There was little fanfare when Congress passed a carbon removal tax credit in 2018 — so little that many people still don’t know the credit exists. Some U.S. state governments also have created incentives for carbon removal. And with climate change set to play a more prominent role in the 2020 elections, other legislative initiatives will likely follow. Hear from experts who will explain how the existing credit and future changes will impact your company.

We must deploy technologies that suck carbon from the air if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. Doing so would create a huge new industry: one recent study estimated that products worth an estimated $5 trillion could be manufactured from CO2. This discussion will survey the ecosystem of opportunities in chemicals, materials and infrastructure that will emerge from the growth of this new sector.

According to Project Drawdown, regenerative agriculture has the potential to remove more than 20 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050 — equivalent to suspending all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions for 3 years. But how do we know the carbon will stay in soils? And what's the best way to keep it there? Dive into the science behind the soil with filmmaker, faculty member and regenerative ag expert Peter Byck.

About Roundtable Lunches: Join interactive lunch discussions, moderated by an expert or thought leader, held at roundtables of up to 10 participants. These are freeform discussions, so bring your own challenges, questions, and ideas to talk through and get to know your fellow conference participants. All roundtable lunches do not have advanced sign-up – participation is first-come, first-served. 

Investing in projects that pull carbon from the atmosphere is a relatively quick way to offset your company’s emissions and accelerate the spread of carbon removal technologies. Yet the offset market can be confusing. What’s the difference between avoidance and removal? How can you be sure that offset projects really remove carbon? This workshop will provide practical advice from offset experts on how to get involved in carbon removal and be confident that your investment delivers tangible benefits.

Thanks to corporate investments, a slew of new forestry projects will help remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere in the coming decade. For many innovative companies, making a direct investment in a forestry project can be one of the most effective ways of offsetting emissions. To help navigate these projects’ social, economic and scientific complexities, companies are partnering with top environmental organizations. In this session, key players behind from both sides of the partnerships will discuss how they are working together to protect and restore forests, including planting millions of trees.

The world’s farms and forests have the potential to draw down billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but monitoring the progress of land-based sequestration projects can be challenging. Hear from the technologists behind the new software tools that are making it possible to track, in real-time, the carbon being removed by even hard-to-monitor locations such as remote forests and large farms. If you’re using land-based offsets to reduce emissions, or thinking about doing so, this session will explain how the new tools can increase confidence in your investment.

With a new federal tax credit in place, carbon capture is taking off at power plants, ethanol facilities, steel mills and elsewhere. Exciting new uses for the captured carbon are emerging alongside these projects. This session focuses on the new technologies that make capture and utilization possible, the new credits that make it profitable and how leading players in this space are planning for the future.

Soap. Vodka. Jewelry. A handful of first-mover companies are creating consumer products using greenhouse gases captured from the atmosphere. This nascent market has the potential to impact hospitality, retail and multiple other sectors. In this session, the entrepreneurs behind some of the new carbon innovations will discuss the technologies involved, customer reaction to products made from recycled carbon, and the opportunities in this new class of consumer products.