Five burning questions as a newbie to carbon removal
Learning a new climate language, through the eyes of a new team member
Editor’s note: Christina Janulis joined Terraset in April to help with communications. She comes from a background in ocean conservation, with a focus on grantmaking and science communication.
I’ve spent several years in ocean conservation, telling stories tangled up with climate along the way. Now, I’m learning a whole new language at Terraset.
I had a lot of browser tabs open during my first week. Carbon markets have their own vocabulary, and it moves fast. Here’s what was on my mind as someone new to carbon markets.
What does “reaching gigaton scale” actually mean?
I kept seeing “gigaton scale, gigaton removal.” It sounded big, but I couldn’t grasp what it really meant.
Here’s what I know now:
A gigaton is one billion tons.
Humans emit roughly 37 billion tons (gigatons) of CO₂ (we’ll just call it carbon) per year. Not to mention, there’s already too much carbon in the atmosphere from past emissions.
The entire voluntary carbon market retired 0.157 gigatons of carbon credits in 2025, including both avoidance and reduction credits. Of that, actual carbon removal accounted for only about 5%, or roughly 0.008 gigatons.
To get on track for a livable future, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we need to remove 10 gigatons per year by 2050.
These numbers provided some context, but you know what really helped me wrap my head around it? Whales.
Terraset’s CEO, Adam Fraser, used a “whales in the sky” visual at a conference earlier this year.
This image helps us visualize the carbon we need to remove from the atmosphere each year in a different unit: a 150-ton blue whale, the largest animal on Earth.
We need to remove the equivalent of 80 million blue whales of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. Today, we’re only removing about 5,000 “whales” worth of carbon dioxide each year. The image above has hundreds of whales; we are currently removing thousands of whales; and we need to be removing millions of whales.
I also learned that getting to this mythical “gigaton scale” is primarily a funding and infrastructure problem, not so much a science problem. Which is, more or less, what Terraset exists to help solve.
I found this comforting. It’s not that the technology doesn’t exist. It’s that the pipeline from “this works” to “this works at scale” needs a lot more money.
What are the different flavors of carbon dioxide removal (CDR)?
I was familiar with marine-based CDR, but I had no idea how many different approaches there were.
The broadest split is between nature-based and engineered approaches. Nature-based solutions work with biological systems that already remove carbon: forests, soils, oceans. Engineered approaches build technology to do it directly. They have very different cost profiles, permanence timescales, and trade-offs. The IPCC has a great overview comparing those dimensions by approach, if you want to go deeper.
Here are a few examples from Terraset’s portfolio:
Bio-oil injection (Charm Industrial): Plant biomass is converted into carbon-rich bio-oil and injected into EPA-regulated underground wells. Geological permanence (i.e. thousands of years). This is one of the more mature engineered approaches.
Biochar (Pyrogen, Graphyte): Organic material is heated without oxygen into a stable, charcoal-like substance that locks carbon in soil for centuries. This is an older technology finding new applications and Pyrogen even embeds it into concrete.
Direct air capture (Octavia Carbon, Climeworks, DeepSky): Machines pull carbon directly from the air, then store it underground or use it as an input. The most energy-intensive approach, but also one of the most scalable and verifiable. Costs are dropping fast.
Agricultural soil carbon (Andes): Beneficial microorganisms added to farm fields capture carbon while crops grow, boosting yields at the same time. Nature-based, with the added benefit of supporting farmers directly.
Ocean-based approaches (Planetary, CarbonRun): My personal area of interest. Planetary enhances ocean alkalinity to lock carbon away for millennia while also reversing coastal acidification. CarbonRun works with river chemistry. MRV for ocean-based approaches is still catching up to the science, but the potential is enormous.
Superpollutant elimination (Tradewater): Rather than removing carbon, Tradewater finds and destroys potent refrigerant gases with a warming potential hundreds of times greater than carbon. This is an unglamorous, highly effective addition to any climate solutions portfolio.
Carbon180 has an excellent explainer on the full CDR landscape that’s worth bookmarking.
How do we actually measure the carbon being taken out of the air, and what’s “additionality” all about?
Coming from ocean science, I’m used to measurement being difficult. Carbon removal is no different, with MRV (monitoring, reporting, and verification).
MRV draws on everything from satellite imagery to geochemical sampling to life cycle analysis to tell us how much carbon was removed, how we know it’ll stay there, and if it would have happened anyway.
That last part is the additionality question. If a forest was going to be protected regardless of whether a carbon credit was sold, the credit isn’t really doing anything new. Additionality means the removal only happened because of this specific intervention.
It sounds simple, but in practice, it is enormously contested. This is why standards and regulations exist, and why Terraset vets which projects it backs.
With a high-quality credit, we have third-party verification that one ton of carbon was removed from the atmosphere and will remain locked up (underground or in other materials, for example) for thousands of years.
Note: As of right now, a “credit” is a certificate, or formal piece of documentation that proves ownership of a ton of carbon.
What actually happens to a carbon credit after it’s bought?
Another mystery for someone who studied science rather than economics. I understood that companies and donors buy carbon credits, but I didn’t have a clear picture of what happened next.
When Terraset purchases a carbon credit from a project like Octavia Carbon – Africa’s first direct air capture company – that purchase gives them capital to operate, hire, and build. In parallel, it creates a verified record on a carbon registry that a specific quantity of carbon was removed, by this project, on this date. That record is permanent and public.
The registry (Puro, Isometric, Rainbow etc.) is essentially the ledger that keeps the whole system honest.
What I found interesting is that the credit purchase isn’t always at the end of this chain of events. I assumed all the action happens, then a credit pops out at the end. But a credit can serve a different role: an early purchase of credits from a buyer like Terraset signals market confidence that helps open doors to more funding. Early buyers help prove a project is credible, which makes it easier to attract the larger institutional capital that comes later.
What’s stopping donors from giving more to climate right now?
Less than 2% of global philanthropy goes to climate. I found that number shocking, and I wanted to understand why.
From everything I’ve read and the conversations I’ve had in my first month, it’s not a lack of motivation. Many donors care about climate.
The hesitation seems to stem from two things: trust and access. The voluntary carbon market had some scandals in the early days around junk credits, and donors are reasonably cautious. On the logistical side, most donors don’t have a path to vetted, investment-ready climate projects that meet their financial advisors’ standards. Both problems are solvable. That’s what we’re working on at Terraset.
The science and the solutions exist. What’s missing is capital and trust. That’s a much better place to be than most climate problems.
If there are topics in the carbon removal or market space that you’re curious about, ask them. We’re figuring this out in public.
I think you may have a typo - the current CDR market removes less than 0.5 gigatons. Did you mean megatons?