Carbon security and the geopolitics of carbon removal

While the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) industry is modest in size today, its rapid growth and connection to critical infrastructure sectors imply that it will have an expanding range of geopolitical implications over time. CDR could directly intersect with national security through vulnerable supply chains and dual-use technologies featuring both civilian and military applications. Global carbon removal markets will add additional complexity, creating risks of race-to-the-bottom dynamics and environmental and social harm. International collaboration on forward-thinking policies and high-integrity standards is required to ensure the safe, equitable, and effective scale-up of CDR around the world.

Introduction

At first blush, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) may not seem like a major area of geopolitical interest. The term “geopolitics” is most frequently considered in the context of international relations and the manner in which countries pursue their interests and security, which has little to do with CDR at this time. Geopolitical significance in the context of the private sector is typically accorded to industries that either contribute in a major way to global financial flows, contribute to national security, or strongly contribute to domestic growth in a manner that has the potential to be disrupted by foreign actors. CDR currently only receives billions of dollars of investment per year globally, whereas clean technology more generally receives trillions per year. It is also not a core component of countries’ national security apparatuses nor is it currently a major driver of economic growth.

As a result, issues that are unrelated to CDR but are within the broader scope of the energy transition, such as Chinese control over critical mineral production or U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas to Europe, are more likely to generate significant press and attention from policymakers and the private sector. CDR technologies are also nascent, and many countries struggling to afford energy at all—countries that are often not primarily responsible for the climate crisis—are unlikely to start purchasing $500+/t removals to compensate for their emissions.

However, there is good reason to expect that CDR will increasingly have geopolitical implications as time goes on. Various projections indicate that gigatons of CDR will be needed every year to reach net zero and pull us back from overshooting our climate targets. At anticipated prices of hundreds of dollars per ton for high-quality CDR, the CDR industry would need to become one that transacts at least hundreds of billions of dollars per year. If the CDR industry were to grow to this size, it would be hard for it to avoid the geopolitical dynamics that similarly face other major industries.

CDR’s links to issues like critical materials supply chains will also make it one of many industries lobbying governments to develop policies that will be geopolitically impactful. Internationally, CDR’s ability to compensate for residual emissions means it will also continue to play a significant role in international climate negotiations. The complicated potential links between CDR and the oil and gas industry could have interesting implications for petrostates navigating the energy transition. It behooves those working on CDR and in adjacent industries to maintain an awareness of the ways it will increasingly interact with geopolitics.

If energy security refers to uninterrupted access to cheap energy, then carbon security could be similarly defined as reliable access to affordable carbon removal and perhaps other forms of carbon management. The goals of this article are to speculate on carbon security and possible geopolitical implications of carbon removal as well as to prompt stakeholders to consider whether additional planning or positioning is necessary to support the safe and robust scale-up of the technology. This article was inspired in part by Sovacool, Baum, and Low’s 2023 piece on the potential for weaponization of negative emissions technologies and solar radiation management.

Each approach to CDR has different resource requirements and costs that must be considered when evaluating their geopolitical relevance. The discussion of CDR here refers to durable or “novel” CDR solutions including direct air capture (DAC), enhanced mineralization, biomass carbon removal and storage, and aquatic CDR. Though short-lived CDR pathways such as forestry and soil carbon storage have an important role to play in ecological restoration and mitigating climate change—and themselves could result in interesting geopolitical dynamics—they are unsuitable for compensating for fossil emissions and require separate considerations, business models, and enabling policies.

National security and carbon removal

According to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), there are 16 critical infrastructure sectors. Several of these sectors are highly relevant to CDR, including chemicals, energy, critical manufacturing, and food and agriculture. If the CDR industry continues to scale up and begins to approach the level that many hope it will, then CDR facilities themselves could even come to be viewed as critical infrastructure, making them a potential target for adversaries.

Large CDR systems will also have extensive and diverse supply chains that could be subject to disruption or other dynamics related to trade policy and import dependence. For example, direct air capture systems require significant amounts of steel, concrete, chemicals, minerals, and various types of industrial equipment ranging from fans to compressors and beyond. Electrochemical CDR systems require unique polymers and metal catalysts, some of which are only manufactured in select geographies. Certain enhanced mineralization and DAC systems are intertwined with the mining industry and critical mineral production. Biomass CDR requires ample amounts of sustainable biomass. Mineralization systems need large amounts of alkaline feedstocks. And so on.

In an age of “de-risking” and increasing emphasis on reshoring, this means that the CDR industry will also likely be caught up in ongoing debates over materials sourcing. For example, China—a major target of U.S. trade policy—is the United States’ second-biggest supplier of chemicals as well as minerals and metals and is also its biggest supplier of machinery.

While companies and countries building any CDR system will attempt to source many of the inputs for their systems domestically due to the costs and emissions of long-distance transportation, it is near impossible for this to always be the case. Inflation, shipping crises such as the Houthis’ attacks in the Red Sea and the Panama Canal drought, global conflicts, trade tensions, and tariffs further complicate supply chain issues for major industries. The CDR industry will not be immune to such issues.

Apart from serving as critical infrastructure or creating supply chain considerations, CDR technologies—and the monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) technologies used to confirm their efficacy—could potentially be classified as dual-use technologies that have both civilian and military applications. Dual-use technologies must be carefully monitored and controlled, as they could pose security risks or face trade restrictions either from countries seeking to limit their export or ban their import. A popular example of a seemingly innocuous dual-use technology is ammonia synthesis via the Haber–Bosch process; while ammonia is a key fertilizer enabling modern agriculture, it is also used to produce ammonium nitrate explosives.

There are several existing examples for how CDR (and adjacent) technologies could be weaponized or wind up classified as dual-use technologies. CO2 collected via direct air capture could be used to make decentralized fuels or chemicals for military equipment; the U.S. Air Force has already explored this possibility with CO2 conversion companies Twelve and Air Company. DAC technology also has uses for separating exhaled CO2 onboard submarines and spacecraft, both of which have or could have military applications. Advances in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are enabling new opportunities in DAC but also have defense applications, such as toxic gas separation being further developed by companies like Numat.

Graphite, which could be made with CO2 captured via DAC or with biomass, also has numerous applications in military equipment. This makes its trade subject to additional scrutiny; for example, China instituted export restrictions on graphite on national security grounds in October 2023. While there are various natural and synthetic pathways for graphite production, it is notable that China currently refines about 90% of the world’s graphite, with the United States importing 42% of its graphite from China. Making graphite domestically with captured or biogenic CO2 could allow countries to develop strategic assets not subject to such restrictions.

Other materials could face additional scrutiny as well. Advances in the use of alkaline feedstocks, like steel slag, as carbon-negative building or roadway materials could have applications in decentralized production of runways and other infrastructure necessary for military bases.

Dual-use concerns are not limited to CDR technologies themselves. MRV systems that are used to monitor the uptake and storage of captured CO2—a critical part of ensuring the efficacy of CDR systems—could be implemented in a way that facilitates purposeful or inadvertent military surveillance. Proposed oceanic carbon removal monitoring systems that involve installing sensors throughout marine environments could theoretically be adapted to covertly engage in undersea surveillance, something that is of increasing value as global undersea military activity increases. Such surveillance could be particularly problematic for countries seeking to hide sensitive military assets underwater and countries involved in maritime territorial disputes.

For various technical, logistical, and strategic reasons, the scenarios posed here may never come to fruition. However, it is incumbent on technology developers and policymakers to be aware of these possibilities in an attempt to better mitigate risks. They should understand the potential risks of CDR processes being used and/or classified as dual-use to better develop the technologies and associated policies in a manner that does not threaten international security. A proactive evaluation of the geopolitical implications of a particular technology could draw from literature, best practices, and precedents deriving from topics such as protecting critical infrastructure, international arms control, and existing and proposed import and export restrictions.

Global carbon removal markets

Given differences in resource requirements, the potential for deploying different kinds of CDR is not evenly distributed within or between countries. Small, landlocked countries, for example, are unlikely to have significant CDR capacity relative to those with significant agricultural areas, low-carbon energy capacity, mineral resources, and coastlines. For CDR processes that require subsurface storage of CO2, it is important to note that storage capacities are highly unevenly distributed. These dynamics could cause different countries to express differing levels of support for funding, requiring, or allowing CDR to contribute to global climate targets.

Article 6 of the Paris Agreement describes how countries around the world may be able to cooperate to meet their emissions reduction targets in a way that increases ambition, prevents double counting, and possibly reduces system-wide costs. Article 6.2 allows for the bilateral transfer of emissions reduction credits, known as internationally transferred mitigation outcomes. So far, many 6.2 deals have involved entities in wealthier countries such as Japan, Singapore, and Switzerland paying entities in other countries such as Ghana, Papua New Guinea, and Mongolia in exchange for emissions reduction credits.

Article 6.4, recently codified at COP29 as the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (PCAM), seeks to establish a centralized global carbon market overseen by the UN and using common standards. Articles 6.2 and 6.4 allow for the transfer of both emissions reductions and removal credits, and over the next several years, Article 6.4 will be establishing specific standards for credits transacted under this mechanism.

While other resources such as Carbon Gap’s policy tracker cover Article 6 and related developments in more detail, there are higher-level geopolitical dynamics that are relevant to the implementation of such mechanisms. Perhaps the most obvious one is the risk of race-to-the-bottom behaviors arising from a false equivalence of credits. If no sufficient distinction is made between emissions reduction and CDR credits or between CDR credits with different storage durations, there may be little incentive for market actors to purchase higher-quality CDR tons that are much more likely to actually represent one fewer ton of CO2 in the atmosphere over a meaningful timespan. Why buy a $300/t direct air capture credit when a $20/t wind power credit (that is likely not additional) is improperly allowed to count for the same level of effort?

Unfortunately, there are also clear incentives for involved nations to dilute the standards so that buyers can access cheaper credits and suppliers can sell larger volumes of credits, which is a similar dynamic to the one that exists in the CDR market today. CarbonPlan facilitated an open letter calling for an independent CDR standards body in part to help resolve this incentive issue in the CDR market, and one can only hope that the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body responsible for setting credit standards has enough independence to establish reasonable minimum expectations.

Given that emissions reduction credits should be phased out as the entire world approaches net zero (see Figure 4 in the Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting), and given that CDR is both expected to come down in cost and be supported by an increasing array of demand-side policies, it is reasonable to expect that CDR will become an increasing fraction of Article 6 transactions over time. In this case, CDR credits could come to represent relatively significant imports and exports from participating countries, which could have geopolitical implications.

In the near term, policymakers could have an incentive to invest in CDR research and enabling conditions to prime their nations or territories to benefit from eventual exports of CDR credits. However, if new, cheaper solutions are discovered over time that can reliably address residual emissions, there is also a chance that some CDR facility investments could become stranded.

There could also be interesting dynamics at play when considering the politics around buying credits from or selling them to geopolitical competitors, especially in an era of trade tensions. Ethics and optics are additional considerations. There is a fine line between sustainable development and carbon colonialism.

As with many technologies, CDR may ultimately be implemented in very harmful or very beneficial ways. In one world, wealthy, landlocked European countries purchase high-quality DAC credits from countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that generate meaningful employment opportunities and sustainable development for local populations. In another world, a petrostate pays for junk biomass carbon removal credits from the Amazon that are tied to brutal land grabs and other possible human rights abuses. Given the potential for dangerous outcomes for both individuals and the environment as well as the underlying justice implications of the climate challenge overall, such possibilities and dynamics cannot be ignored.

Looking out to the far future, countries may eventually opt to move beyond mere net zero and achieve net-negative emissions to address historical or “legacy” emissions and perhaps even begin pulling back from overshooting of warming targets. Denmark, for example, has legislated a target of 110% emissions reductions by 2050.

While countries will likely seek to take credit for their own net negativity or perhaps via Article 6 sell excess removals to other nations still seeking to achieve net zero, there may still be perverse incentives and related political difficulties from such a system. Specifically, countries that are still emitting while others achieve net negativity could point to existing net-negative countries as sufficient for achieving net zero globally, arguing that they thus do not need to decarbonize or pay for their own removals. In turn, this could create domestic pushback in the net-negative countries over continued sponsorship of their net-negative plans. E.g., one might ask, “why should Denmark pay to go net negative if Russia is still emitting?”

While achieving a world where some countries are net negative would already imply significant climate progress, incentives will need to be carefully managed to avoid unintended outcomes, such as free riding or domestic pushback, that would put the world further from its climate targets and the eventual goal of restoring the climate.

Policy recommendations

When considering policy recommendations to enhance carbon security and insulate CDR from negative geopolitical outcomes, there are several predominant themes. Most notable are the need to enhance security parameters around the development and future import and export of CDR technology as well as the need to positively shape the international standards environment in a way that promotes environmental integrity and sustainable development. More specifically, the following recommendations could help countries ensure that CDR is implemented in a geopolitically responsible manner.

Build secure supply chains for CDR from inception

As part of the broader shift to building more resilient supply chains, technology developers and policymakers should model resource requirements at scale and consider how to get from point A to point B for associated supply chains. These requirements will be different depending on the CDR pathway but include inputs such as sorbent precursors, steel, various equipment types such as heat exchangers, special polymer inputs for electrochemical systems, sustainable biomass, and various alkaline feedstocks. Secure supply chains would consider sourcing materials domestically and from friendly countries in ways that are unlikely to be disrupted by sudden changes in political atmosphere

Set clear parameters around what types of CDR and associated MRV technologies could merit dual-use classification

This could allow industry space for designs that avoid a surprise classification, helping them to shield against potential export or import bans. It could also pave the way for future measures that protect against the import or use of technologies that could pose a threat to national security

Develop clear, harmonized, international, and high-quality standards for CDR credits

The design of credit markets must be centered around Geological Net Zero, which compensates for any unabated fossil emissions with additional, anthropogenic carbon removal with storage relevant on a geological timescale. Additionally, standards must be structured to prevent a race to the bottom, free riding, risks of perverse incentives that increase emissions, and socially or environmentally harmful practices

Invest in CDR now to shape its future

Countries investing in CDR development sooner rather than later may benefit from increased influence over its trajectory. Even if a country is not endowed with the natural resources necessary for large-scale deployment of CDR, it may still have a comparative advantage in some aspect of the value chain or a desire to position itself to be better prepared to engage in the CDR market. Those investing now are more likely to take advantage of CDR as an economic engine that drives growth through additional manufacturing, construction, logistics, and related parts of the value chain

While the above recommendations are a sound place to begin, there are additional ideas that could be relevant in the future. These include the establishment of dedicated government offices to oversee the safety and integrity of CDR systems and supply chains, strategic CO2 or CDR credit reserves, strategic stockpiles of other inputs necessary for CDR systems, and other kinds of incentives or buyers’ clubs that collaborate to improve global CDR standards.

Conclusion

Due to its anticipated scale, CDR could have or be subject to a multitude of geopolitical implications in areas ranging from national security to global carbon markets and beyond. It is up to those working on CDR today, from technology to policy and beyond, to holistically evaluate risks and take reasonable and cautious steps to mitigate them. While society is wading into the unknown, there are some low-to-no-regrets approaches we can take to increase the probability that CDR is implemented in a safe and responsible manner that provides net benefits to humankind.

This article is also published on Carbon-Based Commentary. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.