Building a workforce for novel carbon dioxide removal technologies in Australia

Novel CDR technologies extract CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it in durable forms such as geological reservoirs, mineral carbonates, or oceanic bicarbonates. 

Although currently more costly than conventional approaches like forestation or soil carbon, they offer greater scalability and lower reversal risks. CSIRO has developed a roadmap for scaling these technologies, based on a target for Australia of 133–200 megatonnes of CO₂ removals by 2050 to achieve net zero, requiring both conventional and novel CDR.

The study's key findings are:

1. There are high uncertainties and limited information for developing projections on the volume and types of workers for novel CDR.
2. Workforce is not a key priority for the sector which is focussed on commercialising early-stage technologies – but there are some specialist shortages and concerns about the size of the pipeline of students with the base technical skills that will be required (e.g. chemical engineering).
3. There are parallels and learnings to be taken from renewable energy as CDR will require similar project development and construction skills to scale. The CDR sector is quite optimistic about its ability to source a workforce but is likely to face significant competition for labour. Building a workforce for novel CDR will present challenges for the training system and regional areas if effective relationships and sound policy setting are not put in place early.

There are five major factors that will shape future workforce requirements for CDR

Next steps: recommendations and actions

There are four categories of recommendations explored below for next steps and actions to prepare for workforce development in the novel CDR sector.