As part of our ‘Carbon Removal: The First-Time Buyer’s Guide to CDR’ series, we explain how to overcome the initial challenges you may face when starting your CDR journey and how to make the process easier. This is the final chapter in the series; you can find the previous chapters at the end of this article.

So you’ve convinced the management team to unlock funding for Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) credits, and you know how much to spend on CDR, and which projects to choose. You now need to actually start buying credits. While this is the ‘fun part’, there is a lot of work still left to be done and plenty of questions to be answered. This chapter is designed to help you identify the problems that you might encounter along the way, with examples and solutions to solve them.

The top 3 challenges you might face

#1: Capacity

Challenge: Carbon removal is a complex and multidisciplinary field, requiring expertise from finance, legal, sustainability, and technical teams. However, these experts often have competing priorities and limited time to devote to CDR procurement. Some smaller companies might not even have people in these functions, requiring a significant outlay for your company to take on new consultants or advisors.

Solution: Choosing a trusted carbon removal partner can alleviate time constraints, with many tech platforms working as an extension of your team, providing a hand-held approach to procuring, managing and monitoring your CDR portfolio.

#2: Education

Challenge: The CDR landscape is rapidly evolving, with hundreds of projects utilising different technologies emerging around the world. Keeping up with this dynamic environment can be overwhelming. It is important to stay up-to-date on the industry and policy developments but also to stay abreast of innovations that are happening - new project categories are regularly being discovered - as you will have to be able to advocate for your purchases within your company.

Solution: Having an armoury of expert resources at hand such as Carbon Herald and Carbon Brief, as well as being part of associations such as the Carbon Business Council will be a great help in staying on top of CDR developments.

#3: Risk

Challenge: Not all carbon removal projects are created equal, and they carry varying levels of risk - be it financial, operational, or reputational. Some projects may face challenges such as underperformance, delays, or even failure. To mitigate these risks, rigorous due diligence is required, including evaluating the track record of the project developers, assessing the feasibility of the technology, and reviewing third-party certifications.

Solution: Diversifying your portfolio across multiple projects and technologies can even out the risk, but to manage the due diligence and risk most effectively, it’s best to work with an experienced partner who can anticipate, manage and mitigate the risk for you throughout the whole process - from sourcing projects, all the way through to when the credits are delivered, including replacing credits if they’re unfortunately lost.

In summary, while purchasing carbon credits is an exciting step towards sustainability, and possibly also net zero, it can be coupled with challenges that require careful planning and strategic thinking. By proactively addressing these with our solutions, you can navigate the complexities of CDR procurement and build a robust portfolio that supports your company’s climate goals.

At Opna, we handle the entire CDR process end-to-end, for buyers and for project developers - from sourcing projects, to completely rigorous due diligence, contracting and post-contracting portfolio management, monitoring, reporting, anticipating and managing risk, deliveries and retirement. If you’d like to learn more, speak to our team at hi@opna.earth.

This was Chapter 4 of our ‘Carbon Removal: The First-Time Buyer’s Guide to CDR’ series. If you would like to read the previous chapters, please see below: