The Carbon Dioxide Removal Roadmap

Five years ago, FedEx made a transformative gift to Yale to launch a new center dedicated to a simple but enormous question: Can we use nature to pull carbon out of the sky? This month, the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture marks that anniversary with its Spring Symposium, a two-day gathering on May 7 and 8 at Kline Geology Laboratory

The event reflects how much the field has evolved: carbon dioxide removal was once a fringe concept, but it is now a recognized pillar of climate strategy worldwide, with YCNCC positioned at the center of that shift. Titled “CDR Roadmap to 2040,” the Symposium will bring researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders to campus.

In advance of the Symposium YCNCC Co-Directors Peter A. Raymond, the Oastler Professor of Biogeochemistry at the Yale School of Environment, and David Bercovici, the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Yale University and Sara Kuebbing YSE research scientist and Research Director of the Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program, spoke with YSE News about what five years of research has revealed, what comes next, and how fast the science needs to move to actually matter for the climate.

Q: YCNCC turns five this month, and the symposium theme is “CDR Roadmap to 2040,” which implies the field needs to be somewhere very different in 15 years than it is today. Can natural carbon capture deliver at the scale the climate models require, and what’s the single biggest thing standing in the way?

Faculty

Peter A. Raymond Oastler Professor of Biogeochemistry; Co-Director, Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture

Peter Raymond: In 15 years, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) needs to be a portfolio of safe, effective, and affordable climate solutions that deliver mitigation at scale as well as meaningful benefits to communities, farmers, and ecosystems. In our first five years, the YCNCC has made several contributions towards this goal, and we plan to continue this work for the next five years and beyond. Our symposium is both a celebration of progress to date and an honest survey of the massive task ahead of us. 

CDR solutions are at varying stages of development and thus face a range of challenges that the YCNCC and other researchers are working to address, in partnership with industry and the world’s governments.. 

A big challenge that all CDR solutions share is funding, so affordability is key. Ultimately, funding the required scale of mitigation will need to come from governments. So, a major focus for us at YCNCC is providing policymakers with the latest and best available science to support informed regulations, legislation, and other public policy.  

We also believe that public trust, optimized and affordable monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV), and transparent studies at the scale of large deployments are critical to help CDR scale over the next 15 years.

Q: You’re a geophysicist who studies mantle dynamics and plate tectonics — not the most obvious background for leading a carbon capture center. What does that deep-Earth perspective tell you about where natural carbon capture needs to go that ecologists and environmental scientists might not be seeing?

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David Bercovici: My background is in mantle dynamics — how plate tectonics works, how the Earth’s interior circulates. It sounds totally irrelevant to carbon capture, but it’s actually central to one of the planet’s biggest carbon cycles. Plate tectonics constantly brings fresh minerals to the surface at mid-ocean ridges and mountain belts, keeping those rocks out of equilibrium with the atmosphere. That drives a continuous chemical reaction in which CO2 is pulled out of the air and locked into carbonate rocks. Of the roughly 75 million gigatons of carbon on Earth’s surface, 99.99% is stored in rocks — the rest is everything else: the oceans, the biosphere, fossil fuels. That geologic carbon cycle also has a built-in thermostat: when the planet warms, weathering accelerates and draws down more CO2; when it cools, it slows. Without that feedback, Earth would swing between a snowball and a Venus-like state. Multicellular life probably wouldn’t exist.

When we talk about enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement — two of the fastest-growing areas at YCNCC— we’re essentially trying to accelerate that same cycle. And because it operates at a planetary scale, it’s genuinely scalable.

That’s always been how I’ve thought about the center’s ambitions: the really big, durable drawdown is geological and ocean capture. It just takes time to get right — and getting it right matters.

Q: You’ve spent years connecting forest science with real-world land management decisions. What would a trustworthy, science-based forest carbon credit actually look like, and how far are we from that?

Faculty

Sara Kuebbing Lecturer; Research Scientist; Research Director, Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program

Sara Kuebbing: Technologically, we’re not actually that far from having something trustworthy that people would be excited about. We have remarkable new tools — remote sensors, AI, new data streams, and the ability to do remote monitoring at a scale we never could before. What we're missing is the synergy to assemble those pieces into a workable suite of methods that we both trust and are easy and affordable to implement on the ground.

The bigger hurdle is institutional. Forest carbon crediting has been happening for decades, which means there's a lot of existing precedent, policy, and legacy infrastructure. That foundation matters — it's what forest carbon credits 2.0 will be built on — but it also means that some approaches may need to adapt with the existing tools and methods coming out. Fixing the science and fixing the processes have to happen in lockstep for us to get to trustworthyness.

That’s the animating idea behind a new research network,  SHIFT CM that, I’m involved with, in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy. The SHIFT-CM  framework — bringing together carbon market actors and academic researchers to develop methods, data, and tools. The premise is simple: when the people who will actually use the research help build it, the chances of it being adopted are much higher.

Trust is the other piece. High-profile technical failures have genuinely tarnished this field. Rebuilding that trust — through bodies like the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market — is just as important as any scientific advance, and frankly harder.