A report out today from the Rhodium Group estimates that the U.S. carbon removal industry has the potential to create up to 130,000 lasting jobs — if it can scale to 100 million metric tons annually.
That’s a tall order for an industry that currently captures just a fraction of that amount and still relies heavily on a small pool of tech buyers. In fact, according to Rhodium, it’s four times more than the amount of highly durable CDR deployment expected to occur by 2035 under current U.S. policy.
(That said, it’s a much smaller number than the 1.8 billion metric tons that the Department of Energy estimates the country will need to remove annually by 2050 to meet energy transition goals.)
The Rhodium report analyzed the employment potential of five durable CDR pathways that they determined can keep carbon out of the atmosphere for at least 1,000 years — and anticipates that the domestic industry could hit the 100 million metric ton target by 2040 “with adequate policy support.”
But at the current level of support and assuming no policy rollbacks, only one pathway — the energy-intensive direct air capture — will reach the milestone of 20 million metric tons per year by 2032.
DAC is the darling of tech CDR buyers in part because it’s easy to measure; high-profile companies like Climeworks, Heirloom, and Occidental Petroleum subsidiary 1PointFive. To date, DAC has received what Rhodium estimates is the most policy support among CDR approaches, thanks in part to the 45Q tax credit and the $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs.
According to the report, first-of-a-kind DAC projects capturing 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year will create between 540 and 1,370 average annual jobs during a five-year construction period, including project investment and supply chain jobs. (Those numbers include jobs associated with carbon storage.) That size facility will also create up to 420 ongoing jobs, associated with operations and maintenance.
Once DAC capacity has reached 20 million metric tons annually in the U.S., Rhodium projects the industry will create up to 14,500 jobs annually for project development, and up to 7,500 ongoing jobs. The top DAC occupations, the report adds, include construction trades, metal workers, engineers, machinery technicians, and project developers and site managers.
DAC’s job-creation potential in particular leans more heavily toward temporary jobs, created to build facilities. On an ongoing basis, nature-based pathways like enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement will create more permanent jobs than with direct air capture or direct ocean capture.
Of course, reaching these projected job numbers, as Rhodium emphasizes, requires the industry to grow rapidly in the next few years. And that requires additional policy support at a time when the fate of existing policy support, at least at the federal level, is still in question Under the incoming Trump administration, many in the industry are worried about the fate of federally-backed programs designed to give both buyers and developers a much-needed boost.
At the same time, there are state-level efforts, a growing international industry, and the tech industry’s increasing need to offset AI-emissions to stay on track for their own decarbonization goals. And the companies that appear to be furthest along on building commercial-scale facilities — like Climeworks, Heirloom, and 1PointFive — are all building in red districts.
