Oct 12 2024

The weeds are winning

On a languid, damp July morning, I meet weed scientist Aaron Hager outside the old Agronomy Seed House at the University of Illinois’ South Farm. In the distance are round barns built in the early 1900s, designed to withstand Midwestern windstorms. The sky is a formless white. It’s the day after a storm system hundreds of miles wide rolled through, churning out 80-mile-per-hour gusts and prompting dozens of tornado watches and sirens reminiscent of a Cold War bomb drill.

On about 23 million acres, or roughly two-thirds of the state, farmers grow corn and soybeans, with a smattering of wheat. They generally spray virtually every acre with herbicides, says Hager, who was raised on a farm in Illinois. But these chemicals, which allow one plant species to live unbothered across inconceivably vast spaces, are no longer stopping all the weeds from growing.

Since the 1980s, more and more plants have evolved to become immune to the biochemical mechanisms that herbicides leverage to kill them. This herbicidal resistance threatens to decrease yields—out-of-control weeds can reduce them by 50% or more, and extreme cases can wipe out whole fields.

At worst, it can even drive farmers out of business. It’s the agricultural equivalent of antibiotic resistance, and it keeps getting worse.

As we drive east from the campus in Champaign-Urbana, the twin cities where I grew up, we spot a soybean field overgrown with dark-green, spiky plants that rise to chest height.

“So here’s the problem,” Hager says. “That’s all water hemp right there. My guess is it’s been sprayed at least once, if not more than once.”

“With these herbicide-resistant weeds, it’s only going to get worse. It’s going to blow up.”

Water hemp (Amaranthus tuberculatus), which can infest just about any kind of crop field, grows an inch or more a day, and females of the species can easily produce hundreds of thousands of seeds. Native to the Midwest, it has burst forth in much greater abundance over the last few years, because it has become resistant to seven different classes of herbicides. Season-long competition from water hemp can reduce soybean yields by 44% and corn yields by 15%, according to Purdue University Extension.

Most farmers are still making do. Two different groups of herbicides still usually work against water hemp. But cases of resistance to both are cropping up more and more.

“We’re starting to see failures,” says Kevin Bradley, a plant scientist at the University of Missouri who studies weed management. “We could be in a dangerous situation, for sure.”

Elsewhere, the situation is even more grim.

“We really need a fundamental change in weed control, and we need it quick, ’cause the weeds have caught up to us,” says Larry Steckel, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Tennessee. “It’s come to a pretty critical point.”

On the rise

According to Ian Heap, a weed scientist who runs the International Herbicide-Resistant Weed Database, there have been well over 500 unique cases of the phenomenon in 273 weed species and counting. Weeds have evolved resistance to 168 different herbicides and 21 of the 31 known “modes of action,” which means the specific biochemical target or pathway a chemical is designed to disrupt. Some modes of action are shared by many herbicides.

One of the most wicked weeds in the South, one that plagues Steckel and his colleagues, is a rhubarb-red-stemmed cousin to water hemp known as Palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri). Populations of the weeds have been found that are impervious to nine different classes of herbicides. The plant can grow more than two inches a day to reach eight feet in height and dominate entire fields. Originally from the desert Southwest, it boasts a sturdy root system and can withstand droughts. If rainy weather or your daughter’s wedding prevents you from spraying it for a couple of days, you’ve probably missed your chance to control it chemically.

Palmer amaranth “will zero your yield out,” Hager says.

Several other weeds, including Italian ryegrass and a tumbleweed called kochia, are inflicting real pain on the farmers in the South and the West, particularly in wheat and sugar beet fields.

Chemical birth

Before World War II, farmers generally used cultivators such as plows and harrows to remove weeds and break up the ground. Or they did it by hand—like my mother, who remembers hoeing weeds in cornfields as a kid growing up on an Indiana farm.

That changed with the advent of synthetic pesticides and herbicides, which farmers started using in the 1950s. By the 1970s, some of the first examples of resistance appeared. By the early 1980s, Heap and his colleague Stephen Powles had discovered populations of ryegrass (Lolium rigidum) that were resistant to the most commonly used herbicides, known as ACCase inhibitors, spreading throughout southern Australia. Within a few years, this species had become resistant to yet another class, called ALS-inhibiting herbicides.

The problem had just begun. It was about to get much worse.

In the mid to late 1990s, the agricultural giant Monsanto—now a part of Bayer Crop Science—began marketing genetically engineered crops including corn and soybeans that were resistant to the commercial weed killer Roundup, the active ingredient of which is called glyphosate. Monsanto portrayed these “Roundup-ready” crops, and the ability to spray whole fields with glyphosate, as a virtual silver bullet for weed control.

Glyphosate quickly became one of the most widely used agricultural chemicals, and it remains so today. It was so successful, in fact, that research and development on other new herbicides withered: No major commercial herbicide appears likely to hit the market anytime soon that could help address herbicide resistance on a grand scale.

Monsanto claimed it was “highly unlikely” that glyphosate-resistant weeds would become a problem. There were, of course, those who correctly predicted that such a thing was inevitable—among them Jonathan Gressel, a professor emeritus at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who has been studying herbicides since the 1960s.

Stanley Culpepper, a weed scientist at the University of Georgia, confirmed the first case of Roundup resistance in Palmer amaranth in 2004. Resistance rapidly spread. Both Palmer amaranth and water hemp produce male and female plants, the former of which produce pollen that can blow long distances on the wind to pollinate the latter. This also gives the plant a lot of genetic diversity, which allows it to evolve faster—all the better for herbicide resistance to develop and spread. These super-weeds sowed chaos throughout the state.

“It devastated us,” Culpepper says, recalling the period from 2008 to 2012 as particularly difficult. “We were mowing fields down.”

Staying alive

Herbicide resistance is a predictable outcome of evolution, explains Patrick Tranel, a leader in the field of molecular weed science at the University of Illinois, whose lab is a few miles from the South Farm.

“When you try to kill something, what does it do? It tries to not be killed,” Tranel says.

Weeds have developed surprising ways to get around chemical control. One 2009 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that a mutation in the Palmer amaranth genome allowed the plant to make more than 150 copies of the gene that glyphosate targets. That kind of gene amplification had never been reported in plants before, says Franck Dayan, a weed scientist at Colorado State University.

Another bizarre way resistance can arise in that species is via structures called extrachromosomal circular DNA, strands of genetic material including the gene target for glyphosate that exist outside of nuclear chromosomes. This gene can be transferred via wind-blown pollen from plants with this adaptation.

But scientists are increasingly finding metabolic resistance in weeds, where plants have evolved mechanisms to break down just about any foreign substance—including a range of herbicides.

Let’s say a given herbicide worked on a population of water hemp one year. If any plants “escape,” or survive, and make seeds, their offspring could possess metabolic resistance to the herbicides used.

“When you try to kill something, what does it do? It tries to not be killed.”

Patrick Tranel, University of Illinois

There’s evidence of resistance developing to both of the chemical groups that have replaced or been mixed with Roundup to kill this weed: an herbicide called glufosinate and a pair of substances known as 2,4-D and dicamba. These two would normally kill many crops, too, but there are now millions of acres of corn and soy genetically modified to be impervious. So essentially the response has been to throw more chemicals at the problem.

“If it worked last year, if you have metabolic resistance there’s no guarantee it’s going to work this year,” Hager says.

Many of these herbicides can harm the environment and have the potential to harm human health, says Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is based in Tucson, Arizona. Paraquat, for example, is a neurotoxic chemical banned in more than 60 countries (it’s been linked to conditions like Parkinson’s), Donley says, but it’s being used more and more in the United States. 2,4-D, one of the active ingredients in Agent Orange, is a potential endocrine disruptor, and exposure to it is correlated with increased risk of various cancers. Glyphosate is listed as a probable human carcinogen by an agency within the World Health Organization and has been the subject of tens of thousands of lawsuits worth tens of billions. Atrazine can stick around in groundwater for years and can shrink testicles and reduce sperm count in certain fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals.

Replacing glyphosate with herbicides like 2,4-D and dicamba, which are generally more toxic, “is definitely a step in the wrong direction,” Donley says.

Looking for solutions

It’s not just chemicals. Weeds can become resistant to any type of control method. In a classic example from China, a weed called barnyard grass evolved over centuries to resemble rice and thus evade hand weeding.

Because weeds can evolve relatively quickly, researchers recommend a wide diversity of control tactics. Mixing two herbicides with different modes of action can sometimes work, though that’s not the best for the environment or the farmer’s wallet, Tranel says. Rotating the plants that are grown helps, as does installing winter cover crops and, above all, not using the same herbicide in the same way every year.

Fundamentally, the solution is to “not focus solely on herbicides for weed management,” says Micheal Owen, a weed scientist and emeritus professor at Iowa State University. And that presents a “major, major issue for the farmer” and the current state of American farms, he adds.

Farms have ballooned in size over the last couple of decades, as a result of rural flight, labor costs, and the advent of chemicals and genetically modified crops that allowed farmers to quickly apply herbicides over massive areas to control weeds. This has led to a kind of sinister simplification in terms of crop diversity, weed control practices, and the like. And the weeds have adjusted.

On the one hand, it’s understandable that farmers often do the cheapest thing they can to control weeds, to get them through the year. But resistance is a medium- to long-term problem running up against a system of short-term thinking and incentives, says Katie Dentzman, a rural sociologist also at Iowa State University.

Her studies have shown that farmers are generally informed and worried about herbicide resistance but are constrained by a variety of factors that prevent them from really heading it off. The farm is too big to economically control weeds without spraying in a single shot, some farmers say, while others lack the labor, financing, or time.

Agriculture needs to embrace a diversity of weed control practices, Owen says. But that’s much easier said than done.

“We’re too narrow-visioned, focusing on herbicides as the solution,” says Steven Fennimore, a weed scientist with the University of California, Davis, based in Salinas, California.

Fennimore specializes in vegetables, for which there are few herbicide options, and there are fewer still for organic growers. So innovation is necessary. He developed a prototype that injects steam into the ground, killing weeds within several inches of the entry point. This has proved around 90% effective, and he’s used it in fields growing lettuce, carrots, and onions. But it is not exactly quick: It takes two or three days to treat a 10-acre block.

Many other nonchemical means of control are gaining traction in vegetables and other high-value crops. Eventually, if the economics and logistics work out, these could catch on in row crops, those planted in rows that can be tilled by machinery.

A company called Carbon Robotics, for example, produces an AI-driven system called the LaserWeeder that, as the name implies, uses lasers to kill weeds. It is designed to pilot itself up and down crop rows, recognizing unwanted plants and vaporizing them with one of its 30 lasers. LaserWeeders are now active in at least 17 states, according to the company.

You can also shock weeds by using electricity, and several apparatuses designed to do so are commercially available in the United States and Europe. A typical design involves the use of a height-adjustable copper boom that zaps weeds it touches. The most obvious downside with this method is that the weeds usually have to be taller than the crop. By the time the weeds have grown that high, they’ve probably already caused a decline in yield.

Weed seed destructors are another promising option. These devices, commonly used in Australia and catching on a bit in places like the Pacific Northwest, grind up and kill the seeds of weeds as wheat is harvested.

An Israeli company called WeedOut hatched a system to irradiate and sterilize the pollen of Palmer amaranth plants and then release it into fields. This way, female plants receive the sterile pollen and fail to produce viable seeds.

“I’m very excited about this [as] a long-term way to reduce the seed bank and to manage these weeds without having to spray an herbicide,” Owen says.

WeedOut is currently testing its approach in corn, soybean, and sugar beet fields in the US and working to get EPA approval. It recently secured $8 million in funding to scale up.

In general, AI-driven rigs and precision spraying are very likely to eventually reduce herbicide use, says Stephen Duke, who studies herbicides at the University of Mississippi: “Eventually I expect we’ll see robotic weeding and AI-driven spray rigs taking over.” But he expects that to take a while on crops like soybeans and corn, since it is economically difficult to invest a lot of money in tending such “low-value” agronomic crops planted across such vast areas.

A handful of startups are pursuing new types of herbicides, based on natural products found in fungi or used by plants to compete with one another. But none of these promise to be ready for market anytime soon.

Field day

Some of the most successful tools for preventing resistance are not exactly high-tech. That much is clear from the presentations at the Aurora Farm Field Day, organized by Cornell University just north of its campus in Ithaca, New York.

For example, one of the most important things farmers can do to prevent the spread of weed seeds is to clean out their combines after harvest, especially if they’re buying or using equipment from another state, says Lynn Sosnoskie, an assistant professor and weed scientist at Cornell.

Combines are believed to have already introduced Palmer amaranth into the state, she says—there are now at least five populations in New York.

Another classic approach is crop rotation—switching between crops with different life cycles, management practices, and growth patterns is a mainstay of agriculture, and it helps prevent weeds from becoming accustomed to one cropping system. Yet another option is to put in a winter cover crop that helps prevent weeds from getting established.

“We’re not going to solve weed problems with chemicals alone,” Sosnoskie says. That means we have to start pursuing these kinds of straightforward practices.

It’s an especially important point to hammer home in places like New York state, where the problem isn’t yet top of mind. That’s in part because the state isn’t dominated by monocultures the way the Midwest is, and it has a more diverse patchwork of land use.

But it’s not immune to the issue. Resistance has arrived and threatens to “blow up,” says Vipan Kumar, also a weed expert at Cornell.

“We have to do everything we can to prevent this,” Kumar says. “My role is to educate people that this is coming, and we have to be ready.”

Douglas Main is a journalist and former senior editor and writer at National Geographic.

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App Climate change and energy The Spark

Oct 12 2024

Everything comes back to climate tech. Here’s what to watch for next.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

We get to celebrate a very special birthday today—The Spark just turned two!

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been bringing you all the news you need to know in climate tech and digging into some of the most fascinating and thorny topics from energy and transportation to agriculture and policy.

In light of this milestone, I’ve been looking back at some of the most popular editions of this newsletter, as well as some of my personal favorites—and it’s all got me thinking about where climate tech will go next. So let’s look back together, and I’ll also share what I’m going to be watching out for as we go forward.

It’s prime time for batteries

It will probably be a surprise to absolutely nobody that the past two years have been filled with battery news. (In case you’re new and need a quick intro to my feelings on the topic, you can read the love letter to batteries I wrote this year for Valentine’s Day.)

We’ve covered how abundant materials could help unlock cheaper, better batteries, and how new designs could help boost charging speeds. I’ve dug into the data to share how quickly batteries are taking over the world, and how much faster we’ll need to go to hit our climate goals.

The next few years are going to be make-or-break for a lot of the alternative batteries we’ve covered here, from sodium-ion to iron-air and even solid-state. We could see companies either fold or make it to the next stage of commercialization. I’m watching to see which technologies will win—there are many different options that could break out and succeed.

A nuclear renaissance

One topic I’ve been covering closely, especially in the past year, is nuclear energy. We need zero-emissions options that are able to generate electricity 24-7. Nuclear fits that bill.

Over the past two years, we’ve seen some major ups and downs in the industry. Two new reactors have come online in the US, though they were years late and billions over budget. Germany completed its move away from nuclear energy, opting instead to go all in on intermittent renewables like solar and wind (and keep its coal plants open).

Looking ahead, though, there are signs that we could see a nuclear energy resurgence. I’ve written about interest in keeping older reactors online for longer and opening up plants that have previously shut down. And companies are aiming to deploy new advanced reactor designs, too.

I’m watching to see how creative the industry can get with squeezing everything it can out of existing assets. But I’m especially interested to see whether new technologies keep making progress on getting regulatory approval, and whether the new designs can actually get built.

Material world forever

I’ll never stop talking about materials—from what we need to build all the technologies that are crucial for addressing climate change to how we can more smartly use the waste after those products reach the end of their lifetime.

Recently, I wrote a feature story (and, of course, a related newsletter bringing you behind the scenes of my reporting) about how one rare earth metal gives us a look at some of the challenges we’ll face with sourcing and recycling materials over the next century and beyond.

It’s fitting that the very first edition of The Spark was about my trip inside a battery recycling factory. Over the past two years, the world of climate tech has become much more tuned in to topics like mining, recycling, and critical minerals. I’m interested to see how companies continue finding new, creative ways to get what they need to build everything they’re trying to deploy.

Milestones … and deadlines

Overall, the last couple of years have been some of the most exciting and crucial in the race to address climate change, and it’s only going to ramp up from here.

Next year marks 10 years since the Paris Agreement, a landmark climate treaty that’s guided most of the world’s ambitions to limit warming to less than 2 °C (3.7 °F) above preindustrial levels. In the US, 2027 will mark five years since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, ushering in a new era of climate spending for the world’s largest economy.

The last two years have been a whirlwind of new ideas, research, and technologies, all aimed at limiting the most damaging effects of our changing climate. I’m looking forward to following all the progress of the years to come with you as well.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Another thing

If you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet that you probably eat food. So you should join us for the latest edition of our subscriber-only Roundtables virtual event series, where I’ll be speaking with my colleague James Temple about creating climate-friendly food.

Joining us are experts from Pivot Bio and Rumin8, two of our 2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. It’s going to be a fascinating discussion—subscribers, register to join us here!

And one more

The growing energy demands of artificial intelligence represent a challenge for the grid. But the technology also offers an opportunity for energy tech, according to the authors of a new op-ed out this week. Check it out for more on why they say that AI and clean energy need each other.

Keeping up with climate

Hurricane Milton reached wind speeds of over 160 miles per hour, making it a Category 5 storm. It’s hitting the gulf coast of Florida in the coming days. See its projected path and the rainfall forecast. (Washington Post)
→ Tampa Bay has seen destructive hurricanes, but there hasn’t been a direct hit in decades. The metro area is home to over 3 million people. (Axios)

Other regions are still reeling from Hurricane Helene, which dumped rainfall in western North Carolina in particular. The storm upends ideas of what a climate haven is. (Scientific American)
→ Two studies suggest that climate change significantly boosted rainfall from the storm. (NBC News)

If you have an EV, it’s best to keep it out of flood zones during hurricanes when possible. Batteries submerged in salt water can catch fire, though experts say it’s relatively rare. (New York Times)

The risk of winter blackouts in Great Britain is at the lowest in years, even though the country has shut down its last coal plant. The grid is expected to have plenty of energy, in part because of investment in renewables. (The Guardian)

Voters in Kazakhstan have approved a plan to build the country’s first nuclear power plant. The country has a complicated relationship with nuclear technology, since it was a testing ground for Soviet nuclear weapons. (Power)

Revoy wants to bring battery swapping to heavy-duty trucks. The company’s batteries can reduce the amount of diesel fuel a conventional truck needs to drive a route. (Heatmap)
→ I wrote earlier this year about another company building batteries into trailers in an effort to clean up distance trucking. (MIT Technology Review)

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Climate change and energy

Oct 11 2024

Observers warn the US must do more to boost demand for carbon removal

In 2022, the US made a massive bet on the carbon removal industry, committing $3.5 billion to build four major regional hubs in an effort to scale up the nascent sector. But industry observers fear that market demand isn’t building fast enough to support it, even with these substantial federal grants and other subsidies.

Some are now calling for the Department of Energy to redirect a portion of the money earmarked to build direct-air-capture (DAC) plants toward purchases of greenhouse-gas removal instead. At issue is the lack of natural demand for the product that these plants ultimately generate: carbon dioxide that, in most cases, is immediately buried underground. Businesses and organizations that purchase credits representing that CO₂ do so only to meet climate neutrality goals, which are mostly self-imposed. Carbon removal proponents worry that without greater government efforts to prop up ongoing demand, some of the facilities funded through the program may not survive—or even be built.

Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates–backed climate and clean energy organization, released a commentary today calling for more government support for demand to ensure that the industry doesn’t stall out in its infancy, MIT Technology Review can report.

“You’re essentially totally dependent on a handful of companies willing to pay a very high dollar amount as you try to drive the technology down the cost curve,” says Jack Andreasen, head of carbon management within the policy advocacy arm of Breakthrough Energy. “My fear is we’ll build a bunch of facilities and they’ll just be mothballed because they can’t sell enough credits.”

The Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program was funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which President Joe Biden signed in late 2021. To date, only a few of the awardees have been selected, none of the projects have been built, and few of the funds have been dispersed, so any stumbles would still be years in the future. But if any of the DOE-backed projects did ultimately fail, it would likely chill investor interest and spark a political backlash like the Solyndra scandal did in the early 2010s, creating fresh grounds for critics to assail federal support for climate, clean energy, and carbon removal projects.

“It’s absolutely critical that the DAC Hubs program creates high-quality projects and that the DOE does everything they can to make sure they thrive,” says Giana Amador, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, a nonprofit group that represents the industry. She says the organization has heard from numerous companies that “demand continues to be a challenge for them,” especially for larger-scale projects.

The DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which oversees the DAC Hubs program, didn’t respond to an inquiry from MIT Technology Review before press time.

One of the companies that already secured funds through the program, Heirloom, says it is seeing adequate demand for its projects. But in a prepared statement, the company did say that governments will need to step up support in the coming years, noting that according to the UN’s climate panel, the world may need to suck down billions of tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2050 to prevent temperatures from rising past 2 °C over preindustrial levels.

“Achieving that type of scale won’t happen through a voluntary market alone; it will require significant demand-side policy at home and abroad,” the company said.

The hubs

The DOE announced the first set of DAC Hubs grants last summer, revealing that it would provide more than $1 billion to two projects, each with the capacity to suck down a million tons of carbon dioxide per year: Occidental Petroleum’s proposed carbon removal factory in Kleberg County, Texas, and a collaboration between Battelle, Climeworks, and Heirloom to develop facilities in Louisiana.

As Heatmap previously reported, Heirloom has pre-sold a “substantial” portion of the capacity for the two projects it is now planning in the state to customers including JPMorgan Chase, Klarna, Meta, Microsoft, and Stripe.

Occidental’s first industrial-scale DAC project, the Stratos plant in Ector County, Texas, is expected to come online next year. The company’s 1PointFive subsidiary is developing the project and has announced customers including AT&T, Amazon, Microsoft, and Trafigura.

The company didn’t respond to a question concerning whether it has lined up deals for the separate DAC Hubs–funded project. But Michael Avery, president of 1PointFive, said in a prepared statement: “We’re continuing to see increasing understanding and interest in the importance of highly-durable CDR solutions like direct air capture to address residual emissions across several industries.”

Last month, the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations said it would provide up to $1.6 billion to a variety of additional DAC facilities, as well as the infrastructure that would support them, which might include storage wells and pipelines.

Notably, the agency significantly reduced the size of the facilities that might qualify for the second tranche of grant funding. Rather than million-ton facilities, the office said, it would likely look for “mid-scale projects” that could remove 2,000 to 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and “large-scale” ones that capture at least 25,000 tons. It also stated that it plans to use some portion of the remaining funds “to support current and future awardees in addressing key barriers or major industry challenges that fall outside the original award scope and budget.”

Industry observers interpreted that to mean the office was seriously considering the growing calls to provide more demand support for carbon dioxide removal (CDR). That could take the form of direct government procurement of tons of carbon removal that could be applied toward the nation’s goals under the Paris climate agreement or federal subsidies that help defray the cost of corporate purchases.

Andreasen and Amador both said the DOE should allocate up to $500 million from the original $3.5 billion toward such efforts. Repurposing that money may mean building fewer or smaller plants through the DAC Hubs program, but it could increase the odds of success for those that do get developed.

A public good?

Breakthrough Energy isn’t a disinterested observer. The venture arm of the organization has made multiple investments in the carbon removal industry. For that matter, it’s not unusual for an industry organization, like the Carbon Removal Alliance, to call for governments to bestow tax breaks, subsidies, or other forms of federal assistance on its members.

The US already provides significant support for the industry on top of the DAC Hubs funding, including a subsidy of up to $180 for every ton of carbon dioxide removed by a direct-air-capture plant and then permanently stored underground.

The DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has started a pilot effort to directly purchase carbon removal last year, with $35 million in available funding. In May, it revealed a list of 24 semifinalists for the purchase contracts, including Charm Industrial, Climeworks, Ebb Carbon, Heirloom, and others. The office intends to select up to 10 companies that could receive as much as $3 million for the sale of removed carbon dioxide when those tons are delivered.

Many critics will see industry figures asking for still more handouts as pleas for lavish levels of corporate welfare.

But others consider carbon removal principally a public good, and there’s wide agreement that the sector will need massive and sustained government support to reach anywhere near the scale that would meaningfully address climate change.

That’s because it’s an odd industry, fueled less by customer demand than by climate imperatives. An earlier National Academies report said the world may need to remove and store away around 10 billion tons per year by midcentury. But that doesn’t mean companies are especially eager to cover the high cost of doing it.

“Demand is a challenge for all climate technologies,” Amador says, given the often high premiums. “But it’s particularly acute for carbon removal and direct air capture, because it’s a public good. We’re producing a waste management service that no one currently has to pay for, and that makes commercializing this particularly difficult.”

The hope and the challenge

The hope is that scaling up the sector will drive down costs, unlocking additional demand among corporations hoping to cancel out their pollution and making it cheaper for governments to make larger and larger purchases.

The consulting firm BCG estimates that voluntary demand for carbon removal could increase to as much as 750 million tons by 2040, and that supportive government policies could drive an additional 500 million to 2.5 billion tons of “durable” demand by 2050. Among other possibilities, the European Union, Japan, and California may, for instance, incorporate carbon removal into their regulated carbon trading systems in the coming years.

But there’s no guarantee that carbon removal costs will drop, voluntary market demand will build, or government support will rise as fast as needed to keep the industry growing before that occurs. Nor is it a given that nations or businesses will ever collectively suck up the cost of drawing billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the air.

Even if the industry gets costs down to $100 a ton, a standard target that could drive much more demand, removing 10 billion tons a year would add up to a $1 trillion annual expenditure. The obvious question that raises is who should pay for the bulk of that—average taxpayers who would receive the benefits in the form of lower climate risks, or the major polluters that did the most to cause the problem?

There are bubbling concerns that too many startups are already chasing too little demand and that follow-on investments are tightening amid a broader slowdown in climate-tech-focused venture capital. Several companies in the space have already gone out of business, including Running Tide and Nori.

Total purchases of carbon removal, through direct air capture and other methods, have continued to rise. A handful of companies, like Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, and Google, have committed to paying the steep current costs of removing tons of CO₂, hoping to help to stand up the sector and earn credit for taking action to address climate change. In fact, the deal volume so far in 2024, at more than $1.4 billion, exceeds the total seen in all previous years combined, says Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, which tracks carbon removal purchases.

But in what he called “a concerning trend,” the number of buyers—and especially the number of new buyers—has ticked down in recent quarters. Microsoft’s carbon removal purchases alone made up more than 77% of this year’s total.

The problem is, “you need 10 Microsofts to finance one DAC hub,” says Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, which advises companies on carbon removal.

There’s an added challenge for direct air capture within the voluntary carbon market: It’s one of the most expensive ways for corporations to cancel out emissions. Carbon removal purchases only make up about 3% percent of the voluntary carbon market today, according to a Carbon Direct report last year. And DAC purchases only represent about 18% of that fraction of the market, according to CDR.fyi.

Traditional carbon offsets for projects that promise to reduce or avoid emissions are still the main competition for any form of carbon removal, making up about 90% of the voluntary market. The problem is that a variety of studies and investigative stories have found that these credits, which can be earned and sold for preserving forests, building renewable-energy facilities, and similar efforts, often overstate the climate benefits. But they’re a lot cheaper than reliable carbon removal options and remain appealing to many companies looking for a way to cancel out their emissions, at least on paper.

Höglund says that corporate climate goal-setting bodies like the Science Based Targets initiative should help push along the business of high-quality carbon removal by requiring participating companies to set interim objectives for purchases that start small and rise over time.

But he, too, stresses that the major buyers will need to be governments.

“More, and larger, such government purchase initiatives are likely to be needed to keep the permanent CDR sector on the right track,” Höglund said in an email.

Earlier this year, the US Congress approved another $20 million for a second phase of the DOE’s carbon removal purchase program.

The agency is helping to drive demand by buying carbon removal in small, but likely growing amounts, says Noah Deich, a senior advisor in the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which oversees the pilot program. But he stresses that additional corporations will need to do their part as well, paying for the high costs of carbon removal today, to ensure that more and more parties can afford to buy large amounts of it in the future.

“Unless we start to make a bigger market for CDR purchasers, we won’t achieve the commercial liftoff in the 2030s,” he says.

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Oct 10 2024

Productivity Electrified: Tech That Is Supercharging Business

This sponsored session was presented by Ford Pro at MIT Technology Review’s 2024 EmTech MIT event.

A decarbonized transportation system is a necessary pre-requisite for a sustainable economy. In the transportation industry, the road to electrification and greater technology adoption can also increase business bottom lines and reduce downstream costs to tax payers. Focusing on early adopters such as first responders, local municipalities, and small business owners, we’ll discuss common misconceptions, barriers to adoption, implementation strategies, and how these insights carry over into wide-spread adoption of emerging technology and electric vehicles.

About the speaker

Wanda Young, Global Chief Marketing & Experience Officer, Ford Pro

Wanda Young is a visionary brand marketer and digital transformation expert who thrives at the intersection of brand, digital, technology, and data; paired with a deep understanding of the consumer mindset. She gained her experience working for the largest brands in retail, sports & entertainment, consumer products, and electronics. She is a successful brand marketer and change agent that organizations seek to drive digital and data transformation – a Chief Experience Officer years before the title was invented. In her roles managing multiple notable brands, including Samsung, Disney, ESPN, Walmart, Alltel, and Acxiom, she developed knowledge of the interconnectedness of brand, digital, and data; of the importance of customer experience across all touchpoints; the power of data and localization; and the in-the-trenches accountability to drive outcomes. Now at Ford Pro, the Commercial Division of Ford Motor Company, she is focused on helping grow the newly-launched division and brand which only Ford can offer commercial customers – an integrated lineup of vehicles and services designed to meet the needs of all businesses to keep their productivity on pace to drive growth.

Young enjoyed a series of firsts in her career, including launching ESPN+, developing Walmart’s first social media presence and building 5000 of their local Facebook pages (which are still live today and continue to scale), developing the first weather-triggered ad product with The Weather Company, designing an ad product with Google called Local Inventory Ads, being part of team who took Alltel Wireless private (which later sold to Verizon Wireless), launching the Acxiom.com website on her first Mother’s Day with her daughter on her lap. She serves on the board of or is involved in a number of industry memberships and has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. Young received a Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in Advertising from the University of Arkansas.

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Oct 10 2024

Preventing Climate Change: A Team Sport

This sponsored session was presented by MEDC at MIT Technology Review’s 2024 EmTech MIT event.

Michigan is at the forefront of the clean energy transition, setting an example in mobility and automotive innovation. Other states and organizations can learn from Michigan’s approach to public-private partnerships, actionable climate plans, and business-government alignment. Progressive climate policies are not only crucial for sustainability but also for attracting talent in today’s competitive job market.

About the speaker

Hilary Doe, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer, Michigan Economic Development Corporation

As Chief Growth & Marketing Officer, Hilary Doe leads the state’s efforts to grow Michigan’s population, economy, and reputation as the best place to live, work, raise a family, and start a business. Hilary works alongside the Growing Michigan Together Council on a once-in-a-generation effort to grow Michigan’s population, boost economic growth, and make Michigan the place everyone wants to call home.

Hilary is a dynamic leader in nonprofits, technology, strategy, and public policy. She served as the national director at the Roosevelt Network, where she built and led an organization engaging thousands of young people in civic engagement and social change programming at chapters nationwide, which ultimately earned the organization recognition as a recipient of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. She also served as Vice President of the Roosevelt Institute, where she oversaw strategy and expanded the Institute’s Four Freedoms Center, with the goal of empowering communities and reducing inequality alongside the greatest economists of our generations. Most recently, she served as President and Chief Strategy Officer at Nationbuilder, working to equip the world’s leaders with software to grow their movements, businesses, and organizations, while spreading democracy.

Hilary is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Honors College and Ford School of Public Policy, a Detroit resident, and proud Michigander.

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Oct 4 2024

These 15 companies are innovating in climate tech

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

It’s finally here! We’ve just unveiled our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. This annual project is one the climate team at MIT Technology Review pours a lot of time and thought into, and I’m thrilled to finally share it with you.

Our goal is to spotlight businesses we believe could help make a dent in climate change. This year’s list includes companies from a wide range of industries, headquartered on five continents. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend giving it a look. Each company has a profile in which we’ve outlined why it made the list, what sort of impact the business might have, and what challenges it’s likely to face.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a few reflections on this year’s list as a whole. Because this slate of companies exemplifies a few key themes that I see a lot in my reporting on climate technology.

1. Addressing climate change requires building a lot of stuff, on a massive scale, and fast.

A handful of the companies we included on this list stand out because of the sheer scale at which they’re building and deploying technology. And we need scale, because addressing climate change requires going from tens of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year to net zero.

BYD, for example, featured on our 2023 list, and it was a clear choice for our team to feature the company again.

For a while, the title of the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) producer has depended on how you define an EV. If you include plug-in hybrids, BYD takes the crown. If you take the purist point of view and only count fully battery-powered vehicles, Tesla wins.

But now, BYD is knocking on Tesla’s door for even that purist title, outselling the company in the last quarter of 2023. The company’s dominant speed and scale at getting EVs onto the roads makes it one I’m keeping my eyes on.

Other companies are still growing but making significant progress. LanzaJet just opened a factory in Georgia that can produce nine million gallons of alternative jet fuel each year. That’s only a tiny fraction of the billions of gallons of fuel used every year, but it’s a major step forward for alternative fuels. And First Solar, a US solar manufacturer, just opened a $1.1 billion factory in Alabama, and plans to open another in Louisiana in 2025.

2. With climate impacts embedded in longstanding systems, we need creative new ways to tackle old problems.

There are parts of the race to address climate change that most people are probably familiar with. Fossil fuels and their associated emissions are clearly visible in power plants, for example, or in gas-powered vehicles.

But hidden climate challenges exist within familiar objects. Producing items from shampoo bottles to sidewalks can emit huge amounts of planet-warming pollution. We featured a few companies tackling these less visible problems.

Sublime Systems is on the list again this year. The company is making progress scaling up its electrochemical process to make cement with significantly lower emissions than the conventional method. We also highlight a company working in the chemical industry: Solugen runs a factory in Houston, and is about to open another in Minnesota, making chemicals with biological starting ingredients rather than fossil fuels.

3. Climate change is a vast problem that touches virtually every industry, so there’s a lot of work to do.

As we discussed potential companies for this list over the last few months, I was struck by how tricky it was going to be to represent all the industries we wanted to. I could have personally picked 15 companies just working on batteries, for example.

We wanted some energy companies on the list, of course, as well as some in transportation. But then there’s also agriculture, chemicals, fuels, and what about climate adaptation? I think our final list shows just how massive an umbrella term “climate tech” has become.

For example, there’s Rumin8, an Australian company making supplements for cows that can cut down on how much methane they belch out. And then we have Pano AI, which is installing camera stations that pair up with AI to better detect wildfires, which are worsening as the planet heats up.

The world has a lot of work to do to make the progress needed on climate change. I’ll be watching to see what difference these companies are able to make this year, and beyond.