![]() Climeworks, which launched the world’s largest existing air capture plant in Iceland in September 2021, secured a purchase agreement for direct air capture and storage with insurance company Swiss Re in August 2021 worth US$10 million over ten years. However, as it becomes increasingly likely that mitigation won’t have sufficient impact in time, the case for direct removal of carbon grows stronger, while technical challenges to CCUS at scale-such as cost and leakage-remain.Īchieving the full potential of carbon removal potential calls for combining finance with technical expertise. There’s a risk, however, that increased focus on and investment in CCUS will divert attention and resources from other mitigation efforts: given this danger, it is essential that companies pursuing CCUS situate their investment within comprehensive carbon reduction plans and targets. Urgent efforts are needed to mitigate climate risk through emissions reduction, demanding systemic change. The greatest concern about counting on CCUS is the moral hazard. Whether such a level of investment and expansion is possible and plausible is far from clear. For instance, the International Energy Agency’s Sustainable Development Scenario envisions CCUS delivering 15 percent of global emissions reductions by 2050 to limit temperature rise to 1.65☌. That would mean the installed capacity of CCUS increasing a hundredfold by 2050, which would cost US$650 billion to US$1.3 trillion. As climate scenario analysis moves up on the agenda as a key recommendation of the Taskforce for Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), decisions and investments are beginning to be evaluated and made on the basis of scenarios that assume CCUS is scalable. The prominent role of CCUS in future carbon scenarios is a challenge for business strategy today. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that we need a carbon removal industry capable of removing 10-20 billion tonnes of emissions from the atmosphere per year from now until 2100 to keep temperature increases below 2 degrees. As the United Nations Environment Programme reported in October 2021, even if current pledges to reduce emissions are fulfilled, we’ll be on track for a 2.7☌ global temperature rise this century. The expansion required will depend on the rate of emissions reduction: the more rapidly we can decarbonize, the less we’ll be reliant on carbon direct removal (CDR) to keep a cap on warming. Real-world plans for approaching net zero, however, are driving momentum for doing just that. While small-scale plants show promise, CCUS at scale remains largely unproven. Rudra Kapila, Senior Policy Advisor for Carbon Management, Third Way, adding that this would both revolutionize our approach to tackling climate change and support businesses and communities alike. But at the larger, million ton-scale, DAC technology can also start to capture long-lasting carbon dioxide, or legacy emissions, and help move our energy and economic systems to become carbon-negative," says Dr. ![]() “These technologies can be designed to be small and modular, making them well-suited to curb residual emissions from industrial processes in hard-to-abate sectors. Analysis of this being put to use in an EU-funded pilot cement plant found costs to be the lowest of any comparable technology, from €14 to €24 per tonne of CO2. Another new approach comes from Merrit Electro Fuels in British Columbia, which plans to use DAC combined with hydrogen to make low-carbon synthetic fuels. Take Calix in Australia, which builds kilns that produce zero-carbon cement and lime by trapping carbon in honeycomb-like structures at very high temperatures generated by wind or solar power. Now, there’s growing interest in scaling new technologies for processes that are typically hard to decarbonize. Still, one clear advantage of CCUS is the potential for permanent storage deep underground, whereas nature-based solutions are subject to risks, from logging and forest fires to the impacts of warming on natural cycles. Technological approaches, such as direct air capture (DAC) from atmospheric air (instead of sources of carbon-laden air, such as power plants), have been operating minimally since the 1990s, but the physics and chemistry of the process are extremely energy intensive and expensive. ![]() Natural methods, including reforestation, afforestation, wetlands conservation, regenerative agriculture, wider biodiversity restoration, even increasing the population of whales, have an important role to play. Answer: put some of it back into durable storage.Ĭarbon removal is possible in principle-by various routes. But we are redistributing it into the atmosphere from natural sinks in vegetation, the ocean, and fossils at an ever-increasing pace. Our problem is not too much carbon: there is always the same amount.
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