Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 30 Ju. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/410-removes-new-Latin-American-carbon-dioxide-removal-accelerator-programw-Hans-Westerhof--Marian-Krger-e3mm7bh

TL;DR

  • remove launches a Latin America accelerator cohort with Milkywire funding, extending their Global South work beyond India and Africa. Concrete gap-filling, not vaporware.
  • Central thesis: LATAM developers get shut out of buyer/investor mindshare by availability bias — the founders who can’t afford Carbon Unbounded don’t get RFPs. Fair diagnosis.
  • Startups in the Global South ship biochar and soil samples to Europe/North America for lab analysis. Underrated bottleneck for enhanced rock weathering and biochar scale.
  • remove is doubling down on non-credit revenue diversification — biochar into fertilizer, biocoal as pulverized-coal-injection substitute in steel. Explicitly fine with it not counting as carbon removal.
  • Krüger’s counter-cyclical pitch: right now is actually a decent time to found a direct air capture company if your first commercial plant lines up with a 2030 compliance regime.

Ross Kenyon hosts remove co-founders Hans Westerhof and Marian Krüger to announce a Latin American accelerator cohort, launching applications now with a fall 2026 kickoff, funded by Milkywire. The conversation is half program pitch, half a candid read on where Global South carbon dioxide removal (CDR) actually gets stuck — buyer psychology, lab infrastructure, and the increasingly obvious limits of a voluntary-credits-only business model.

The most useful analytical move in the episode is Krüger naming availability bias as a structural buyer/investor problem. If founders can’t get to Carbon Unbounded or NY Climate Week, they don’t get into RFPs — full stop. remove ran a London Climate Week event where three Global South founders pitched to buyers who otherwise wouldn’t have seen them, and Krüger reports that raters admitted they’d been reading “diverse revenue streams” on project pages for years without understanding what it meant operationally. That’s a small but honest data point about how thin the buyer-side due diligence bench still is.

The second load-bearing claim: remove is explicitly reorienting programming around non-credit go-to-market. Westerhof frames CDR’s weirdness bluntly — “we have software installed, here’s the interface… is it really happening?” is not a question you get in normal B2B, but it’s routine in CDR. Their answer is to push developers toward integration with existing industrial value chains: biochar into fertilizer, biocoal as a pulverized-coal-injection reductant in steel and aluminum. Krüger is refreshingly direct that biocoal displacing metallurgical coal is not CDR — it’s above the zero line — but if it lets a biochar developer scale from 1,000 tons to 20,000+ tons/month of offtake, they’ll take it and worry about the crediting pathway later. This is a sharper articulation of the “products, not credits” thesis than most accelerators are willing to make on the record.

Adjacent context: remove has now run 200+ startups through cohorts across Europe, India, and Africa; the India work is anchored with IIT Bombay and Vikram Vishal. The lab-infrastructure gap Krüger flags echoes complaints you’ve heard from ocean alkalinity enhancement folks about baselining capacity, and it’s the same argument Isometric and other registries implicitly rely on when they require third-party MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification). The revenue-diversification thesis rhymes with what Milkywire and other philanthropic buyers have been pushing for two years.

Useful for: LATAM founders considering applying, philanthropic funders thinking about Global South CDR capacity, and buyers/investors who want an honest read on why their pipeline skews North Atlantic.