In Biorecro’s new initiative, we are launching a series of interviews with experts in various corners of the climate industry. These conversations serve a dual purpose: to obtain their unique perspectives and to illuminate the ongoing efforts in finding climate solutions.
Executing effective climate solutions is not a one-person task. Climate policy implementation involves a meticulous process that requires thorough research, teams of experts, and the minds of policymakers. But who are the experts that are behind these research initiatives and how do they contribute to policy development?
Mark Workman serves as a director at Foresight Transitions, overseeing a qualified team dedicated to furnishing strategic guidance and decision support across the energy, environmental, and technology domains. His scope of expertise encompasses areas like Deep Decarbonization, Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) and strategy development under deep uncertainty. As an affiliate researcher at Imperial College London, Mark is actively cultivating his expertise in specialized domains, including resource systems, energy transitions, environmental and climate change studies, climate security, the intersection of climate issues with violent conflicts, and the dynamics of decision-making amidst uncertainty. Mark sat down with the Biorecro team to discuss the United Kingdom’s status on climate policy and his research with the CO2RE Directorate Hub, the UK’s national research hub on Greenhouse Gas Removal.
Continue reading for Mark’s interview conducted by Kiara Manns:
What are the main goals and objectives at CO2RE?
CO2RE’s role is to provide best in class evidence to allow the UK government to generate the relevant policies to realize the “net” part of net zero by 2050. In the UK, we’ve basically got to grow an industry the size of the water sector in 27 years from a standing start.
The Hub, though it has a research set of partners and participants, it really is a market intervention. We are up against it in terms of hitting net zero. We’re at 360 million tonnes a year of produced emissions in the UK. To decarbonize those 360 million tonnes and then remove the residual emissions in 27 years is going to be tricky.
Based on the research you've done with CO2RE, has there been any improvement with carbon removal efforts and other climate solutions in the UK?
In terms of conventional net zero market development, you essentially have a research base which results in millions being thrown at the sector by the government. Then you get a grant-based set of initiatives which runs into billions and again that tends to be from the government, but it also crowds in the private sector. And then what happens is that there needs to be a transition from those billions to trillions – when you bring in and leverage private sector investment.
The UK GGR research phase was kind of 2010-2020, I suppose you could argue. Now we’re entering that transition from the government to the private sector doing the heavy lifting by setting up the market.
The US with the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act has effectively started a small green revolution over there in terms of transiting the GGR sector to be more market based. When I say market based, I mean bringing in private sector actors to leverage the government backed grants. And so that’s kind of happening in the UK just with smaller sums of cash.
What’s needed to achieve climate policy in the UK?
At the moment there’s a gap between where the market needs to be – driven by policy to generate that spill over between where the government grant-based system and the private sector investment taking over.
The Government has set targets, which is great, but you need policies in place to address private sector risk to then realize those targets. The targets give ambition, but you can’t then calibrate risk off the back of that. It’s the policy standards and regulations that allow the risk calculus to be brought in. Once you have a risk calculus, you can then actually attract private financial capital.
Once you attract the capital, then you can get the ecosystem of actors needed for the market to function with a view to addressing the information asymmetries. At present, the information asymmetries are still too large and the confidence is not there for the market to function as well as it needs to.
We went to the aviation sector because the aviation sector is a high-value manufacturing sector. It’s a very important sector: Boeing in the US and Airbus in Europe and the UK.
It’s high skilled jobs, high economic return- meaning that they are important for economic development. It has an innovation capability that can potentially result in spillovers into the carbon removal sector. We thought it would be a progressive conversation to work with the aviation community and workshop with them to consider the risks that they have to navigate and elicit what they had to offer.
If there was ever a community that might be able to turn those risks into opportunities, it was going to be that kind of sector. Whereas obviously you have other sectors: straight oil and gas with their operational and embedded emissions. They’re going to be hard to decarbonize in some respects. There’s also glass, cement, steel etc. A lot of these energy intensive sectors, fall into the same bucket but probably don’t have the innovation disruptive capacity that the aviation sector has.
What are the best options right now to help this kind of industry reach net zero?
The development of an Advance Market Commitment, specifically tailored to the generation of high integrity negative emissions carbon credits – which would likely be technical GGR – would be a good step. We need to have concerns around nature-based solutions. Without a shadow of a doubt, it’s highly problematic to monitor, report, and verify [nature-based solutions]. The amount of negative emissions that get generated is almost certainly going to fluctuate depending on a number of contextual and environmental issues.
Geological based storage mechanisms, like BECCS, have got to be the ones that can hit gigaton scale. There are storage sites and more than likely there are opportunities to develop cost reductions from learning by doing. The ability to monitor, report, and verify should also be a lot easier. However, these technologies are expensive.
Ultimately we need to go through the learning with nature-based solutions, as they are ready now, in order to set up the market structures- the institutional ecosystems- to develop the market confidence to allow the technical emissions to be developed along with its geological storage.
I am likely one of many who has to seriously question how much CO2 has actually been sequestered in the voluntary carbon markets. It’s certainly a lot less than is claimed. That just has to be a trade-off to get the sector established, allow learning to happen and give long run data sets to allow the market to be established, settle down, and then hopefully reduce the cost of capital for these more technical based solutions.
Any upcoming projects or research you’d like to share?
My main research with carbon removal is based around CO2RE at the moment. There’s some work that we’re looking at around Carbon Take Back Obligation. Carbon Take Back Obligation (CTBO) is a producer responsibility initiative. Present initiatives are based on the consumer having to pay a tax on carbon that they purchase. The CTBO is very much based around the producers having to sequester as much carbon as they produce. Which then results in fewer actors having to be targeted with policy and very much works on the “polluter pays” principle.
It’s just trying to work trying to look at those interventions that have systemic effects – that’s what I am keen to work on. There’s another piece of work that we did with Miriam Aczel from Berkeley around anticipatory governance which seeks to generate regulation to allow sectors to transition more rapidly and accommodate the principles of good governance.
If we’re really serious about developing new technologies then we need novel governance constructs. However, regulation tends to freeze in existing technological constructs. And that tends to slow down innovation because regulation is in place to protect the consumers so therefore you have to make sure that disruption doesn’t impact customers. Whereas obviously creative destruction very much is predicated on organizations having assets that get stranded which would likely result in customers, you know, getting stranded as well.
