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Strategy, innovation, corporate venture capital, customer insight, regulation and competition policy. Opinions stated here are my own, not National Grid’s.
I enjoyed this story by Rachel Millard about the UK government's pledging just shy of £22bn for the nation's first carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. This technology will be critical in helping hard-to-decarbonize industries achieve net zero. I hope this announcement signals openness to an even broader portfolio approach that includes carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. According to the IPCC, stabilizing earth’s climate also requires removing CO2 that's accumulated in the air and oceans from decades of emissions. CDR is needed both to compensate for residual emissions and to achieve net-negative emissions after 2050. Our portfolio company Captura is piloting direct ocean capture (DOC) technology, a form of CDR. Think of DOC as direct air capture’s (DAC) younger but cooler sibling: It's less mature but has promise to remove CO2 at lower cost. At scale, Captura’s system potentially will be able to capture millions of tons of CO2 per year and sit either along the coast or out at sea, close to offshore sequestration sites. This will avoid the cost and complexity of capturing emissions at source and of onshore transportation. Captura’s technology is also very flexible and can run when renewable generation is available, helping reduce congestion costs on grids. No wonder the company's a finalist for the XPRIZE. I visited Captura's California HQ recently, and I hope the UK government is thinking about the role the startup's technology could play in carbon removal. After all, two of the companies involved in developing the first carbon storage sites the new program will support -- Eni and Equinor -- also are investors in Captura. https://lnkd.in/erTEqnbd