This impact investor travelled the world searching for carbon removal projects. Here is what she found.

In 2024, Patrícia Silva embarked on something most only dream of. A six-month tour around large parts of the world. But this was no ordinary trip. While on her travels around East Africa and Asia, Silva spent much of her time researching and observing the myriad efforts to stop carbon entering the atmosphere.

Originally a civil engineer working on wind farms and sustainable construction, Silva is now a founding venture partner with VC firm Satgana, as well as Carbon Markets Lead with environmental services platform Patch. Her career journey saw her turning her focus to the sustainability sector, climate in particular. "The goal was really to work on the most impactful projects I could," Silva tells Impact Loop from her home office in Lisbon. "At that time for me, that was trying to increase large-scale renewable energy grid projects."

Silva eventually found herself drawn to carbon removal projects while obtaining an MBA at Berkeley. Several years later she linked up with Romain Diaz, founder of Satgana, a specialty climate-tech focussed VC firm based in Lisbon.

At Satgana, Silva is the lead venture partner on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) investments. She and a small team analyse over 1000 opportunities per year, investing in roughly 10 of those annually with Satgana’s boutique €8.5m ($8.8) climate fund. They’re now working with 20 companies across Europe and Africa, and hope to round it off at 30.

“It's really cool to see what's out there,” said Silva. “Even the companies that we don't invest in, we still support and send some of them to other supporting investors.”

With her background in engineering, Silva feels comfortable evaluating the mostly technical, on-the-ground, nature of the projects Satgana looks to invest in, as opposed to peers in the VC world who may be a bit more familiar with the software side of things.

Carbon removal is an important part of the battle to limit global warming to 1.5C, particularly with regards to sectors that are difficult to decarbonise in the first instance. While the idea of removing carbon from the atmosphere has been around for a long time, Silva describes a slow development beginning in earnest around a decade ago, with still a lot of work to do developing and evaluating the efficacy of different technologies.

She explains the CDR sector is still in its ‘startup’ phase, with lots of energy and development but not yet fully matured. From 2030, we start to enter the ‘scale-up’ phase, where Silva hopes these projects will start seeing proper implementation. From there, the sector moves into its ‘soak-up’ phase (a term coined by Klarna’s head of climate Alex Farsan), in which Silva and her peers want to see CDR technologies start doing what they’re intended to – pulling vast amounts of C02 out of the air and sequestering it in different forms.

Reaching that future soak-up phase depends on funding and energy going where it is needed now. “We need to start deploying the solutions as soon as possible so they can get to the scale that we need in a few decades time,” said Silva.

Biochar: big potential?

Of the myriad different carbon removal and sequestration technologies out there, Silva sees particular promise in nature-based solutions such as biochar, which is created from combusting biomass in a way that retains the carbon. The resulting materials can be used as soil additives, improving soil quality and – crucially – keeping carbon in the earth and contributing to the development of carbon sinks. Biochar would be useful in rural agriculture, particularly in the developing world, where waste crops are typically burned off at the end of the season, for instance.

Another solution Silva is excited about is Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, which is essentially accelerating a natural ocean process to increase its capacity for sinking carbon. Though it has promise, there is still a lot of careful research to be done on how such technologies might affect marine ecosystems.

Nonetheless, nature-based solutions like these are relatively simple, vastly scalable and cost-effective at scale. But of course, all these solutions require funding to get set-up, long before the world starts to see the benefits.

"Currently, we're not deploying enough funding to be able to scale up the solutions, and that is a problem," said Silva. In 2023, investments in the durable carbon removal sector were around 600 million dollars (€578m), she said ('durable' in this case meaning carbon sequestered for centuries rather than decades). That is a drop in the ocean compared to the trillions needed to meet the goals laid out by the IPCC.

A need for public-private partnerships

To get anywhere near that level of funding, believes Silva, it’s essential that governments step in. There’s promise in existing long-term funding and subsidy projects in the US and EU, the latter of which having published its Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Certification late last year.

At the same time, regulation needs to move carbon-emitting industries beyond voluntary markets and into compulsory emissions- and waste-reduction. That government intervention is critical, both for providing the underlying R&D funding to develop the solutions companies can turn to in the future, and for making sure they do actually comply.

"So you can start seeing the momentum (needed) to get to the hockey stick we need,” said Silva. “We’re moving slowly, but there will be a transition and then we’re going to scale up really quickly. That makes me positive about this space."

There’s a lot of money floating around in the world, but it needs to be deployed

In the meantime, Silva and her team at Satgana are looking to raise two new funds, including a separate vehicle for investments in Africa, focussing both on emissions reduction as well as projects pursuing climate equity. These are long-term investments, and Silva said the world needs more patient capital that will prove as durable as the carbon removal solutions it undergirds.

"There’s a lot of money floating around in the world, but it needs to be deployed. Unfortunately, we see a lot of people with the money trying just to make themselves richer and not looking at the massive potential their funding has. There’s this mindset of ‘we want results quick.’ But as we see, the issues with climate are becoming more real."