ESG Today writes that as per a study conducted in 2022 by experts at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world will need to develop carbon removal solutions and technologies to help keep the global warming threshold to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Current carbon removal and storage solutions are few and far between and their scale and development stage are limited, for now. Additionally, carbon offsetting, which implies buying carbon credits for compensating released emissions, has verification and quality issues, to name a few.

Egil Fagerland, CEO of Aker Carbon Capture, said that "it’s time to move past the first-of-a-kind and the demonstration projects for carbon removal. The deployment rate needs to be accelerated by the hundreds to deliver the ‘net’ in net zero."

Norway-based Aker Carbon Capture (ACC) is a company that offers a proprietary carbon capture solution that helps reduce and remove CO2 emissions from industrial sites, which can be implemented on existing facilities and those that are to be built. Using a mixture of water and organic solvents, the company's CO2 capture technology can be applied to a multitude of industries, such as coal and cement.

Under the new collaboration, Microsoft, Aker Carbon Capture and CO280 will be developing projects in the US and Canada to explore different approaches to carbon capture, in order to find the most economically-viable and efficient ways to reduce the carbon footprint of companies.

Darryl Willis, Corporate Vice President of Energy and Resources Industry at Microsoft, said that "our collaboration with Aker Carbon Capture and CO280 builds on important large-scale initiatives across asset-intensive industries including pulp and paper. By leveraging the power of technology to create a digital value chain for carbon tracking and reporting, we can equip the market for high-integrity carbon removal credits and further enable the industrial sector to decarbonize."