Abstract
The challenge facing society in the 21st century is to improve the quality of life for all citizens in an egalitarian way, providing sufficient food, shelter, energy, and other resources for a healthy meaningful life, while at the same time decarbonizing anthropogenic activity to provide a safe global climate, limiting temperature rise to well-below 2°C with the aim of limiting the temperature increase to no more than 1.5°C. To do this, the world must achieve net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. Currently spreading wealth and health across the globe is dependent on growing the GDP of all countries, driven by the use of energy, which until recently has mostly been derived from fossil fuel. Recently, some countries have decoupled their GDP growth and greenhouse gas emissions through a rapid increase in low carbon energy generation. Considering the current level of energy consumption and projected implementation rates of low carbon energy production, a considerable quantity of fossil fuels is projected to be used to fill the gap, and to avoid emissions of GHG and close the gap between the 1.5°C carbon budget and projected emissions, carbon capture and storage (CCS) on an industrial scale will be required. In addition, the IPCC estimate that large-scale GHG removal from the atmosphere is required to limit warming to below 2°C using technologies such as Bioenergy CCS and direct carbon capture with CCS to achieve climate safety. In this paper, we estimate the amount of carbon dioxide that will have to be captured and stored, the storage volume, technology, and infrastructure required to achieve the energy consumption projections with net zero GHG emissions by 2050. We conclude that the oil and gas production industry alone has the geological and engineering expertise and global reach to find the geological storage structures and build the facilities, pipelines, and wells required. Here, we consider why and how oil and gas companies will need to morph from hydrocarbon production enterprises into net zero emission energy and carbon dioxide storage enterprises, decommission facilities only after CCS, and thus be economically sustainable businesses in the long term, by diversifying in and developing this new industry.
Highlights
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris meeting in 2015 resulted in the Paris Agreement where 195 signatory nations agreed to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change in order to limit global warming to below 2◦C with further ambitions to reduce this limit to well-below 2◦C above preindustrial averages (UNFCCC, 2016)
As global temperature is proportional to atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration (CO2, CH4, N2O, fluorocarbons, etc.) and their half-life in the atmosphere varies from decades to centuries, the world has a limited GHG budget to emit into the atmosphere before the 2◦C limit is breached
The IPCC “Global Warming of 1.5◦C” report indicated that cumulative net anthropogenic GHG emissions postindustrialization should not exceed an ∼3 trillion tons CO2 equivalent (Tt CO2 eq.) carbon budget (CB) to avoid breaching the 1.5◦C warming threshold (Rogelj et al, 2018)
Summary
A Net Zero WorldThe United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris meeting in 2015 resulted in the Paris Agreement where 195 signatory nations agreed to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change in order to limit global warming to below 2◦C with further ambitions to reduce this limit to well-below 2◦C above preindustrial averages (UNFCCC, 2016). Total energy demand will grow by 37% by 2040, and taking into account energy efficiency improvements and projected growth in non-fossil energy use due to the change in mix of fossil and other fuels in the IEA current policy scenario, this will cause a 20% increase in GHG emissions.
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