The Quest to Engineer the Best Carbon Removal Credits
One Year of Residual Carbon with Co-Founder Ted Christie-Miller
This is a summary of episode #388 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you enjoy your shows. You can also watch the full episode right below this text.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
A technically sound CDR project is not automatically investable.
Project development and financial structuring are different crafts from technology development.
“Offtakeable” is a design constraint, not a marketing afterthought.
Insurability shapes engineering choices.
Bankability requires predictability, not brilliance.
Carbon developers often optimize for removal, not risk allocation.
Standardized contracts matter as much as standardized MRV.
Investors fund structures, not aspirations.
The first wave of CDR projects blurred roles.
The next wave will separate them deliberately.
Finance disciplines technology.
Scale requires translation between engineers and capital.
📝 The Category Error Holding Carbon Removal Back
In early-stage carbon removal, everyone did everything.
Scientists built technology. The same teams tried to design credits. The same people pitched buyers. The same people structured contracts. It was scrappy, heroic, necessary.
But scrappy doesn’t scale.
The central insight of this conversation is simple but profound: developing a carbon removal technology is not the same thing as developing an investable asset.
Those are two different products.
One removes carbon.
The other allocates risk.
And capital often cares much more about the second.
🏗️ Offtakeable Is a Design Constraint
When developers ask, “How do we build this?” they are usually thinking technically.
But the better question might be:
“How do we build this so someone will sign a long-term offtake agreement against it?”
That changes everything.
Offtakeable means predictable delivery.
Predictable MRV.
Clear durability profile.
Defined liability if something goes wrong.
Insurance that actually pays out.
Contracts that don’t collapse under scrutiny.
You can have beautiful engineering and still fail this test.
An investable project is engineered backwards from the requirements of buyers, insurers, and lenders.
💼 Insurability Is Engineering
One of the most overlooked forces in climate infrastructure is insurance.
If a project cannot be insured, lenders hesitate. If liability is unclear, offtakers hesitate. If permanence risk is undefined, everyone hesitates.
That means engineering decisions are no longer just about yield or efficiency. They are about risk transfer.
Can reversal risk be bounded?
Can monitoring be standardized?
Can delivery timelines be forecast with boring reliability?
Finance rewards boring.
This is hard for founders who are optimizing for elegance or maximum carbon efficiency. But markets scale through repeatability, not novelty.
🔄 Separating the Disciplines
The episode surfaces something maturing industries eventually learn:
Technology development and project development must separate.
In renewables, developers build pipelines and structure tax equity long before electrons flow. In infrastructure, SPVs exist precisely to isolate risk. In oil and gas, exploration and project finance are distinct crafts.
Carbon removal is just beginning that separation.
You need technologists.
You need developers who understand permitting and logistics.
You need finance professionals who understand waterfalls and risk allocation.
You need counterparties who can translate across all three.
Without that separation, every project remains bespoke.
And bespoke does not attract institutional capital.
🧭 Designing for Capital From Day One
This is not about surrendering to finance.
It is about acknowledging that if the goal is gigaton scale, projects must be:
Offtakeable
Investable
Insurable
Standardizable
Those qualities do not emerge accidentally. They must be designed into the project from the beginning.
The first generation of carbon removal proved that tonnes could be removed.
The next generation must prove that tons can be structured.
Because the difference between a promising project and a scalable industry is not just technology.
It is whether the deal closes.
