Abstract
How will the global atmosphere and climate be protected? Achieving net-zero CO2 emissions will require carbon capture and storage (CCS) to reduce current GHG emission rates, and negative emissions technology (NET) to recapture previously emitted greenhouse gases. Delivering NET requires radical cost and regulatory innovation to impact on climate mitigation. Present NET exemplars are few, are at small-scale and not deployable within a decade, with the exception of rock weathering, or direct injection of CO2 into selected ocean water masses. To keep warming less than 2°C, bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) has been modelled but does not yet exist at industrial scale. CCS already exists in many forms and at low cost. However, CCS has no political drivers to enforce its deployment. We make a new analysis of all global CCS projects and model the build rate out to 2050, deducing this is 100 times too slow. Our projection to 2050 captures just 700 Mt CO2 yr-1, not the minimum 6000 Mt CO2 yr-1 required to meet the 2°C target. Hence new policies are needed to incentivize commercial CCS. A first urgent action for all countries is to commercially assess their CO2 storage. A second simple action is to assign a Certificate of CO2 Storage onto producers of fossil carbon, mandating a progressively increasing proportion of CO2 to be stored. No CCS means no 2°C.This article is part of the theme issue 'The Paris Agreement: understanding the physical and social challenges for a warming world of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels'.
Highlights
How will the global atmosphere and climate be protected? Achieving net-zero CO2 emissions will require carbon capture and storage (CCS) to reduce current GHG emission rates, and negative emissions technology (NET) to recapture previously emitted greenhouse gases
Carbon resources are 30–50 times larger than reserves [1] including difficult to extract conventional hydrocarbons, plus unconventional hydrocarbon, methane hydrates in permafrost and hydrates frozen beneath continental margin sea beds. Any one of these reservoirs of fossil carbon is more than enough to take the cumulative total of anthropogenic carbon emissions because of industrialization beyond the ‘1 trillion tonne carbon’ limit approximating to 2°C of average global warming [2]
Staying within that limit means that global emissions need to reduce at about 3% yr−1 (37 Gt CO2 yr−1) to a net balance of zero around 2050
Summary
CCS is a group of technologies, which have the common aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to atmosphere from the extraction, combustion or utilization of fossil fuels and carbon-containing resources [19] This provides a means whereby widespread, accessible, portable and dense energy storage fuels may be used with minimal impact to the climate. In the present discussion of technologies to reduce emissions and to achieve negative emissions, the importance of CCS with geological storage is that it is flexible in application to diverse CO2 sources, has a long history of industrial development compared to NETs, and several industrial scale projects have been operating for over 20 years. CO2-EOR has emerged as the only commercial method to incentivize CCS, and most CO2 storage (in 2018 totalling 60 Mt CO2 each year) currently works through such projects (electronic supplementary material). These show a slow pace of CCS development, and do not include NET or DAC
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