Will 2024 be a memorable summer or is it the new norm?
July 22, 2024, was the hottest day on record, according to a NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration analysis of global daily temperature data. July 21 and 23 of this year also exceeded the previous daily record, set in July 2023. I wonder if we will see these headlines every summer from now on, with more extreme weather, temperatures, droughts, and wildfires!
When I was 18 (almost 20 years ago), I made the decision to dedicate my life to climate change. Back then, it was fringe, idealistic, and almost romanticized. A career in planting trees!
Little did I know that I would be working at the intersection of novel technology development and financial market mechanisms two decades later. With all the efforts made on the nature-based side (I'm part of this effort too), we still need to accelerate change towards technology-based carbon removal and scalable industrial decarbonization faster.
I won't state facts or numbers, we all know they look grim (from IPCC to ongoing deforestation to species loss). Instead, I want to give a snippet of my last week, when I was honored to contribute as a faculty member to the Research Experience in Carbon Sequestration (CCUS-CCS), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Fossil Energy & Carbon Management (FECM) for the second time.
Working in carbon markets, I try to think outside of the box. So you can see me with the legends Richard A. Esposito and Pamela Tomski on a geological site characterization visit... because sequestering carbon under the ground isn't easy! I think the more we understand, the better projects we can build by connecting dots from engineering, geology, field services, technology development, and financial mechanisms such as carbon markets. The second picture shows me escaping the heat of Wyoming, up in the mountains, where we actually found snow.. I thought about how many more years we will be able to see this in summer, given the temperatures. And the last picture is a number that gives me hope—looking at IP and patent development in #DAC. In all fairness, I'm very skeptical about many of them, but we have a new tool in the toolbox that can be applied in #CCS #CCU and #CCUS if done correctly.
Alexia Kelly just posted a few days ago that she was at a conference in Houston where she only knew one person. I intentionally seek those crowds because we don't have enough time to keep speaking in echo chambers.
A quote that really struck me last week when spending time with engineers, reservoir modelers, geologists, EPC firms, and other scientists was: "We can build the best technologies we want, if we can't finance them, they will end up on the shelf." This tells us, at its core, why we need to think holistically, push ourselves to work across industries, and get out of our comfort zones. Personally, I never thought I would learn about field geology... but here we go!
Graphic from AlliedOffsets