Free CDR Career Advice!

TL;DR working to find a job in carbon removal can be hard work itself – some advice below on how to find the right team fit.

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“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” – Aristotle

Part of my dream for the carbon removal industry is a future where many thousands of people find gainful, meaningful employment for work to remove the legacy of excess greenhouse gas. For that vision to become reality – removing the first one billion tons before we believe it is possible today – requires a workforce that is educated, trained, and well-matched for the CDR jobs of the future.

To that end, through the people I’ve been lucky to meet in the carbon removal industry, I’ve been asked quite a bit about how to find a job in CDR. When welcoming new folks into AirMiners, the question of how to find a job is probably the topic most on the minds of those who are new to our community. That’s why in AirMiners we’ve done  two  events ( about this topic – Heidi Lim in particular has some excellent (and oft-cited advice) here.

One pillar of this is: how much can I expect to earn in carbon removal? And that data has been difficult to find. That is, until today with the release of an excellent global salary report created by the CDRJobs.earth team led by Sebastian Manhart.

Building on that hope for finding a job that inspires the best of you is why I’m writing this for you as a CDR job-seeking reader: to help you save time by asking three questions of yourself, about what makes you most effective to direct your efforts to fruitful career goals. 

Please note that these self-revealing questions constitute my own personal advice, and your own results may vary.

First, what is your one functional superpower that you bring to the table when approaching a carbon removal company? To be blunt: what is the one thing that you could do immediately in a new role without any on-the-job training? 

‘Functional expertise’ could be marketing campaign creation, operations or program management, corporate financial expertise, or any one of a wide variety of technical skills. And what concrete results have you driven in executing on this skill? In business school my classmates and I practiced the STAR framework to handle interviews: Situations,Tasks, Actions, and Results. What was the Situation you found yourself in, what Tasks were before you to achieve, what were your Actions to attain that goal, and what were the Results you ultimately arrived at. Quantifying those results is especially important: “I developed R or Python to research and analyze X number of deep datasets” “Our marketing campaigns achieved a 200% ROI!” / “We delivered this $5M project ahead of schedule and below budget” marks the success that attracts interest.

Not to discount passion – which is important – but a Grade ‘A’ record of performance plus passion is a compelling story. At the time of this writing, our industry is still in an early enough stage that top functional expertise from different industries will find a ready-made home. Not many have been in CDR for more than five years (myself included!), so bringing a strong transferable set of skills is by far the best way to build a compelling narrative to land a new role.

Second, what type of carbon removal do you like best? 

There are a wide – and I mean wide – variety of CDR methods on offer in these early years of the carbon removal industry. The trick is to figure  out which type of CDR suits your skills and interests – as soon as you can – which makes career searching in CDR  much easier. That way as a job seeker you can home in on how the superpower identified above can be useful in, say, marine CDR, Direct Air Capture, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, Measurement/Reporting/Verification, or any other type of carbon removal technology that provides meaning to you.¹

Carbon removal is a new enough industry that you as a job seeker can ask yourself what sparks your interest in a particular method of carbon removal. What is it about that method that makes you like it more than others, at a high level? If you don’t have that perspective, fortunately AirMiners own BootUp program² provides such an entry point, offering a broad overview of state-of-the-art CDR methods over the course of several weeks.

Most importantly get out and talk to people who are starting up these organizations! Find them on LinkedIn, at networking events, even (gasp) in our main AirMiners community or elsewhere. Ask yourself whether you can envision you working at the type of jobs for people in that method of CDR is a good fit.

Third question: what size organization would you like to work at? The landscape of carbon removal is very much the landscape of startups, though the term ‘startup’ covers a lot of ground in terms of risk and reward. Maybe you are a founder of a company. Maybe you are Employee Number 5, or Number 25, or Number 125 – all of those are new, small STARTUP businesses, with a high degree of risk around technological approach or business model. 

The real introspection to work on is: “in what environment am I most effective at driving results?” Will your 1 or 2 skills from Question 1 above be best unleashed with structure and resources? Or with freedom and latitude without as much to fall back on? Every person has different preferences – and prefers things at different points of their career, especially when factoring for personal and family needs.

The larger a company, even along the more differentiated a role tends to be, and possibly the more hierarchical. Smaller organizations tend to be flatter, favoring those who consider themselves generalists. Plus, compensation – especially for pre-revenue companies – would be more for equity rather than cash. 

Different people in a similar situation could pursue widely varied pathways. For example a recent graduate might want to develop the one functional skill that they know they want to fulfill throughout the next several years of their career, then climb a career ladder or switch companies. Or another recent graduate would say ‘nah, I need my space’ and found a startup or two (or three) in their first years in industry. Knowing yourself and where your talents may best take root – that’s the essence of how to start a job search.

And an added bonus question: How effective might you be in a remote vs. hybrid vs. in-office work environment? The COVID pandemic led to the rise of remote work, with some reversal of that trend in recent years. Fortunately many CDR companies – including small startups – are willing to take a risk and seek talent from a truly global pool rather than limit themselves to a particular geography. 

This post started off with the goal of developing a professional workforce in carbon removal; my hope is that you as a job seeking reader find the career journey a bit easier by asking questions of yourself to guide your job search in a new and growing field. 

Thanks for reading, and wishing you good job hunting!

 

Jason Grillo is a Co-Founder of AirMiners. The opinions expressed in this writing are the author’s own and do not reflect the position of any employer.

Mind the CDR Gap – Climagination with Jason Grillo

 

TL;DR: A gap exists between where we are and where we need to be in carbon removal by 2030, but with the right factors in play we can overcome it sooner than anyone thinks is possible today.

Hi there! 

Summertime travels are wonderful – the result of oftentimes weeks of planning for where you’re going and how to get there. In the carbon removal industry, we’re moving forward to a destination where gigatons of excess greenhouse gases are removed from the atmosphere.  “NetZero by 2050” is certainly an admirable target – we need to understand where the industry needs to get to by midcentury.

As much as future projections focus on 2050 goals, they can seem, well, a bit distant: nowhere near as much emphasis has been placed on what an interim 2030 goal might look like. And that’s an important goal because we can know now whether or not we are on track, and take actions if needed to meet an end-of-2030 target. A specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goal – 6 years away at the time of this writing – can inspire action today which can make that midcentury vision a reality.

That’s why I’m writing today about what might be 2030 interim CDR milestones for climate goals, a gap in where we might be, and a path forward to tackle that. 

To do this I’m going to outline a target, then use publicly available data sources of leading novel CDR methods to extrapolate a portfolio of projections to 2030. As defined in the State of CDR 2nd Edition report, “Novel” CDR includes DAC, BECCS, Biochar, Enhanced Rock Weathering, and marine CDR methods. 

Fair warning: this analysis includes many assumptions about future growth of various CDR sectors – and I very much welcome your scrutiny and constructive critical eyes. So please, comment away using the link at the end of this post!

 

What does a 2030 target look like?

To start off, let’s characterize the 2030 destination.

Fortunately, the aforementioned State of CDR report, 2nd Edition offers an excellent starting point. I’m presenting two scenarios outlined in Chapter 3 of that report: one where our climate settles on 1.5 degrees C without overshoot, and one with overshoot. The data for this comes from the data resources accompanying the report – again, publicly available, and free of charge!

The State of CDR team made multiple estimates, with a median of 260 Megatons of atmospheric CO2 to be removed in the year 2030 for the climate to be on track with the scenario of 1.5 degrees of warming without overshoot, and 70 Megatons with overshoot. 

Data sourced from State of CDR report, 2nd Ed, June 2024

Others have speculated that the 1.5C number requires as low as 190 Megatons; additionally or as high as 285 megatons. For the purposes of our gap conversation, I’m comfortable to stay with 260 megatons for a 1.5 degrees Celsius result without overshoot.

 

Where will the 2030 Megatons come from?

The short answer: everywhere! All solutions are on the table; a portfolio of approaches – some of which are not delivering tonnage yet – are going to contribute to getting to the result. To forecast what a 2030 scenario might look like I’m going to use some existing estimates here from citable sources, and also create some projections of my own based on growth assumptions.

 

Contributions by DAC and BECCS in 2030 

know that Microsoft and Frontier in particular have gone quite deep in funding new BECCS projects, particularly in Scandinavia. The State of CDR Report Chapter 3 has an excellent chart (below) based on companies’ announced plans to build and deploy BECCS and DAC capacity through 2030. BECCS in particular is indicated to have a capacity of ~20 MT in 2025, rising to ~60 MT by 2030; DAC in 2030 is also projected to be 60 MT, for a 120 MT total between these two methods.

 

Some caveats: this likely reflects the facilities’ nameplate capacity, so actual tonnage removed – might not perform as well. 

Second, as with all company estimates, delayed and canceled project deployments may diminish future results. 

Contributions by Biochar in 2030  

Per CDR.FYI we know that Biochar is delivering the vast majority of CDR tonnage today and is selling well now, and is poised to grow in future years. By how much is an open question. For the 2030 estimate, I am going to assume linear growth of tons of biochar produced based on the 2023 Market estimates from the International Biochar Initiative/US Biochar Initiative 2023 Global Market report

Growing from ~96,000 tons to ~352,000 tons represents a 3.6x increase in physical char produced over two years from 2021 to 2023. Assuming this trend of linear growth continues, then in the year 2030, 31 million tons of biochar worldwide would be produced. And since one ton of biochar contains ~2.8 tons of CO2 (source: 2023/24 European Biochar Market report), that figure represents approximately 87 million tons of CO2 stored in the year 2030.

Note that this figure is the tons of physical biochar produced rather than the quantity of registered carbon credits from them – regardless of whether a biochar producer is selling credits, the physical char stores embodied carbon and represents carbon removed from the atmosphere. Adapting a phrase, if a tree gets pyrolyzed in a forest, and nobody registers the credit, it still does reflect removed carbon (and yes will probably make a sound 😉).

Contributions by Enhanced Rock Weathering in 2030

For ERW, the data are a bit more scant, though the Boston Consulting Group offers insights from their 2023 report on carbon removal. With a forecast that 33 megatons will be removed by the entire CDR industry in 2030, 9% of which is ERW, BCG’s result is that ~3 Megatons of CDR will be achieved by enhanced weathering in that year.

That said, I offer that there could be some upside to this – weathering rates and CO2 uptake rates are still under research. And it is possible that deployments may outpace estimates as of now.

The estimated gap

The sum total of those four methods that we have credible 2030 estimates for is 204 megatons to be removed in that year, leaving a gap of 56 megatons to be fulfilled by other methods or by outpacing the projected trajectories of the methods mentioned above.

How to make up a gap? 

  1. Bring additional methods to scale.

Marine CDR in 2030 could contribute to reducing the gap mentioned above, however it is challenging to estimate since most startups are not (yet!) reaching volume at the time of this writing. However, I agree that a suite of marine solutions could be enough to fill the gap (and more on that below) however, projecting into the future is a challenge.

Fundamental research now in mCDR would set the stage for significant deliveries to take place in the year 2030 – particularly for Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, or macroalgae sinking. BCG suggests a 100Mt in 2050 figure across all ocean methods, rather than offer a 2030 estimate.

Biomass burial and storage is also just now starting to gain a foothold, with over 180,000 tons sold and over 3,000 tons delivered at the time of this writing per CDR.FYI. This solution is scaling rapidly. Assuming that 75% of the 180k tons sold to date are delivered in 2024, and this grows at the same rate as biochar 3.6x every two years (yes, a big IF), then burial solutions would contribute 3M in 2030. 

 

2. Keep pushing to outpace the estimate of the four methods that I included above (BECCS, DAC, Biochar, and ERW). Growing any field of carbon removal is not inevitable, but rather the result of people researching, deploying, and learning how to efficiently advance the practice of removing excess atmospheric greenhouse gas. The ability to advance faster than forecasts is not fanciful – but happening for key climate technologies already. 

It is my belief that carbon removal can model the systemic adaptations present in these industries – innovations in financing, policy advancements, improved social license to operate through awareness and endorsement – leading to deployment and expansion beyond linear estimates. 

In other words, we can close the carbon removal gap – and despite the many challenges that carbon removal faces, that can happen sooner than anyone thinks today.

 

-Jason Grillo is a Co-Founder of AirMiners. Opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not represent the position of any employer.