Key uncertainties behind global projections of direct air capture deployment

Reconfiguring European industry for net-zero: a qualitative review of hydrogen and carbon capture utilization and storage benefits and implementation challenges

“…140 A participant also underscored the dominance of blue hydrogen when stating: “ for the coming period, we would expect the majority of hydrogen to be blue [hydrogen], we need to reduce CO 2 emissions quickly and for the majority of industries this is fastest way to reduce their emissions .” In addition DAC might help to offset hard-to-abate future emissions 141 because it possesses the opportunity for the following characteristics to be developed: large-scale CO 2 removal potential, low direct land and water footprint, siting flexibility and carbon storage permanency and high measurement certainty. 142,143…”

Utilizing CO2 as a strategy to scale up direct air capture may face fewer short-term barriers than directly storing CO2

“…DACCS has also historically been associated with various concerns about its risks, such as its large energy requirements [118,119], its safety [8,85,120], and its entanglement with the fossil fuel industry and perverse incentives to continue polluting [121][122][123], which reduce public acceptance of DACCS [6,120,124]. The benefits of DACCS, on the other hand, lie in its potential to not only enable net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in hard-to-abate sectors, but also to contribute to net-negative CO 2 emissions, although such impacts become climate-relevant only if absolute emissions fall below the rate of carbon removal [2,3,[5][6][7]. This has led to a polarized debate characterized by enthusiasm on one side and rejection on the other side [61,62].…”

“…To limit warming below 2 • C and especially 1.5 • C, carbon removal will likely be needed, first to counterbalance greenhouse gas emissions from hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation, steel, cement and chemical industry, and agriculture [1], and achieve net-zero emissions, and second to compensate for temporary temperature overshoot [2]. Direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) will likely play an important role in the future carbon removal toolset [3][4][5][6][7] due to its large carbon removal potential [8] and its ability to sequester atmospheric CO 2 independently from point sources (e.g. bio-or fossil-fueled smokestacks) [9].…”

“…However, these studies did not aim to directly compare different uses of DAC, but rather assessed in isolation either their role in future mitigation scenarios [3-5, 7, 50], their techno-economic performance [11,22,24,25,32,35,36,38,39,44,47,51], their lifecycle emissions [9,23,36,40,41,45], possible markets [30,37,46,48,[52][53][54], or policies and governance infrastructure [26,[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62]. Despite the burgeoning literature on DAC, only a small body of literature reviewed CO 2 removal and utilization jointly [6,32], while only two studies, to our knowledge, explicitly assessed opportunity to utilize the carbon captured by DAC to pave the way for future scaled DACCS deployment. Meckling and Biber [33] investigate a policy strategy of incentives and mandates targeting enhanced oil recovery as a possible initial niche market for air-captured CO 2 .…”

Scaling carbon removal systems: deploying direct air capture amidst Canada’s low-carbon transition

“…Within that bundle of CDR, the range of cumulative DACCS deployment for 1.5°C and 2°C is 0-310 GTCO 2 and 0-250 GTCO 2 , respectively (IPCC, 2022). Motlaghzadeh et al (2023), looking more closely at the scenarios within the AR6 database that include DACCS, indicate that annual DACCS deployment in the year 2,100 has significant variation among scenarios, ranging from 0 to 18.9 GTCO 2 /yr.…”