This issue of the GCI newsletter features Dr. Jan Mazurek, Senior Director at ClimateWorks Foundation. Dr. Mazurek has devoted close to 30 years at the highest levels of federal and state service to devising policies and institutions that drive down emissions. She has also successfully raised millions to enshrine mitigation efforts and plans to devote the next several decades to doing even more, using trees and technology to safely remove and store carbon pollution that causes the planet to warm.

The science is clear: We need to take

carbon emissions to zero and

then go below to "less than zero."

~ Dr. Jan Mazurek

How did you become interested in the field of carbon dioxide removal? 

I knew when I was five years old that I wanted to help the animals and people who couldn’t help themselves. I pledged to make that my life’s mission. For many years I thought that meant becoming a veterinarian, but life had other ideas. One of my undergraduate economics professors had me read Kenneth Boulding’s “Spaceship Earth” essay and a surfer friend of mine started working on ocean issues. After that, I was hooked.

What are some of the misconceptions or roadblocks that you've encountered in your work?  

When I started, everyone agreed a price on carbon could tackle the problem of climate change but then we dithered and delayed. So now we have to take emissions to zero with mitigation and then well below zero with carbon removal. 

Many people don’t understand that emissions in the atmosphere are double pre-industrial levels. We need to bring those emissions back down to Earth and lock them up AND we have to avoid or prevent all new emissions (tailpipes, smokestacks).

In the absence of a carbon price policy, which is agnostic to the approach one uses, people have become tribal or created Madisonian factions around their preferred carbon avoidance and carbon removal approach. That’s unfortunately not realistic. We need everything. Trees cannot do all the removal work because that would eat into land for food. Plus, as the planet warms, it appears nature is becoming less effective at storing CO_2. We see that here in the West. As the climate warms and dries we have hundreds of millions of dead and dying trees. And those trees burn. So, forests in my state are a carbon dioxide source not a sink.



What do you think causes the misconceptions & roadblocks that you have encountered? 

Lack of a price instrument has made us tribal. You have these wars between the pro solar and the pro nuclear. You have people worrying that carbon removal will eclipse the need for mitigation. You have people writing essays saying nature can do all the work needed to remove 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide. Sadly, this is just misleading--we need everything.

In your experience, what do policy makers usually get right about carbon dioxide removal? And what areas of growth do they have? 

Most people don’t understand that we need removal as well as taking emissions to zero. For those that have some idea of what removal is—taking historic CO₂ out of the air rather than avoiding adding more by doing something like driving a car that doesn’t emit CO₂—they then confuse removal with carbon capture. 

Carbon capture is no different than a smokestack scrubber. It captures the CO₂ before it enters the atmosphere. Removal means bringing historic or existing CO₂ back down. Removal takes much more energy because even though atmospheric CO₂ is double that of pre-industrial levels at 418 PPM it is still really diffuse. It takes a lot of energy to suck it up.

Photo courtesy of Climeworks/Julia Dunlop



Why is this issue important to you? 

Over my lifetime, I have watched the climate change. It used to snow in Southern California. We got twice as much rain. Forests were not dying. Last week, a tropical storm hit Southern California in late March—that never used to happen. Plants and animals cannot adapt quickly enough to the changes, so we see enormous collapse of ecosystems on land—100 million conifers in our forests, as well as oak trees, lost. Offshore, California’s entire bull kelp forest collapsed because of a hot blob of ocean water. Now, sea urchins have moved in and eaten the ecosystem barren. 



Seeing these things happen in my lifetime is shattering because as a child I vowed to stop this. In parts of California, we’ve already seen close to 2 degrees Celsius of warming kick in. We saw during the pandemic when emissions from cars, planes, factories and trucks plummeted, atmospheric CO₂ continued to climb. It is like a bathtub, where even if you turn the tap to a trickle, it overflows. So, you need to turn off the tap and remove the water—that requires removal. And not just removal with nature, but with machines and ocean removal.

Why should carbon dioxide removal be relevant to policy makers? 



Removal costs more than avoiding emissions or abatement. So, we need policies to bring down carbon removal costs. This Congress and the Biden Administration are passing any number of measures to help us innovate so that removal comes down the cost curve like solar. New York State has announced it will become an epicenter for carbon removal. I wish my home state of California would do the same. That’s smart policy. Pioneering all the approaches we need to remove carbon—whether through trees, zero carbon agriculture or machines that mimic trees will create clean, well-paying jobs for our kids and our grandkids, ensuring them a prosperous, healthy future.

News in a Nutshell

Announcing a new resource for life cycle and techno-economic assessments for carbon capture, utilization, and storage!

Today, we are announcing a new resource, accessible to everyone, explaining LCAs and TEAs, and providing guidance on how to conduct them. This web-based resource has been developed and assembled by the International CCU Assessment Harmonization Group and is hosted by the Global CO₂ Initiative.

Click for more information.

GCI releases new report to help inform multi-dimension LCA and TEA decision making

GCI is pleased to announce the release of a new report in our series of case studies on life cycle assessments (LCA) and techno-economic assessments (TEA): "Multi-Attributional Decision Making in LCA & TEA for CCU: An Introduction to Approaches and a Worked Example"

This report provides insights into a method for supporting decisions that involve multiple dimensions or criteria and thus allows evaluation of trade-offs. It allows economic, social, and environmental criteria, including competing priorities, to be systematically evaluated. For carbon capture and utilization, this is critically important for decision makers to come to a conclusion on whether or not to support a particular new technology.

The report can be downloaded for free here.



Dr. Volker Sick honored by Royal Society of Chemistry

Congratulations to Global CO₂ Initiative’s Director, Dr. Volker Sick, who was selected to deliver the Spiers Memorial Lecture on April 7, 2021, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of a Faraday Discussion!  

The Spiers Memorial Lecture, formerly known as the Spiers Memorial Award, was presented in 1929 until 2020. Each Spiers Memorial award winner acted as the introductory lecturer to a Faraday Discussion. This year's Faraday Discussion was entitled "Carbon Dioxide Utilisation." In 2020, as part of a series of changes introduced following an independent review of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s recognition programs, this award evolved to the Spiers Memorial Lecture.

GCI congratulates President Mark Schlissel and the University of Michigan for their commitment to carbon neutrality!

People all over the world are realizing the potential value of carbon capture and utilization.

JPMorgan's Jean-Xavier Hecker says carbon capture is going to take off.

More technological breakthroughs occurring in the CCU space.

New technological developments make CO₂ capture cheaper and more energy efficient.

European cement makers will experiment with capturing 100% of CO₂ emissions and using *all* of it to make synthetic fuel.

One way that carbon removal technology could pay for itself is to make new products with the captured carbon dioxide. Carbon capture & utilization, unlike carbon capture & storage, can be profitable.

Carbon capture is becoming increasingly easier.

GCI Webinar: Life Cycle Assessment and Techno-economic Assessment of Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage

For more information about the webinar, please click here or to register, please click here.

May 4: (10 AM - 12 PM)

Part I: International CCU Assessment Harmonization Group and AssessCCUS website

(Volker Sick, Tim Skone, Grant Faber)

Part II: A harmonized glossary for TEA and LCA for CCUS

(Lorenzo Cremonese)

May 11 (10 AM - 12PM)

Part I: How to define the Comparison Product System representativeness based on the Technology Readiness Level of the Proposed Product System – a recommended approach

(Tim Skone)

Part II: Baselines Scenarios

(Michael Wang)

Part III: TEA and LCA case studies of CCUS using a harmonized method

(Uisung Lee)

May 12 (10 AM - 12:30 PM)

Part I: How to identify and deal with Technology Readiness Levels (TRL)

(Tim Langhorst, Arno Zimmermann, Sheikh Moni)

Part II: Assessing current Technology Learning Curves (TLC) and their use for emerging CCU technologies

(Farid Bensebaa)

May 19 (10 AM - 12PM)

Part I: TEA/LCA Integration

(Christophe Mangin)

Part II: Technology Performance Level assessment framework for low-TRL technologies in the CCUS industry

(Nicole Mendoza)

May 26 (10 AM - 12:30 PM)

Preview of “Techno-Economic Assessment & Life Cycle Assessment Guidelines for CO₂ Utilization (Version 2)

(Stephen McCord, Tim Langhorst)

Keep in touch

We want to hear from you! Is there something or someone that you would like to see featured in a future issue? Let us know!