Role and issues of CCS in long-term sustainable emission reductions and toward sustainable development

Abstract

Abstract The Copenhagen Accord recognizes the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius, and deep cuts in global emissions are required. According to the Fourth Assessment Report of IPCC, the global emissions in 2050 should be reduced by 50% at least compared to the 2000 level in order to achieve below around 2 degrees Celsius and 450 ppmv- CO2eq.. However, the future improvement over 4% p.a. will be needed to achieve halving global emissions within a few percent of GDP losses, while the historical carbon intensity was improved by 1.2% p.a, There are large gaps between historical trends and the required efforts for such a challenging target. In addition, historical trends indicate that it is very difficult to achieve reductions in primary energy consumptions. Therefore, decarbonization of the energy, i.e., carbon intensity improvement, is indispensable for deep emission cuts. Although the developed countries had some trends of the decarbonization, it is also far from such targets of large emission reductions. De-carbonization technologies of nuclear power, renewable energies and Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS) are significant. Most emission reduction scenarios including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and the International Energy Agency (IEA) show increase in carbon price to advance carbon emissions for the future under the assumptions on sustainable global cooperation for emission reductions. However, It is difficult to sustain global cooperative intention to tackle global warming over 100 years in a real world. The carbon price rather should be decreased in the long-run for sustainable development and sustainable global actions for emission reductions. In addition, historical and currently planed carbon prices of emission trading schemes in many countries are low in the real world, and high carbon prices, particularly explicit prices, are unacceptable politically. CCS development and deployment has risks of intermittent carbon price in near- and mid-term and of carbon price converging zero in long-term. This paper discusses this gap between proposed scenarios assuming ideal world including continuous increase in carbon price and politically acceptable carbon prices in the real world, and outlook of plausible CCS deployment considering the gap.