The Three Biggest Letters in Carbon Removal Are MRV
Monitoring, reporting and verification are becoming increasingly crucial to ensuring that carbon removal startups are delivering on their promises to clean up the atmosphere.
A worker walks through the Carbon Engineering Innovation Centre, a direct air capture research and development facility, in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada. Companies trying to pull carbon from the air are increasingly being asked to prove what they do and rely on a process known as monitoring, verification and reporting or MRV.
Photographer: James MacDonald/BloombergLast year, a group of Norwegian auditors touched down in a remote corner of Iceland to meet with Climeworks, a Swiss company that built the world’s largest plant of its kind. They weren’t there just to open the books, but to open machines that were doing what none had done before at this scale: remove carbon directly from the air.
For three days, auditors from DNV, a firm that specializes in quality assurance and risk management, interviewed staff, reviewed hundreds of pages of documents and inspected everything from air collector containers to sensors quantifying carbon dioxide levels. Their efforts were part of a mission to figure out if the first facility to capture carbon from the air and store it underground was actually doing what Climeworks claimed.