Negative emissions technologies and carbon capture and storage to achieve the Paris Agreement commitments

Abstract

How will the global atmosphere and climate be protected? Achieving net-zero CO 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 CO 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 CO yr, not the minimum 6000 Mt CO yr 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 CO storage. A second simple action is to assign a Certificate of CO Storage onto producers of fossil carbon, mandating a progressively increasing proportion of CO 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'.

Reducing sea level rise with submerged barriers and dams in Greenland

“…Recent adaptation measures have been implemented to reduce the impact of sea level rise. For example, United States of America (USA) dollars (US$) 14.5 billion is the budget allocated to protect New Orleans, Louisiana, USA against category 5 hurricanes (Burnett 2015), the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (MOSE) project built to protect Venice, Italy against flooding is estimated at € 5.5 billion (Giovannini 2017), and The Netherlands spent € 8.9 billion from 1954 to 2008 in flood infrastructure (Aerts et al 2008). At a regional scale, sea level rise adaptation strategies have also been applied in Europe (Hinkel et al 2010), Brazil (Lacerda et al 2014), United States of America (USA) (Ashton et al 2008;Song et al 2018), Saudi Arabia (Babu et al 2012), Egypt (Frihy and El-Sayed 2013), Australia (Lin et al 2014), and Bahrain (Al-Jeneid et al 2007).…”

The death spiral of coal in the U.S.: will changes in U.S. Policy turn the tide?

“…Carbon Capture, Transport, and Storage (CCTS; often also Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS) is seen by many as a necessary measure to keep global warming below 2°C (Haszeldine, Flude, Johnson, & Scott, 2018). Many also see it as an opportunity to continue the use of coal for power generation (IEA/OECD, 2017b).…”

“…Global consumption of steam coal continues at a relatively high level and decreases only little below current consumption levels by 2050. We do not assume any large-scale application of CCTS under the moderate climate policy pathway, because the motivation to deploy this costly technology is insufficient if no strong, binding climate targets exist (Budinis, Krevor, Dowell, Brandon, & Hawkes, 2018;Haszeldine et al, 2018).…”

The Death Spiral of Coal in the USA: Will New U.S. Energy Policy Change the Tide?

“…Carbon Capture, Transport, and Storage (CCTS; often also Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS) is seen by many as a necessary measure to keep global warming below 2°C (Haszeldine et al 2018). Many also see it as an opportunity to keep on burning coal (IEA/OECD 2017b).…”

“…The moderate climate policy pathway sees the global community taking some limited action against climate change at the ambition level of the currently active Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that were pledged immediately after the Paris Agreement. However, this is not sufficient to limit global warming to below 2°C by the year 2100 but rather sets the world on course for a rise of the global mean temperature by some 3.2°C (2.6 -4.0°C) above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century (Fekete 54 (Budinis et al 2018;Haszeldine et al 2018).…”