In the Chatham House paper, Daniel Quiggin estimated engineered removals would cost $192 billion to $315 billion a year by 2050 under deployment assumptions aligned with the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. Using 2027 forward prices for wood pellets and assuming BECCS still provides 99% of engineered removals in 2050, the paper says the bill could climb to $460 billion a year. If countries lean more heavily on DACCS instead, it says costs could move higher still.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group III headline statements say carbon dioxide removal is unavoidable for balancing residual emissions from sectors that are hard to fully decarbonize if the world is to reach net zero. But the same assessment says the scale and timing of removal depends on how quickly countries cut emissions before removals are counted.
Why carbon removal is colliding with energy security
Quiggin’s argument is that engineered carbon removal is not just expensive to build. It is expensive to run. The paper says energy inputs account for nearly 50% of DACCS costs and at least 33% of BECCS costs, leaving both technologies exposed to power and fuel volatility at the same time governments are trying to lower bills and strengthen supply security.
The broader investment backdrop makes the comparison harder to ignore. In its Net Zero by 2050 roadmap, the International Energy Agency said annual clean energy investment would need to reach about $4 trillion by 2030. Chatham House said its $460 billion upper-end scenario would equal about 13% of annual clean energy investment and estimated that cutting the same volume of carbon dioxide through wind, solar and electric vehicles could cost about $72 billion a year at projected 2050 abatement costs.
Carbon removal costs are driven by heat, fuel and scale
Direct air capture has long been pitched as a backstop for aviation, shipping and some heavy industry. But the International Energy Agency’s direct air capture assessment says the technology still starts from a tiny base, requires significant amounts of energy and would need rapid scaling to capture around 980 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2050 in its net-zero scenario.
BECCS carries a different set of risks. It can produce energy while removing carbon, but the economics hinge on biomass feedstocks, transport and storage infrastructure, and long-term subsidy support. Chatham House also warns that heavy dependence on woody biomass could create land-use and supply-chain pressure, turning a proposed climate backstop into a practical energy and affordability problem.
Carbon removal has been building toward this debate for years
The warning fits a longer arc. In January 2023, Reuters reported that almost all carbon dioxide removal still came from trees and soils, while investment in newer engineered methods remained small. In August 2023, The Associated Press reported that the U.S. Department of Energy awarded up to $1.2 billion to two direct-air-capture projects, the largest federal investment in engineered carbon removal at the time. By April 2024, Reuters reported that policy support and new crediting standards were starting to draw buyers from aviation and finance even as doubts over cost and scale lingered.
What the carbon removal warning means for climate policy
The core message is not that carbon removal has no role. It is that carbon removal becomes more risky and more expensive when governments treat it as a substitute for faster cuts in fossil fuel use, efficiency gains, electrification and renewable deployment. The more countries do now to reduce emissions directly, the smaller the future bill for engineered cleanup is likely to be.
For policymakers, the question raised by the paper is no longer whether carbon removal belongs in a net-zero plan. It is whether the role assigned to it is large enough to strain public budgets, energy systems and political support if costs do not fall as hoped.
