 Good morning and welcome to the Stanford carbon management workshop on engineered and hybrid solutions for carbon. My name is Sarah Salzer and I am the managing director of the Stanford carbon removal initiative and will be your host for this event. The goal of the workshop over the next three days is to create a dialogue which will allow us to identify gaps and opportunities for research as well as come up with technologies and or creative strategies that can bring about further reductions in atmospheric carbon. Each day is quite different. Today we will be focusing on setting the stage for carbon removal. What do we mean by engineered and hybrid solutions? And how do system scale models fit in? And what options for carbon to value are being pursued? Tomorrow we will be diving into the topical areas of direct air capture, bioenergy with CCS, carbon mineralization and bio inspired solutions for carbon, learning about what is new and what are the barriers. Finally on day three we will be discussing mechanisms for overcoming barriers including issues such as scale, global commitment, technology diffusion and deployment, behavior and environmental justice and financing. With that as an overview I'd like to cover a couple logistical items. If you encounter any technical issues please contact Justin Warren via text message at the number listed on the slide. If you have a question for a speaker please submit it via the Q&A function which can be accessed at the bottom of the screen and we will be reviewing the submitted questions and selecting a few to pose to the speaker. Today's theme is carbon removal setting the stage. This slide shows the topics we'll be covering today as well as the speakers. We'll be finishing the morning with a panel discussion involving all seven speakers. So to set the stage I'd like to invite Yi Shui, the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford to say some opening remarks. Over to you. Well thank you Sarah. First let me welcome all of you to this very exciting workshop. To introduce myself a little bit, starting from January 1st I took over from Alun Majangda and Sally Benson to become the director of Precourt Institute. So this is very very exciting time to work on energy to work on fighting climate change. You have seen in the past maybe a year or so a lot of exciting things happening. In the big background Fortune 500 companies about close to 30 percent now announced the climate goals by 2050 carbon neutral. Amazon's climate pledge now the company grows to 105 companies. The next zero commitment is by 20, 40, 10 years earlier than Paris Agreement. And Stanford is starting a new school on climate and sustainability. Precourt Institute will be a funding pillar of its institute. Inside Precourt Institute we have been planning several major initiatives. Carbon removal is one of them and this is also hydrogen greenhouse gas free hydrogen initiative. There's also another initiative. The third one is energy climate AI. So the carbon management carbon removal is very important part of the future program initiative to help decarbonize the whole economy. And today's workshop will serve as the function to guide us. The ideas coming out through this workshop will guide us towards the future research direction. So I'm excited about learning all the thinking in the next three days. I would like to thank you for participating into this workshop and look forward to the discussion. Great, thank you. I would now like to introduce Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford and Chris Field, the director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. Rob is going to set the stage for this workshop and Chris is going to tie back to our first carbon management workshop that was held last September on natural climate solutions. We'll start with Rob Jackson. Hello everyone, welcome. We're grateful that you can be here. Good morning, good evening, wherever you happen to be. As Sarah mentioned, I'll set the stage briefly for some of our goals today and quickly turn it over to Chris to recap the first carbon removal workshop that focused on natural climate solutions. So carbon removal workshop today we're going to focus on industrial and hybrid approaches. These first few lines are a bit of an outline for the morning. Natural climate solutions, as I mentioned, we covered in the earlier workshop that Chris will talk about. So we'll really think about industrial and by hybrid we're primarily discussing BEX, so land-based bioenergy approaches coupled with industrial aspects. And then we won't focus on other greenhouse gas removal such as methane or nitrous oxide, but Stanford's new carbon removal initiative will have some hypotheses on other gases that it might be worthwhile in the panel discussions to consider some of the opportunities and challenges for gases beyond carbon dioxide as if CO2 isn't challenging enough. So let me continue on just to set the stage. So this is the trace for global fossil carbon dioxide emissions dating back about 60 years. You can see a steady increase and of course last year's really unusual COVID related drop of about two and a half billion tons that we estimate. So that's part of the story. We have not yet turned the corner to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions or start to see them decline and the evidence suggests so far for 2021 that we're heading back to the 2019 levels, the emissions and economies are rebounding. So last year, 34 billion tons of carbon dioxide from fossil emissions, about six billion net tons from land use emissions, approximately 40. And the context for that is that we have four to 500, so very roughly half a trillion gigatons or billion tons of carbon dioxide left to stay below the one and a half degree threshold for temperature stabilization. And so that's the challenge of one and a half degrees. And we'll look at why that's such a challenge just in a couple of slides. This is work from Dan Tong and UC Irvine, Steve Davis and others, and this is a paper that came out a year to go in nature showing committed emissions. Their analysis looks at kind of standing built infrastructure already in place and estimates the emissions associated with that infrastructure if it lives out its full and typical lifespan. And they estimate based on different sectors, which is what you're seeing here in colors, electricity in the light purple being the biggest, that this existing infrastructure will cumulatively emit almost 650 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which already places us over the allowable or estimated threshold to the cumulative budget of four or 500 billion. And then of course in the light on this figure, we see proposed infrastructure if built, we will add to that limit. So our budget appears to be over, we're likely to overshoot one and a half and possibly two degrees C estimate. So what will we do about that or what can we do about that? And that of course is where carbon removal can come into play. This is a complicated slide, but let me spend a minute to walk through it. It's from the IPCC report, one and a half degrees. And there are three scenarios here shown left to right that show increased cumulative carbon dioxide emissions with greater overshoot as you head to the right. The red bar is gross carbon dioxide emissions. Purple bar is net CO2 emissions. And then you see different forms of carbon removal. Green is natural climate solutions, estimated. Light gray is bex. One of the hybrid solutions we'll talk about today. And then the hatching above the red line is CCS, so not truly carbon removal, but mitigation and keeping carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere. So all of these knobs are knobs that can be turned in different combinations of course, different costs, different extents to try and keep below the various thresholds. And everything between the purple and the red bars is what we need from carbon removal. So that's our task for today. And the more we overshoot, of course, the more we surpass the total budget for one and a half degrees, the more we have to pull back out of the atmosphere at a much greater expense. So that sets the stage really for what we'll focus on today. And I just want to spend a second to discuss other greenhouse gases, which isn't the focus of today's workshop, but I hope might be in a future one. And the global methane cycle is something I work on a lot and we do in the global carbon project. And it is dominated by human activities. So 60% of global methane emissions come from human activities, roughly two thirds agricultural and one third fossil fuel. This is our latest global methane budget. And you can see the different sources there, because natural sources wetlands. And we want to think about in this carbon removal initiative that we're launching here at Stanford, what we can do for some of these other very potent greenhouse gases such as methane, or long lived gases such as nitrous oxide, and they're both challenging for being present in the atmosphere at much lower concentrations than carbon dioxide. So they have some disadvantages, but also some advantages in terms of potency and lifetime. So I will stop there and turn it over to Chris, who will give us a recap of the first workshop that some of you attended on natural climate solutions. So thank you everyone. I also want to join me in welcoming everyone to a really important topic. And I'm very pleased on behalf of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment to be a co-sponsor of this important event. The last workshop, as you already heard, focused on natural climate solutions was back in September of last year. And it was one of our first all zoom outing, very successfully looked at a broad range of natural climate solutions, looking at land, ocean, soils, forest, agriculture. And it also considered some of the economic and social factors that are important. And I think as we move forward, what we're seeing is that it's really central to make sure that we keep our fingers on the pulse of the important economic and social issues as well as the technology issues. Almost every presentation in the first workshop showed this slide from a 2017 PNAS paper by Bronson Griscombe and his colleagues that in many ways has been really critical in setting an upper limit on what's feasible in terms of carbon removals using natural climate solutions from different sectors, from forests, agriculture and grasslands and wetlands. This figure tackles three important things. It tackles what's the total capacity from each of our variety of different approaches. It tackles what are the economically feasible components with cost estimates for the dark gray bars show sinks that should be available at less than $10 a ton, the light gray bars at less than $100 a ton and the white bars total capacity. And it also shows something with the colored vertical bars about the co-benefits, which have always been a very important part of the thinking about natural climate solutions. And the key take home from this figure is that there are meaningful opportunities in a wide range of sectors, but the predominant ones in terms of the total capacity are reforestation and avoided deforestation. And that came out really resoundingly across the presentations. Here's a recent summary of all the published estimates of the capacity of the terrestrial biosphere to remove CO2 from the atmosphere over the rest of the century. The orange band shows the interquartile range and the IPCC estimates that Rob just showed. And what you can see is that some of the published estimates of land-based natural climate solutions get up into that interquartile range. Many do not, and a large fraction of them are less than half of the magnitude of that amount of removals that need to be accomplished, really putting a focus on the technology-based and hybrid solutions that we're going to consider here. The real take home from message from this figure is that natural climate solutions can be important contributors, but it looks at this point very unlikely that they'll contribute more than on the order of a quarter to a half of the removals that need to be accomplished if we are to stick with the ambitious 1.5C range. Throughout the presentations in the first workshop, there was a lot of emphasis on the value of the co-benefits in terms of habitat, in terms of biodiversity, air and water quality, and vibrant rural economies and lifestyles, a really important component of the overall portfolio, and it's one that can be a part of these engineered and hybrid solutions as well. There are, of course, some clear examples of being overambitious in the natural climate solutions space, and things like the Trillion Tree Initiative have probably been overhyped. Many of you will also be aware that the last few months have been challenging for the natural climate solutions agenda, and there have been a number of recent publications, including this one that came out recently in ProPublica, indicating that we still have some fundamental challenges with our accounting of natural climate solutions, and we obviously need to get the accounting right if we're to make either the natural climate solutions or the engineered or hybrid solutions a major part of the system going forward. The work on agriculture was super interesting and pointed out big opportunities both in crop management and in soils, but the fundamental contrast fork in the road that it highlighted was that we really have two very different kinds of options for pursuing ag-related solutions. One is to change agriculture so that we store a lot more carbon in agricultural soils. The other is to maximize yields, sort of forget about the carbon balance of the agricultural lands so that we need the minimum amount of land for agriculture and can free up the most land for other kinds of solutions. We really don't know which approach is going to be the most valuable. Also in the ag area, there's super interesting discussion about re-engineering plants so that the conversion efficiency of solar energy is substantially higher than the fraction of a percent that we see now and closer to the four to six percent that's theoretically possible. So there are a wide range of solutions that can be deployed and I think the bottom line that it's important to remember is that those solutions can contribute. They can be important sources of co-benefits but they don't come close to solving the overall challenge that we face in terms of negative emissions overall. I want to leave you with one thought from the Global Carbon Project which demonstrates that currently nearly 30% of current CO2 emissions are stored on an annual basis. Ecosystems on land and an additional 20% or so are stored in the oceans and when we look forward at the role of natural climate solutions, probably the most important thing we can do is take every possible step in order to assure that these ongoing sinks, we think of them as background sinks, continue, we can increment them but the top priority needs to be protecting the sinks we have and with that I will turn it back to Sarah and wish you all a very enjoyable workshop.