in that context. We are interested in it partly because maybe we didn't get our act together in the last 50 years in the way that we should have. But the main thing we're trying to do is get our act together now. 

So, this is not a replacement for the main work of addressing climate change, which is reducing emissions. And that's, broadly speaking, what Colorado is working to do. We have very aggressive climate targets that are set in statute here in the state of Colorado. So, we're working to reduce our emissions 50% by the end of this decade, by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, and then net zero by 2050. 

We're really doing that through two big pushes. The first big push is changing our grid to be all clean electricity, so very rapidly switching to renewables. And luckily, here in Colorado, we have a lot of wind. We have a lot of solar. It's actually very affordable. So, we're able to make those changes, and we're actually very on track. We're actually more than on track on our electricity goals. So, we'll reduce our emissions in the electricity sector over 85% by the end of this decade. We'll close our last coal-fired power plant by the end of this decade, which is amazing. Colorado has historically relied almost exclusively on coal for our power, so it’s a huge transition, very quickly. 

And then the other main thing that we're trying to do is electrify the other parts of our economy that have relied on fossil fuels. So that means our transportation sector first, that's our largest source of emissions. Moving to electric vehicles as quickly as we can, thinking about other alternative ways to power heavy duty vehicles, big trucks, trucking, et cetera. 

And then also our homes and industries. Moving away from natural gas, moving away from propane, which is still used in a lot of parts of rural Colorado. And as that grid gets cleaner and we're using more electricity, that's the main way that we're thinking about addressing climate change. 

So that's not to say that carbon management isn't important. It is. It is important because number one, we have this legacy of not having moved quickly enough. And number two, there are just some parts of the economy where, as we look at decarbonizing, we're still not exactly sure what we're going to do in some sectors. There are some parts that are very hard to decarbonize. 

And that doesn't mean that we should stop any of the research on how to actually switch these processes or reduce these processes. But at the same time, we want to have these other options. I think carbon management has this huge potential to play this role, both in historical emissions, and then in some areas that we are just not sure how to reduce otherwise. 

But I think the main idea to take back is that this does not mean that we're not moving as quickly as we can on the main work of addressing climate change, which is reducing emissions.  

KRISTAN: Ashleigh. Tell us a little bit about who Carbon America is for those of us who don't know and what are some of the projects? You have some work happening here in Colorado, predominantly a lot of technology-based projects. Tell us what's going on there.  

ASHLEIGH ROSS: Carbon America is a CCS dedicated startup located right here in Denver, Colorado. We are participating in the CCS ecosystem by essentially bringing the value chain for these projects up to 100%. 

Essentially, we bring turnkey solutions to CO2 sources so that we can capture those CO2 emissions from the source, as Wil mentioned, the point source capture, take that CO2 and then safely store that in secure geological storage formations that have gone through multiple years and many millions of dollars' worth of technical analysis and data. 

We're fully vertically integrated. That means that we bring all of the parts of the value chain. And with that, we announced Colorado and Nebraska's first commercial CCS projects in northeast Colorado, the Sterling and Yuma plants that produce natural CO2 from the fermentation process. 

There is CO2 from combustion as well. The fermentation process for the ethanol produces CO2 out of that process. So, we're capturing that CO2, putting it through pipelines as short and small as possible to put it in those safe geologic formations that we currently have permits under review for our project in northeast Colorado and in Nebraska. The EPA is reviewing those injection permits now.  

Those are some of the emissions that there aren't other options for coming out of those processes. After we started those projects, we said what else can we do here in the state of Colorado? What are other strong CCS projects? And right here in Southern Colorado, we have all of the makings of a phenomenal CCS project. We have CO2 sources that are considered hard to abate. We have cement and steel where the CO2 comes out of the process not associated with anything from fossil emissions. There are fossil emissions, too. But there's other CO2 that can't be taken care of from other processes. We've partnered closely with the Department of Energy to bring quite a bit of funding to Southern Colorado to advance the ecosystem here. We've got a $33 million grant from the Department of Energy with the Colorado School of Mines to develop a sequestration site for southern Colorado. 

We also have a DAC hub, a Direct Air Capture feasibility study for southern Colorado to look at what are the prospects for how much CDR could we do here in southern Colorado. How can we build these out as a comprehensive ecosystem? We really are targeting those hard to abate industries and places where CCS is not going to be the solution everywhere. 

And in truth, a lot of CCS is going to be hard to pull these projects off. These are complicated and they're expensive. But there are many places where this is really going to be the only opportunity to fully decarbonize these sources. And importantly, here at Carbon America, we really talk about community centric CCS. 

We don't know what success looks like for this project. We really want to work with all of the stakeholders to say, what does success look like to each individual stakeholder, whether you're an industrial facility, whether you're a landowner living near a sequestration site, whether you're the school teacher that is managing the school near the sequestration site. 

We need to really work with all of our stakeholders to understand what can success look like and build the projects the best we possibly can.  

KRISTAN: Thank you. I do want to spend some time talking about community engagement. Lauren, let's bring you into this conversation. Obviously, you work for a center that has soil in its name, but you wear many hats. 

Give us a little bit of that landscape view of some of the soil nature-based reforestation projects and landscape that exists in Colorado. What is our potential for some of these more nature-based solutions here in the state?  

LAUREN GIFFORD: This is like a dissertation question, but I will give you the answer in 30 seconds. 

I always tell folks that there's a reason why I live in Colorado, and it's because Colorado is such an exciting place to work on climate change because we have a state that supports us. And we have a lot of companies and businesses here that are excited and ready to start working on carbon removal and climate action broadly. 

And we have universities that are training students on the cutting edge of what it takes to have a real viable climate action ecosystem. So, that's exciting about Colorado. I'm the associate director of the Soil Carbon Solution Center at CSU, and I'm also faculty in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability. 

I'm really here in Colorado to talk to students and to talk to stakeholders about these intersections of nature and finance. And how financial mechanisms can be used to enhance natural processes to help us sequester carbon. 

But these solutions, we call them nature-based solutions, are really complex. In a lab, we might be able to say we know what it takes for soil to sequester additional carbon dioxide. But the reality of it is getting a farmer to change their behavior, and getting a financial institution to invest in that carbon that will support that behavior change. Does that behavior change take away from other things that farmer is growing and earning money through? Who owns the land, and how are benefits distributed, right?  

These things are incredibly complex, but here in Colorado, we've got mountains, we have plains, we have grasslands, and we have abandoned oil wells that we're ready to plug with biomass in some cases. 

This is really a center for innovation for carbon removal and nature-based climate solutions, and it's really exciting.  

KRISTAN: Anything else on the technology side or the pathway side that anyone wants to add? I'm looking at Wil because in the last conversation we did a good overview of all the different pathways of carbon removal. So, we can point you to that, but I just want to see if there's anything else you wanted to add before we moved off. 

ASHLEIGH: Yeah, thanks, Kristan. We talked a little bit about the different kinds of technologies, but even within the carbon management technologies bucket, there are a lot of really different technologies, and so there isn't just one kind of direct air capture technology. There isn't just one kind of carbon capture technology. In fact, there are a number of different kinds that have different pros and cons. So that's something that we all need to be watching the space for as we start to see some of these more innovative capture technologies rolled out. 

And I'm particularly optimistic. This is a bit of a plug -- we've got our own cryogenic capture technology that takes all of the SOx, NOx, particulates, and mercury out of the flue gas. And we're doing it without chemicals, without solvents, without refrigerants, and we don't even use water in our capture technology. 

A lot of us are continuing to work on making sure that these projects are going to have the maximum environmental benefit possible.  

KRISTAN: Okay. Let's talk a little bit about policy then. So I'm going to start here with Dominique, but encourage others too. We've had some recent legislation in current years, specifically directed at carbon removal and management. 

Could you highlight some of the big things that we're doing here at the state that are some of these policy drivers?  

DOMINIQUE: Yeah, there's a couple different things and because carbon management is so broad, there are nature-based solutions. There's carbon capture and other solutions. It covers a lot of ground. 

I think a few things that the state is doing are just the basic sort of studies and support for possible solutions, like looking at biochar and how that might plug wells. That's like a very specific thing, bringing a couple different nature-based solutions together with another problem we have, which is old oil and gas wells that are leaking or coal mines and other places. So, we have a number of different studies that we funded that are ongoing.  

There are also specific kinds of incentive programs. Different departments run incentive programs. There's a whole soil health department at the Colorado Department of Agriculture trying to incentivize these practices that we do know work to some extent, even if we can't always quantify it perfectly.  

And then, one big thing that I think is really important is just starting to provide some regulatory certainty for some of the more complicated processes that are going to require some oversight and regulation. 

A couple of years ago, what used to be the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the COGCC was reconstituted and given a much broader mission, and they are now the Energy and Carbon Management Commission. So, they still oversee oil and gas, that has not changed, but they also oversee a number of other areas, including deep geothermal work, so creating electricity from geothermal, as well as carbon capture and storage. 

There will be a rulemaking at that commission, probably late this year, specifically on carbon capture and storage, and so making sure that Colorado is leading the way, along with many of our neighboring states in providing certainty in talking to communities, understanding concerns, and addressing those concerns. Providing the pathway for these technologies, I think is a really important piece. 

LAUREN: And a lot of those pathways are really boring, right? I'm sorry that there are policy people in here and I don't mean to offend you, but permitting, like snooze, right? But we need more than a governor to say, I support this, right? And I'm going to create this office of carbon management. 

We need seamless permitting. We need tax incentives, right? That's a lot of what the Inflation Reduction Act is putting forth and trying to simultaneously address climate change while growing a clean energy economy. It's tax incentives, and they're really complicated, and you need to have an accountant tell you how you could even engage in this. 

So, we need people at every step of the way who are tracking what's available, who are supporting this through their sort of resources and skill sets. You need Boulder County. If you're in the front range, Boulder County is the progressive spot. Boulder County created a carbon removal fund because they want Boulder County to be a place where carbon removal can grow broadly. 

So, they were giving money to organizations to work on nature-based solutions, such as ecosystem restoration along Boulder Canyon. But they're also giving money to companies working on mineralization for taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and putting it into bricks and things like that for building materials and long-term carbon sequestration in a multitude of ways. So, there's really exciting ways that we can get involved in this sort of carbon removal readiness at all stages. I always say addressing climate change needs all-hands-on-deck. It's really important to have people behind a desk working on legislation in really nuanced ways.  

KRISTAN: Okay, I would be curious from others on the panel, what are some of these other policy frameworks, incentives, regulations that you think we should be looking forward to, to trying to get into that next stage? 

Wil, are there things that are happening in other states that we could be learning here?  

WIL: There's a lot happening at the federal level. We're spending about 12 billion dollars under the Inflation Reduction Act on both carbon capture and storage and these carbon removal approaches. 

And one of the things that's important to emphasize is most of these approaches are at very early stages. We're not going to be able to rely on the private sector to do a lot of the basic research and development that's required for this.  

So, it's the same kind of model that we had for renewables, where the German government, the U.S. government, and others bore a lot of the responsibility for the basic research and development that ultimately provided technologies that then were handed off to the private sector, and the private sector honed them, brought costs down, and made them viable in the market. 

We’re building four direct air capture hubs, these gigantic machines to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere throughout the country. Those hubs will remove some CO2, but more importantly, they will help us to learn what processes we can use to reduce the cost because they're extremely expensive at this point, and not really viable in the long term. But that kind of research and development can ultimately help us to do that.  

We're researching other kinds of approaches such as capturing CO2 from rock as we mentioned, or looking at ocean-based approaches that might permit us to take CO2 from the atmosphere. The federal government is starting to work on regulatory approaches that are important under things such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, because these approaches all pose risks that have to be taken into account. 

The EPA is starting to develop those regulations, including in, in terms of some of these ocean-based sort of approaches. It's going to require regulations in the context of land use, where local governments and state governments may have a more prominent role in cases where there's transboundary impacts, whether within the United States or transboundary impacts for some of the ocean approaches that may have impacts in other countries where the federal government's going to have to play an important role. 

ASHLEIGH: And just to briefly touch then on point-source carbon capture and storage policy. The biggest challenge in CCS is essentially that the tax credit that was established for CCS, $85 a ton, is not enough in the vast majority of cases. I've been trying to get in the ground for 22 years. So that's how long I've been dedicated to carbon management and how long I've been obsessed with it, to be honest.  

But the problem is essentially that when this industry really got kicked off in about 2018 when the tax credit was changed in California policy, a lot of people really rushed into the sector. 

And we drew the value of the tax credit where people thought that was going to be able to mobilize a certain amount of investment. However, inflation has eaten up a tremendous amount of that tax credit now. Additionally, the overall stakeholder costs, because we've not got the community engagement parts correct yet, the stakeholder costs are going up rapidly as well. 

So, essentially, that tax credit is not enough to do most projects. That's why we go get our DOE grants, and we get our loans, and we have to bring all of these additional funds to essentially close that gap. That's what we talk about. If the tax credit is $85 a ton, and I need $120 a ton to be able to do the project, I've got to go find a way to close that gap. 

Maybe that can be through voluntary carbon markets or cap and trade programs depending on what the CO2 source is. Maybe that can be through investment tax credits, but we essentially have to do all of our gymnastics to figure out how to close those gaps. The other way that we could help really advance things is also thinking about not just policies and the existing kinds of technical projects, but thinking about policies to mobilize stakeholders. 

We give all of the incentive to private industry to do these projects, and we've completely forgot to have the conversations with the stakeholders in our communities to say, what kind of policies would get you excited about hosting a carbon management project? Those are the kinds of dialogues we're hoping to have now. 

DOMINIQUE: Just one last thing, echoing all of these things, it's still early and it's so broad and most people have no idea what we're talking about, right? You all are here this morning, you're probably the most educated top 0.1% of the state population about this topic, even after this one hour. 

The state is actually working right now on a carbon management roadmap, mostly because we like to make these roadmaps, which do end up being boring. But usually there's like a two-page summary that's not quite as boring. And the roadmap is to identify what the state should be doing, and what are the policies? 

We've done some studies, and we do have some incentives. We're doing this regulatory framework, but what should we be doing over the next three, four, five years to support this market, knowing that it does have a role to play? There's a huge community engagement piece of that, hearing from the community, hearing what's exciting, what's concerning, what the questions are, and then looking at the suite of different options under carbon management. 

We pretty quickly ruled out the ocean-based work here in Colorado. After that, there's this long list of very different technologies which all fall under this huge umbrella. And some of them are yes, that completely makes sense. It might be cost-effective. We're well suited to it. There are many things which maybe are not as cost effective on a CO2 basis, but have so many co-benefits. They have job co-benefits, air quality co-benefits, or resilience co-benefits, right?  

We have three wildfires just here on the front range this morning. So, we know that carbon management and thinking about our forest health is really important, right? Even if it's expensive from a CO2 basis, we might need to do it anyway.  

So just thinking about the huge suite of different options, what we should be investing in, what policies we need, what incentives we need, how much, and then the community pieces as well. 

KRISTAN: Someone must have pulled the wool on me. I'm a former ocean scientist and I thought there were going to be jobs here in the future! 

So, let's talk a little bit about some of this community input. First of all, when is this roadmap due? It was directed in 2023. I know you are working on it, so when's it due?  

DOMINIQUE: Luckily, there wasn't a specific due date. There was a date we had to get it underway, but likely a draft will be released late this fall.  

KRISTAN: Great. We'll keep our eyes on that. What are folks hearing? You've all brought up community input a little bit. What have you been hearing in the carbon management road map planning? What are some things that communities have been saying about questions, concerns, information, and awareness? What are you all hearing? And then I'd be curious about everyone's take on this. 

DOMINIQUE: Yeah, I think that the first thing that we're hearing is just a lot of “what are we talking about here”? I think it's always important for us to remember from even just a climate change standpoint, most people have busy lives. They go to work, they take care of their families, and they don't spend a lot of time thinking about this. 

So just even understanding how it might impact them is the very first start of it. I think there's a whole suite of solutions, maybe especially more in the nature-based solutions, which have very broad support maybe until you get to some sort of price tag. Generally speaking, people are very in support of agricultural practices that sequester carbon, unless you're asking them to pay for it in some way, right? 

And then we need to talk about what we're talking about here. But there's a lot around forest health. There are not so many concerns around safety or community impact, right? There's a lot of excitement and it's just more, okay, what about the cost? There is a whole suite of technology-based solutions around which there are a lot of concerns. 

And I think the first concern is always that first point I made, which is: shouldn't we just be reducing emissions? Why are we burning fossil fuels? We should just stop doing that. I think that there's a lot of just understanding of, okay, this isn't replacing reducing emissions. This is for this smaller sliver.  

And then there are concerns. What does it mean to have pipelines? What does it mean to sequester carbon? How do we know it's going to stay there? How do we know it's safe? And once we get into those specific technologies, there are a lot of concerns, there's a lot of questions. And I think we have a lot of work to do to start to answer those.  

ASHLEIGH: That's a really great point. And actually, I got into this world because the idea, as a little Girl Scout tree hugger, of shoving a bunch of CO2 under my feet freaked me out. So, I actually started researching CCS because I was skeptical about it from the subsurface side.  

And that's when I came to then understand the long history of injecting CO2 for other purposes, but that we do understand fairly well how it can work in the ground. But any single one of these sites has to be very carefully studied and selected, right? This is not something that you're just going to find everywhere. 

That's why we need tens of millions of dollars to even understand how good a site could potentially be for CO2 storage. And some of the concerns sometimes are around is there a risk of contaminating my groundwater? And we can go through the long list of all of the ways that we protect the groundwater and all of the regulatory processes as well. 

Sometimes the concerns are around pipeline safety. We don't actually get as many of that. Actually, some of the dynamics we got in southern Colorado was don't damage the roads, and if you damage the roads, don't count on the county to clean it up. So, sometimes, you walk into a community event thinking you might know what they're going to think, but every community is unique. Every stakeholder is unique. So, you just have to go, show up, and be vulnerable and just have those dialogues. 

LAUREN: One of the issues in this space is understanding what community engagement really looks like. We're grappling with this at CSU. How do we train people to do viable community engagement, particularly around carbon removal? It's technology that people don't quite understand. The majority of people don't understand, and that's valid. 

It's actually political, it's contested. You have five people on stage to talk about carbon dioxide removal. We all are thinking about it in a different way. This is a very new, nascent industry. That's actually really good in a lot of ways because we can drive the dominant discourse in ways that are really positive. 

And we can be innovative and try new things. Like Mark Zuckerberg says, move fast and break things. We can try that in this space still. It's not entrenched like oil and gas, or something like that.  

But at the same time, there's a lot of confusion. People aren't sure. You want to put a DAC facility in Brighton? What does that mean? What does that mean for my community?  

But there's so many people who need to be involved in this type of development. Carbon removal development is just like any other type of development, right? It's just like fracking, not the end result, but it's just like building a shopping center. We are building something in a community, and it will have unintended consequences. It will have long-term consequences. 

We need to get labor on board. We need to get environmental organizations and environmental justice groups on board. We need any type of community organized group that needs to have a say in what this looks like in their community. We are using water. In most cases, we are using water in a state and a region where water is scarce. 

We need to know more about how to have effective dialogue and how to take people's opinions and needs and values into consideration when we do this type of development.  

ASHLEIGH: Just to be clear, in CO2 storage, we are not allowed to frack. We're not allowed to come even close to frack pressures, and actually, that is honestly oftentimes the very first question we answer. 

Once we walk into these community events, and once we make it very clear that we are not going to be fracking, we're not allowed to get even close to it, and there's nothing associated with oil and gas with the project, that immediately takes a lot of tension down.  

WIL: I think one thing that's really important about community engagement is that it be done in good faith. 

In community engagement, there's an acronym called DEAD which is Decide, Educate, Announce, and Defend. And a lot of community engagement is DEAD. The decisions have already been made. The community is going to be educated in meetings and things of that nature, but it's done, right? 

And that not only often creates backlash that ultimately ends those projects from happening, but it's not ethical. One of the things that's really important is co-development of these projects from the outset. Finding out what community needs are, what community concerns are responding to those concerns. 

And it really requires, in my opinion, a very important role for government that can serve as an honest broker in this context and not rely entirely on the corporate sector or the development sector to develop that because of the self-interest. But that's expensive. It requires a lot more development of people that can do it well. 

And then it's a very difficult process. You have to provide materials that people can understand. You have to provide access to a representative cross section of your community when people don't have time to be engaged in this kind of colloquy on a regular basis. And you have to be willing to accept “no” if a community ultimately decides that the project is not in their best interest. 

And that's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. But I think it's really important to have fully informed consent if a community is going to accept these projects.  

KRISTAN: I appreciated those points of what involves good community engagement. I'd be curious if anyone has a good example where we actually have done this well. Any sort of real-world tangible examples?  

ASHLEIGH: We're going to try in Southern Colorado. We really are trying. And unfortunately, a lot of opposition is materializing in CCS, primarily in the Gulf Coast, because a lot of people have taken the approach of decide first and then go educate the communities. 

It's going to be a challenge. It's going to be long and hard. We're going to have really hard conversations with the environmental justice groups, with our industrial emitters, with our local leaders, and with our stakeholders along a pipeline route and a sequestration site. 

We're going to have all of those really hard dialogues, and we did commit to incorporating as much consent-based citing principles as we can so that we get all of that feedback from the community to say, “who wants to be a part of the project”? Who does not want to be a part of the project? How can we design it to have the most success for everyone? We're going to try. Keep your fingers crossed for us. 

LAUREN: I can tell you so many bad examples, right? That's the problem. I just reviewed a project for the DOE where a DAC hub said, oh, the community really wants us. They sent the town band when we did our groundbreaking. Period. That was their community engagement. There are so many bad examples, but we're trying to figure out if there is a roadmap for doing it correctly and doing it well. 

KRISTAN: I do think that some of the improvements at DOE, with the Justice40 Initiative and many other things that have been added are hopefully doing that. I'd be curious what we're seeing here in Colorado.  

DOMINIQUE: I would say that we are definitely seeing a movement. There's been a huge emphasis from the federal government through IIJA and IRA in community engagement and setting some basic standards. 

Here at the state we've had a lot of work on environmental justice and what sort of baseline standards and recommendations are best practices. I will say that there's a huge kind of shift though that happens between a general, what is this? What do these projects possibly look like? Let's engage.  

And then there’s what Ashleigh's about to go into, where we're talking about a specific project in a specific place. That's where it really does change how important that community engagement is. Then you can really answer questions. It's really hard in this roadmap stage when we're talking about all these different carbon management tools and the entire state of Colorado. 

There's not a lot of questions without specificity. Once you get to that specific project, that's where you have to do that engagement. And I think Wil said, sometimes the answer is going to be no. However, often once you get past no, this is not the main way that we're addressing climate change; no, this is not going to be used for getting more oil and gas out of the ground here; no, these safety concerns aren't necessarily a big concern. Maybe there is still a sliver of concerns over here. Then you often can get a lot closer to yes for a lot of people, and it just takes a lot of work to get to that last bit of questions.  

LAUREN: And another thing that helps people get to yes is by saying that we're going to pay living wage or above living wage jobs long term, not just for the workers who are building the facility, but also to those who are working here, and that those workers will not be exposed to hazardous chemicals and dangerous situations. 

WIL: And I think one thing that's important is to emphasize to people that there is no free lunch at this point, right? It's not, if we just decarbonize the economy, we're okay. We're past that because we screwed things. But at the same time, it's important that we not disproportionately impact vulnerable communities that were disproportionately impacted by the manifestations of climate change itself, right?  

And so that means not always putting these projects in those kind of communities, not putting the pipelines in those kind of communities, right? There are major environmental justice concerns where we cite projects in areas where we think they'll be the least avenues of political resistance. 

Everybody is going to have to share in the benefits, hopefully that we get from carbon removal, but also share some of the risks. And that's a harder thing to sell in some ways. But it's going to be absolutely critical. And things like the Justice40 Initiative seek to do that, right? 

They seek to ensure that we're sharing risks and benefits. But politically, it's a harder thing to sell.  

KRISTAN: What about workforce? Lauren, you brought this up. What are our workforce needs for this startup in an emerging industry?  

LAUREN: A few years ago, everyone was talking about green jobs, like we need solar installers. That was the archetype of the green job.  

And right now we see that we need these sort of climate driven jobs across the board. There's labor, but we also need people who went to Yale School of Forestry or Berkeley or Stanford, who can talk about carbon removal and carbon management at a very high level. And we have that just in the last few years. We have some really skilled graduates coming out of these schools.  

We need folks who are from Colorado who intimately know how complex Pueblo is and how Pueblo is the weirdest – we might call it purple, but it is not purple. It's like red and blue M&Ms mixed in, right? You might love Kamala Harris and your neighbor has a Bobert country sign on her yard, right? We need people who really know this community and also know the complexity of carbon management to be living here. So, we need this type of education at all scales.  

I just ran this program on carbon finance, a bootcamp to upskill mid-career or senior career experts in this field to say carbon markets are really complex. They're also the primary tool that we're using to address climate change and to grow carbon removal. We need more people who understand how complex they are and can navigate this landscape.  

We need workforce, but this is everyone from junior laborers to the folks at the highest level at the state and federal government. 

ASHLEIGH: I would say we need, of course, the engineers and the permitters and a lot of the folks to actually build and make these projects really happen. I also think we have such a unique opportunity here in the state of Colorado because it is such a microcosm of the energy transition. 

And because you have these red and blue mixes paired with the opportunity for carbon management, that is just an unparalleled opportunity to get it right. Dominique is really emphasizing that we've got to be so thoughtful about how we're doing carbon management. Carbon management should only be part of the solution, not all of the solution. 

And we need people to think creatively about policies to make sure that all of the solutions are going to be viable within the state. Here in the state of Colorado we can think really creatively about policies to unlock stakeholder sentiment. 

In the last one of these sessions Wil talked about “Is carbon management a little bit more like a utility model”? This is just waste. Can we just take the steam out of the air and just take care of our waste? Or do we want it to look a little bit more like the oil boom, with a little bit more competition and all that kind of craziness? 

We have an opportunity with the state government and how they think about this so comprehensively. We have an opportunity to get carbon management right in the state of Colorado and show the rest of the world how it can be done.  

KRISTAN: Let's talk about the startup dynamic that exists and some of the challenges of keeping projects and startups going here in the state. 

What have we seen, what are some of the dynamics playing out, and what should we be wary of?  

LAUREN: There's been a lot of news recently about how the carbon removal startup boom is meeting what happened to the tech boom of a decade ago. We've had some high-profile carbon removal companies go under after raising around $50 million and they just couldn't deliver on what they promised. 

So, we are at this point where large promises of carbon removal and carbon reductions have been made and we're seeing who can deliver and who can't, and I think that's okay. It's certainly sad that a company that raised $50 million didn't make it, right? They couldn't sink ocean CDR on seaweed. 

KRISTAN: I think it was kelp.  

LAUREN: It was kelp, yes. Sorry! I'm not an ocean person, right?  

But that's unfortunate. However, we're going to see a lot of these. If I just scroll on my LinkedIn, I see people suddenly looking for jobs and I'm like, but you're with one of the biggest, well-funded carbon removal companies right now. 

I think it's definitely a place to keep our eyes on. Delivery dates are coming and not everyone has been able to meet those.  

ASHLEIGH: The timing of this industry is particularly challenging. And for example, in Nebraska, it took a couple of weeks to get our permit for a test well. In the state of Colorado, it took us a year to get a permit for our test well just to pull up samples, and that stretches out these project timelines.  

As a startup, and as a pre-revenue startup with our investors, we get our $50 million investments, and we have budgets that are supposed to last a certain amount of time. However, when permits are delayed, and other things are delayed, it gets more challenging to be able to keep everything afloat.  

For example, for our project in Southern Colorado, we were expecting a 120-day negotiation period. [Colorado School of] Mines got the draft contract on day 407. And we know that there are at least five projects after us that are still waiting on their contracts. 

The timing of some of these things is really presenting challenges. Additionally, the Department of Energy's $12 billion for carbon management -- they're having problems getting those contracts out. So, when we're sitting here waiting on these contracts and the DOE says, you'll get your contract when you get it, and you'll be grateful for it, that's a really challenging place to plan your business around. 

DOMINIQUE: Yeah, and I would just say, that's where it's coming back to that regulatory certainty, whether it's at the federal level, the state level, or the local level. Local governments actually have a lot of control over these decisions and permitting, so that's one thing we can do to support the startup environment. 

The other thing that I would just say is, echoing what Lauren said, it's okay to see things go under because a lot of the good ideas that were there might get resurfaced in some other startup. And I wouldn't think that some companies folding means that this doesn't work. 

It just means that there's a lot of technology out there. Just because the idea was good, doesn't mean that the company was well run. So that sort of shows progress. To me, it shows that we're going to have a couple winners come out of this. We're going to have some good ideas resurfaced and I think in 10 years we'll be a lot further on. 

I just think Colorado is a great place to foster that sort of innovation and we're trying to do our part from the regulatory standpoint to make sure that remains true.  

WIL: Realistically, in the long term, we can't rely entirely on this voluntary carbon market where you have a few companies like Microsoft and J.P. Morgan that are purchasing a little bit of carbon removal. It will ensure that this industry can't be stood up at the levels that it has to be stood up. And we're talking right now about removing millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere, we're going to need maybe 10 billion tons by the middle of the century, and maybe 20 billion tons by the end of the century. 

Realistically, the only way that's going to happen is going to be on the regulatory side. We're going to need mandates to remove carbon and politically that's going to be a very difficult thing to do but we're really going to have to talk about it. 

We're going to have to talk about really esoteric things like the social cost of carbon. The fact that when we produce things, the impacts on the environment from climate change are not costed into those products, right? So, people respond in a free market, which supposedly is what we all want, in a way that would drive carbon removal and drive more renewable energy. We need our product costs to reflect their actual impacts, and by doing so we can help foster the free market to do what it should do. But we're also going to need requirements from government to remove carbon, right? That may be a utility model where we all pay for the cleanup of waste like we have in other contexts, maybe through emissions trading systems, but realistically, that's what's going to have to happen. 

Sixty-five percent of all the carbon removal that's happening right now that's being paid for is by one company, Microsoft, right? There are not enough virtuous players out there to do that on a voluntary basis. If we don't face that reality quickly, a lot of these carbon removal companies are going to disappear along with their expertise. We're not going to have any realistic chance of escalating from a million tons of carbon removal to billions of tons within a couple of decades. So, the clock is ticking.  

KRISTAN: Let me include a couple audience questions here, and then we're going to wrap up. We have a great question talking about the overturned Chevron ruling from our Supreme Court. Anyone want to take that on, about how it could both hinder or help carbon removal and carbon sequestration technologies? 

WIL: It's probably not going to help. What it means is it's going to remove a lot of the discretion that regulators have in the executive branch in determining how to interpret statutes. We're already seeing one manifestation of this with the Clean Air Act regulations associated with carbon capture and sequestration. The Biden administration has said it is the way we're going to use for coal-fired power plants to reduce their emissions on the Clean Air Act, which is now being contested. 

It's not clear that the Supreme Court will say that the EPA has the discretion to determine if that's the optimal way or an acceptable way for companies to be able to do this, whereas in the past there would have been great deference given to them. Assuming they strike that down, it’s a major drag on our ability to regulate emissions. 

KRISTAN: Any countries doing this better that we could be looking to and learning from? Or states? 

LAUREN: I would say a lot of these projects are really place based, right? It's not that California is doing it better or something like that. Every project stands on its own and is contextualized around where it is in the community, where it is, and the investors. It's hard to say whether there's one place better than or not.  

WIL: One thing that California is maybe doing better, assuming the bill passes, is they want to pass a bill that would require carbon to be taken back from those that produce it, right? Again, this is creating that kind of demand that's ultimately going to achieve economies of scale and learning by doing that'll bring down costs and realistically provide us with a trajectory to do huge amounts of carbon, multi-gigaton amounts of carbon in the future. Looking to states that are providing those kinds of models I think is helpful. 

KRISTAN: What's one thing you want the audience to take away about the state of affairs in this conversation?  

DOMINIQUE: I think that a takeaway I would say is that this is early but it's one of the many things that kind of gives me hope. I, like many people, have some anxiety. It's an occupational hazard when it comes to climate, an you’ve got young kids, right? 2050 doesn't seem that far out. The fact that there are so many people that are engaged and excited, and that there is all this new technology or old technology that often comes with a lot of co-benefits means that some of these solutions are going to work, and some of these things are going to help fix our problem. 

In particular, I remind myself often that maybe we're going into a particularly difficult period because we didn't get our act together early enough, but that we can come out of it, and on the other side we're going to be okay, right? Things might actually be better, right? 

All of these switches that we're making are going to improve our lives beyond just addressing climate change. This is just one of the many solutions that people are working towards, and we should support however we can. 

LAUREN:  I'll wrap up with a little anecdote which happened yesterday. Generally, I feel like it's a gift to get to think about how we might address climate change and how we might grow our economy and make our communities stronger, while also addressing this catastrophic problem. 

Yesterday I was driving my six-year-old daughter to theater camp, and we're up on a hill. You could see two plumes of smoke and we live in Louisville. A thousand homes in Louisville and Superior burned two years ago in the Marshall fire in one of the most catastrophic urban wildfires that we've ever had in the country. 

My six-year-old started having anxiety and what seemed to me was like PTSD. And she said, “Mom, there's other fires. Are they coming to Louisville? Did people's houses burn? Did any animals die yet? Like, where is it? What's it near? What's it near?” 

I'm crying right now. This is why we need to do this. Our kids do not deserve to have climate anxiety when they're in kindergarten. I did not have it and my students at CSU have it, and we're having a whole workshop next week on how to teach faculty to deal with climate anxiety in the classroom. Our kids deserve better. Our ecosystems deserve better. 

The people who haven't even been born yet deserve better. So, we really need to do everything in our power to stop the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels and manage the pollution that we have in the atmosphere already.  

ASHLEIGH: A few years back, probably five years ago or so, I was late picking my son up from daycare. I apologized for being late because I was stuck in a meeting. He was, I think, three at the time and asked me what I did, and I talked a little bit about climate change and saving polar bears. I remember just looking in the rear-view mirror at him in the backseat and him saying, “I'm glad you're doing that, mom.” 

I think the thing I would leave us on is just the incredible opportunity we have here in the state of Colorado, right? We have all of the right people, and all of the right dynamics to have all of the hard conversations to figure out how to get it right. 

I think just one more great anecdote and evidence of this, and this is appropriate for being at the museum. We went and did one of our community events down in Southern Colorado at the Hanover School. It's the junior high school closest to our sequestration site. We've got a scale model of the earth that shows the different layers and the different ways we protect the groundwater. 

I was having a conversation with the woman who runs the front office at the school. She said, so if you inject that CO2 into the ground and it interacts with dinosaur bones in the ground, will it affect the carbon dating of the dinosaur bones? What an amazing question, right? To be able to pull together those disparate ideas to put together that question is just amazing. 

I think that's just a perfect example of all of the right thinking and creative thinking and pulling together disparate ideas to really be able to save the world from climate change.  

WIL: Yeah, there's not much more to say than that. We just have this huge responsibility to future generations that we seem to like to ignore. We're partying like it's 1999, and it has huge implications.  

We have the capability in this generation to establish a foundation for future generations to cope with climate change, some of which is inevitable and to respond to it in a more effective way. We need to mobilize to do that in a way that's responsible, but it's also expeditious at this point because the clock clearly is ticking.  

KRISTAN: When Wil and I had a conversation many months ago about putting this series together, it was because a museum is a great place to try to have this conversation when people don't know what these words are and don't know what we're talking about. 

So, hopefully this is just one additional thing that adds to that ongoing conversation that needs to exist because they are hard conversations. I'm really grateful for everyone's personal experience and time and expertise on the panel. Thank you so much for being here. 

For more on this series visit our Climate Interventions page.