Temporal and spatial deployment of carbon dioxide capture and storage technologies across the representative concentration pathways

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment (to be published in 2013–2014) will to a significant degree be built around four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) that are intended to represent four scenarios of future development of greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and concentrations that span the widest range of potential future atmospheric radiative forcing. Under the very stringent climate policy implied by the 2.6 W/ m2 overshoot scenario, all electricity is eventually generated from low carbon sources. However, carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technologies never comprise more than 50% of total electricity generation in that very stringent scenario or in any of the other cases examined here. There are significant differences among the cases studied here in terms of how CCS technologies are used, with the most prominent being is the significant expansion of biomass+CCS as the stringency of the implied climate policy increases. Cumulative CO2 storage across the three cases that imply binding greenhouse gas constraints ranges by nearly an order of magnitude from 170 Gt CO2 (radiative forcing of 6.0 W/ m2 in 2100) to 1600 Gt CO2 (2.6 W/ m2 in 2100) over the course of this century. This potential demand for deep geologic CO2 storage is well within published estimates of total global CO2 storage capacity.