The New Frontiers Report for CDR 

Across many fields, scientific and technological progress is characterized by periods of steady improvement punctuated by breakthroughs that enable rapid advances. Communications, lighting, water treatment, and many other sectors have followed this pattern. Over the past decade, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) has likewise seen significant progress across a growing range of approaches. Yet, based on RMI’s work with academics, startups, developers, and other field experts, we believe substantial opportunities remain for innovation to transform the field, particularly by driving step-change reductions in cost and advancements in scalability. 

RMI’s New Frontiers Report for CDR (NFR) explores where those breakthroughs could come from. The report tells the story of CDR’s development to date, assesses current deployment trends, and identifies priority innovation areas across 14 CDR approaches. While factors across policy, markets, finance, governance, and community engagement continue to be important for rapid and responsible CDR deployment, this report focuses specifically on technological and process innovations that could unlock significant cost reductions, improve deployment viability, or dramatically expand the scale at which individual approaches can operate. The report is designed to provide innovators, public and private funders, CDR developers, research institutions, and policymakers with a clearer view of where targeted investment and innovation could have the greatest impact across the CDR portfolio. 

For each of the 14 CDR approaches, the NFR includes: 

• A timeline of progress over the past three decades, highlighting key scientific, commercial, policy, and funding milestones. 
• An assessment of current and near-term deployment based on project pipelines over a five-year horizon. 
• An analysis of the major drivers of current and future at-scale costs per ton of CO₂ across eight cost categories 
• Considerations for deployment at scale, including key tradeoffs, synergies, integration opportunities, resource constraints, and supply-chain needs 
• Priority breakthrough areas for each approach, as well as cross-cutting innovation opportunities that could benefit multiple pathways. 

The report also examines the role of enabling technologies, drawing lessons from sectors that have experienced rapid technological advancement over the past century. Many of the opportunities identified are cross-cutting innovations in areas such as automation, remote sensing, advanced materials, and synthetic biology that could accelerate progress across biogenic (bCDR), geochemical (gCDR), and synthetic (sCDR) approaches. 

To enable these breakthroughs, RMI proposes a future workstream that will build on the NFR by creating Rapid Development Plans (RDPs) for the most promising breakthrough opportunities. These RDPs are intended to outline what would be required to move the most promising breakthrough ideas from early-stage concepts to research, demonstration, commercialization, and deployment at scale. We are currently seeking funding to pursue this work.  

Since its launch, RMI’s CDR team has focused on advancing carbon removal in line with the scale of removals identified by the IPCC as necessary by mid-century and beyond. More recently, UNEP’s 1.5°C Overshoot Report has reinforced the importance of CDR in any pathway that seeks to bring global temperatures back down after an overshoot. Whether CDR can fulfill that role will depend in large part on our ability to improve the performance, cost, and scalability of the underlying technologies and systems today. 

The New Frontiers Report is intended to help catalyze that next wave of progress by directing attention toward the breakthroughs that could make carbon removal substantially more affordable, scalable, and effective—and ultimately capable of delivering at the scale the climate challenge is expected to require. 

Download the complete report to learn more. Click to view excerpted pages below.