The cost of permanent carbon dioxide removal

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) appears set to play an increasingly important role in meeting national and corporate net-zero targets. To play a credible role in this effort, CDR must be fungible with fossil CO2 emissions. However, it is clear that non-permanent CDR path-ways are of non-zero climate repair value (CRV). In this contribution, we present a general analytical framework that quantifies the CRV of a CDR pathway of arbitrary permanence. A non-linear relation-ship between store durability and CRV is observed. We then incor-porate the CRV concept in a conventional levelized cost of removal analysis, extended to account for monitoring, reporting, and verifi-cation (MRV) of a given store. We demonstrate that, once the im-pacts of reversal and ongoing MRV costs are accounted for, the cost of permanent removal is generally lower than that of non -per-manent removal.