Carbon removal technologies could create tens of thousands of US mining and quarry jobs – report

The carbon removal industry could positively impact both the climate and the mining jobs market, according to a recent report released by US-based non-profit the Carbon Removal Alliance.

The analysis, conducted independently by Rhodium Group, assesses the carbon removal sector’s economic opportunities. The report shows that a carbon removal industry capable of removing 100 million metric tons of carbon emissions per year would add between 95,000 and 130,000 lasting jobs across the United States.

Carbon removal is an industry of technologies and approaches that remove excess carbon dioxide and permanently store it. Some of these technologies — namely enhanced rock weathering (ERW), ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) and direct ocean capture — are job creators, according to the report.

Carbon removal is different from carbon capture, a process which captures some or all of the carbon at a point of emission — like a power plant. Carbon removal permanently removes and stores legacy carbon dioxide pollution already in the atmosphere, and is not connected to a point of emission.

Carbon removal technology ERW specifically could help create 22,000 to 29,500 ongoing jobs as mining and quarry workers are one of the top occupations associated with ERW projects while OAE carbon removal technology could create 13,000 to 17,500 ongoing jobs, the report found.

Mining and quarry workers are again one of the top occupations associated with these OAE projects.  OAE methods can repurpose byproducts from industrial processes, like steel slag. These processes can also create a high-purity alkalinity which provides added potential for critical mineral extraction.

Giana Amador, executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance, said the organization is focused on fighting climate change by bringing to light this new sector of solutions.

“We work closely with the Rhodium Group specifically to better understand the economic and jobs potential of what a carbon removal industry could look like at scale. These are new solutions that have been in development for about a decade and can really lead to job creation and economic benefits across the US,” Amador told MINING.com in an interview.

“[They] don’t just reduce emissions, which typically is the strategy that we think about using when we think about fighting climate change — things like renewable energy, electric vehicles, but the solutions that we focus on are actually how we clean up carbon that’s already in the atmosphere,” Amador said.

“We work with innovators who are developing a wide range of technologies, including ones who are using minerals from the mining sector,” she said. “We work with around 30 companies who are all developing cutting edge technologies and are beginning to deploy projects across the globe.”

Eli Cain, senior policy manager at Carbon Removal Alliance, joined the organization from the US Department of Energy National Laboratories,  where he helped manage carbon removal policies.

“There are three different ways that we can durably take carbon out of the atmosphere — through plants and biomass [and] through chemicals that sequester CO2. And you can do it through minerals that already react very naturally on very long timescales with atmospheric CO2 and capture that,” Cain said.

“The more traditional ones are things like basalt or limestone or dunite or olivine, wollastonite — all of these are mined in the US, and a lot of them in Canada as well. Canada does a great job on this, we want to bring more of that into the United States.”

On the economic front carbon removal work can be like how partnerships can make the most of some mining byproduct that exists on mines already. Partnerships between carbon removal companies and mining companies can open up new revenue streams for miners, Cain noted.

ARCA climate technologies, one of the Carbon Removal Aliance’s member organizations, published a whitepaper this year reporting that mine waste could be transformed into a ‘net-zero, multi-billion dollar opportunity’.

Mining companies have their own emissions targets, and Cain said the Alliance has heard from suppliers that they can offer cheap and effective decarbonization solutions.

“One of the reasons we’re really excited about partnerships between carbon removal and mining companies is because the carbon industry is going so quickly, it means that we will need more of these mine resources in order to accomplish their goals,” Cain said.

“And we’re not talking like one new mine — we’re talking like the scale of the global cement industry today.”