Carbon Abundance describes the regime in which atmospheric CO2 stops being a waste stream and becomes a cheap industrial feedstock. It is the subtle thesis that if Energy Abundance delivers sub-penny electrons, direct air capture (DAC) and electrochemical CO2 conversion become economic by brute force: the capital stack is dominated by electricity cost, and at near-zero power the whole chain tips into the money. Climeworks, Carbon Engineering, and a cohort of electrosynthesis startups are early tests of this claim.
From capture to feedstock
DAC at scale is only half the story. The other half is what happens to the captured carbon: sequestration in basalt and saline aquifers, conversion into synthetic jet and marine fuels (e-fuels), feedstock for plastics and aggregates, and — at a longer horizon — carbonate building materials that store CO2 in the built environment. Each destination has a different cost curve and a different bottleneck. The integrated system is closer than any single link.
Why framing matters
Climate policy has historically framed carbon as a restraint problem — emit less. Carbon Abundance reframes it as an abundance problem: build enough clean energy to make DAC cheaper than not-doing-it, and the flow reverses. This is not a license for delayed mitigation; removal is additive to emissions reduction, not a substitute. But it does mean the endgame of climate work is industrial, not purely abstentional, and that reframing changes which projects are fundable.
Risks and open questions
Moral hazard is the standard objection: cheap removal at some future date is used today to justify current emissions. Verification is the under-discussed objection: permanent storage must be audited over centuries, which implies institutions with century-scale trust horizons — a capacity civilization does not currently have. This is where Carbon Abundance crosses into Coordination Abundance and Verifiable Identity.