A new project backed by Bill Gates wants to make carbon removal more legal.

Companies are increasingly adopting new ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to meet their sustainability goals, but who is watching to see if these strategies are working?

It’s called a new project Carbon Removal Standards Initiative (CRSI)) launched today and aims to help develop standards for efforts to pull down and sequester CO2. While it has made a big name in the investment in scaling up carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, there are still concerns about whether these technologies can be proven at commercial scale.

CDR can look like many different things, such as building industrial plants that capture CO2 from the air or seawater. On paper, this may sound green, but there is a risk that not all carbon accounting will be enough to help stop climate change. For example, these new industrial plants use a lot of energy, and the carbon they capture could potentially be used to produce more oil and gas. There is still not much oversight to ensure that new projects live up to their claims.

Policymakers are still trying to keep up with all this new technology. The European Union is developing its first certification framework for carbon removal technologies. Meanwhile, industry groups have set up their own initiatives to get CDR off the ground. Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability are launching one effort called Frontier in 2022 to connect verified carbon removal projects with companies willing to pay for the service.

Instead of developing its own guidelines for others to follow, CRSI Say We are taking a “top-down approach to standardization” and are working to provide technical assistance to regulators and other organizations working on carbon removal policies. We are already Publicly available database Provides academic papers, industry white papers, and other resources on emerging fields.

CRSI wants to differentiate itself as a nonprofit that doesn’t take corporate donations or rely on selling credits for carbon removal projects. “As the carbon removal industry grows, there’s a lot of self-regulation,” says Anu Khan, CRSI’s founder and executive director. “Industry will always be involved in developing standards, but it can’t be the only voice in the room.”

Certainly, CRSI’s early funders include Bill Gates’ climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Microsoft is investing heavily in carbon removal. One of the biggest purchases in July In the carbon removal project of Texas oil giant Occidental. Microsoft pledged to be carbon negative within 10 years in 2020, but its carbon footprint has increased by about 30% since making that pledge. So it’s no wonder that some environmental groups worry that carbon removal may be misleading. Companies can say they’re fighting climate change while still emitting a lot of pollutants that are worsening the crisis.

Kahn says carbon sequestration needs to be expanded beyond a tool companies use to plug their pollution. That means capturing carbon for the climate without having to sell credits to companies that fail to reduce their emissions. First, we need strong standards.

“I think it’s a really promising conversation,” Khan said. “But with all these policies, we need to make sure that they actually are measurable and quantifiable in terms of sequestering carbon.”