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What is carbon removal?
Carbon removal means taking carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere and storing it somewhere it cannot easily return from: in rock, soil, the ocean or long-lived materials. Removal is different from cutting emissions. Cutting emissions puts less carbon into the air, and removal takes carbon back out.
How is removal different from reducing emissions?
A solar farm that replaces a coal plant reduces emissions: less carbon dioxide reaches the air than would have. A project that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it underground removes carbon: the amount in the air goes down. Both matter, and neither replaces the other. Reductions come first, and removal deals with what cannot be cut and, later, with what is already there.
What are the main methods?
Methods are often grouped as conventional, which mostly means planting and protecting trees and managing soils, and novel, which covers the newer approaches:
- Direct air capture with storage: machines draw carbon dioxide from the air and inject it deep underground.
- Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS): plants absorb carbon as they grow, and when they are burned for energy, the carbon is captured and stored.
- Biochar: plant waste is heated without oxygen into a stable charcoal that holds its carbon for centuries when added to soil.
- Enhanced rock weathering: crushed rock spread on land reacts with carbon dioxide and locks it into stable minerals.
- Ocean-based methods: approaches that increase how much carbon the ocean takes up and keeps.
How much carbon is removed today?
About two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, according to the 2026 State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report. Almost all of that removal comes from forests and land. Novel methods remove about two million tonnes a year, around a tenth of one per cent of the total, though they are growing much faster.
Why does durability matter?
Carbon stored in a forest can return to the air if the forest burns or is cut down. Carbon stored in rock stays there for thousands of years. How long carbon stays out of the atmosphere is called durability, or permanence, and it shapes what a tonne of removal is worth and what it can honestly be used to balance.
Where MOTHER Carbon fits
MOTHER Carbon begins with carbon removal, helping the projects that remove carbon, of every durable kind, raise the money to be built.
For project builders
Is your project ready to finance?
Eight questions, one for each thing a lender will ask. The check takes two minutes, and our team can take it from there.
Sources
- The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal, 3rd edition, June 2026.