Today’s Climate Solutions Need to Be Adaptive and Scalable: Verra’s New CCS Methodology and Modules Show How It’s Done

One way the voluntary carbon market advances critically needed climate mitigation is through the development of new carbon accounting methodologies. By providing detailed procedures for quantifying project benefits, carbon accounting methodologies are key to supporting a broad range of activities that reduce or remove emissions. Essentially, each new methodology provides a new pathway for driving finance to a particular climate mitigation activity, enabling it to scale up its impact.

Developing robust methodologies takes time. From start to finish, developing a new methodology can take years, depending on the approach’s newness, complexity, and technological requirements, as well as how much market demand there is. It is a multi-step process that requires expert review, public consultations, and review by a validation/verification body.

Therefore, for new carbon accounting methodologies to be as impactful as the world needs them to be, they must be adaptive and scalable, enabling the rapid expansion and the continuous evolution of the activities they cover.

A point in case is the methodology VM0049 Carbon Capture and Storage, v1.0 in Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Program, which was launched in June of this year. It relies on a modular approach and provides the tools needed for the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) hubs.

CCS is particularly suited for reducing emissions from the hard-to-abate sectors that society continues to rely on, such as cement, steel, and chemicals. Because these sectors are energy-intensive or have process emissions, they are difficult to decarbonize, and carbon capture is one of their only viable mitigation options.

One of the modules under Verra’s new CCS methodology is for projects that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through direct air capture (DAC). When coupled with long-term storage, DAC is a form of CCS. Because it directly reduces atmospheric CO₂, it is a critical approach to mitigating global warming and achieving net-zero emissions targets.

VM0049 is designed as a methodological framework to allow for the easy addition of new modules. This flexibility makes this approach rapidly scalable in the following ways:

• As new capture and transportation technology becomes ready for deployment, new modules can be developed quickly, enabling a new pathway for finance to flow to the particular activity.
• Project proponents are able to tailor their carbon capture projects by combining different capture technologies and transportation modes based on their needs and circumstances. This means that more project proponents can use this methodology to generate carbon credits and expand their operations.
• Projects can modify their approach (add activities, remove others, etc.) to scale up and adapt to changing emission targets, economic opportunities, and market conditions, enabling faster progress towards climate action goals.
• Larger projects face reduced risks by allowing for the implementation of individual project components.

Verra’s new CCS methodology also facilitates the scalability of climate mitigation activities through the development of CCS hubs. CCS hubs are systems shared by several emitters that use the same CO₂ transportation, storage, or utilization infrastructure, greatly reducing the costs for implementing their projects—which are some of the most expensive projects to develop—and reducing development times.

The inclusion of CCS hubs also fosters collaboration and attracts investment, which catalyzes further innovation and deployment of CCS technologies.

The VM0049 framework facilitates the integration of CCS hubs through allocation tools that enable the robust accounting of CO₂ streams moving through shared project infrastructure when those streams are owned by partners or are used or stored outside a given project.

Additionally, VM0049 enables the scaling up of this important climate solution through its broad applicability and by offering additional economic benefits.

In general, DAC and CCS approaches do not depend on specific geographic conditions or focus on specific industries. They can, therefore, easily be deployed across a wide range of industries and on a global scale.

Because the development, deployment, and maintenance of DAC and CCS infrastructure can create jobs across engineering, construction, operations, and other sectors, these approaches have great potential for long-term viability through broad acceptance and community support, further driving their scalability.