Abstract
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be essential to meet the climate targets, so enabling its deployment at the right time will be decisive. Here, we investigate the still poorly understood implications of delaying CDR actions, focusing on integrating direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (DACCS and BECCS) into the European Union power mix. Under an indicative target of −50 Gt of net CO2 by 2100, delayed CDR would cost an extra of 0.12−0.19 trillion EUR per year of inaction. Moreover, postponing CDR beyond mid-century would substantially reduce the removal potential to almost half (−35.60 Gt CO2) due to the underused biomass and land resources and the maximum technology diffusion speed. The effective design of BECCS and DACCS systems calls for long-term planning starting from now and aligned with the evolving power systems. Our quantitative analysis of the consequences of inaction on CDR—with climate targets at risk and fair CDR contributions at stake—should help to break the current impasse and incentivize early actions worldwide.
Highlights
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be essential to meet the climate targets, so enabling its deployment at the right time will be decisive
RAPID identifies the optimal portfolio of power technologies, BECCS and DACCS, including their location and installed capacities, which may vary over time to meet a given energy demand pattern and CO2 removal target
The opportunity cost of delaying CDR would vary over time, depending on the gradual mix decarbonization and improvements attained via learning curves (e.g., CAPEX of DACCS expected to become c.a. 70% cheaper in 2050 relative to 2020, Supplementary Table 14)
Summary
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be essential to meet the climate targets, so enabling its deployment at the right time will be decisive. We investigate the still poorly understood implications of delaying CDR actions, focusing on integrating direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (DACCS and BECCS) into the European Union power mix. According to the most recent integrated assessment modeling scenarios (IAMs), limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will require deploying CDR to remove 10-20 Gt/yr of CO2 over the 21st century, and cutting emissions sharply to reach carbon neutrality around mid-century and become carbon-negative[2,5,6]. CDR technologies and practices deliver net negative emissions by removing and sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere[7,8]. DACCS shows a large removal potential limited mainly by the storage capacity[5,17], yet its large heat and power requirements hamper its large-scale adoption[16,18,19], suggesting that an optimal regionalized portfolio of CDR strategies should be sought. The CDR deployment to date has been minimal[20,21] with only
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