Google announced today a new commitment to contract for at least $35 million of carbon removal credits over the next 12 months, as part of an initiative by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) aimed at helping to scale the carbon removal sector by funding the sector’s innovations and technology.

In a post announcing the new commitment, Randy Spock, Carbon Credits and Removals Lead at Google, said:

“This model of mutually reinforcing public-private support is an important tool to commercialize carbon removal solutions. As with many emerging technologies, governments and companies have a critical and complementary role to play in demonstrating promising carbon removal approaches and bringing them to a commercial scale.”

According to the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate change mitigation study released in 2022, scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C include carbon dioxide removal methods scaling to billions of tons of removal annually over the coming decades. The report also noted, however, that while there are multiple existing solutions to capture and store CO2, most are early stage and currently limited in scale.

As part of its efforts to help scale the industry, the DOE launched the Carbon Negative Shot in 2021, aimed at supporting innovation in CO2 removal pathways – such as Direct Air Capture (DAC), soil carbon sequestration, ocean-based CO2 removal, and reforestation, among others – to enable carbon capture and storage at gigaton scales for less than $100 per net metric ton of CO2e by 2032. In September 2023, the DOE announced the Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize, through which it made $35 million in funding available to purchase carbon removal credits to help support commercial carbon dioxide removal companies.

In an effort to expand the investment to other companies and organizations, the DOE announced today the Voluntary Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchasing Challenge, calling on organizations “to make public bigger and bolder purchase commitments like DOE has made with its own $35M carbon removal purchase pilot,” and providing supporting materials for buyers to make larger carbon removal purchases, while helping carbon removal credit suppliers to find more customers.

The DOE said that it will create a public leaderboard recognizing buyers and tracking voluntary carbon removal purchases.

Google is the first company to join the challenge, matching the DOE’s own $35 million commitment.

In a post announcing the new Challenge, the DOE said:

“Working together, this public-private initiative has the potential to unlock game-changing capital for high-quality and affordable carbon dioxide removal in time to meet our climate goals.

“To that end, we’re thrilled to see Google announced today that it’s pledging to match the DOE’s $35M initiative to support carbon removal solutions. We plan to highlight as similar announcements going forward.”