The new climate gold rush: Scrubbing carbon from the sky

As countries around the world continue to pump planet-warming pollution into the skies, driving global temperatures to record levels, the financial world is racing to fund the emerging field of carbon dioxide removal, seeking both an environmental miracle and a financial windfall.

The technology, which did not exist until a few years ago, is still unproven at scale. Yet it has a uniquely alluring appeal. And with a small but growing number of companies willing to pay for it, investors are jockeying to be first movers in what they believe will inevitably be a big industry that is necessary to help fight global warming.

Companies working on ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air have raised more than $5 billion since 2018, according to investment bank Jefferies. Before that, there were almost no such investments.

"It's the single greatest opportunity I've seen in 20 years of doing venture capital," said Damien Steel, chief executive of Canada-based Deep Sky, which has raised more than $50 million to develop carbon dioxide removal projects.

Investors believe the market is poised for explosive growth.

More than 1,000 big companies have pledged to eliminate their carbon emissions over the next few decades. As part of those efforts, more corporations are starting to pay for carbon dioxide removal. This year, Microsoft, Google and British Airways were among the companies that committed a total of $1.6 billion to purchase removal credits.

That figure was up from less than $1 million in 2019, according to CDR.fyi, a website that tracks the carbon dioxide removal industry. Next year, industry executives believe companies could spend up to $10 billion on such purchases. In a recent report, McKinsey estimated the market could be worth as much as $1.2 trillion by 2050.

While huge sums of money are being dedicated to the nascent field, these projects will not have a meaningful effect on global temperatures anytime soon.

There are a few dozen facilities operational today. But the biggest of these capture only a sliver of the greenhouse gases humans produce in one day. Even if hundreds more such plants were built, they would not come close to counteracting even 1 per cent of annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Instead, many scientists and activists say the most effective way to combat global warming is to rapidly phase out oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is heating the planet.