In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Sebastian Manhart sits down with Rudy Kahsar, Principal at RMI and a founding member of its carbon removal team, to dig into the New Frontiers Report for CDR. The report traces up to three decades of progress across 14 carbon removal approaches to work out where the next breakthroughs could come from, and Rudy's answer to the question he gets asked most, which pathway to go all in on, is not the one most people expect.
Rudy makes the case that the technologies doing most of the removing in 2050 may not exist yet, and that breakthroughs tend to arrive when experts from one field wander into another. Policy sits outside the report's scope, but his message to policymakers is clear: rather than writing rigid rules around one or two of today's approaches, set aside some funding and regulatory attention for the approaches nobody has invented yet. Sebastian, who has long argued against picking winners this early, needs little convincing.
The conversation then turns to the numbers. RMI built bottom-up cost stacks for every approach across eight shared categories, using generative AI for the first pass before testing it with companies and experts, and Rudy explains why the future cost stacks are aspirational scenarios rather than predictions. Sebastian contrasts that transparency with the black-box cost estimates that have made their way into the EU ETS proposal.
They close on some of the report's boldest bets, from engineered crops that lock carbon away more durably to the convergence of AI, drones and sensors, and on direct air capture, where Rudy is blunt about cost. Tune in to hear why he thinks an outdoor clothing brand could be an unlikely ally for carbon removal.