Status Updates From Carbon Capture (The MIT Pre...

The second area is negative emissions used for off-sets. As discussed in chapter 6, the leading option today for large-scale negative emissions is bioenergy with CCS (BECCS).

The last area is in electricity production. This sector holds the biggest potential for carbon capture, but is also the most uncertain.

In a decarbonized world, there are three major areas where carbon capture can have a significant role.

One is in industrial processes like cement plants, fertilizer plants, and steel mills. For this sector, carbon capture is the primary option for decarbonization. The only realistic alternatives are to use carbon neutral biofuels, or just continue to emit CO,, but buy offsets.

Because we cannot repeal the laws of physics, the threats posed by climate change will not go away on their own. Therefore, at some point in time, humankind will have to realize that the only real choice is to make climate change mitigation a high priority, and to decarbonize our energy systems. The question is in the timing. The longer we wait, the more adverse the impacts from climate change will be.

Arguing that renewables can do it alone is a very risky proposition. Do we want to put all of our eggs in one basket? The magnitude of the climate challenge is so large, we need as many options as possible, including renewables, nuclear, and carbon capture.

This distinction between renewable energy policy and climate policy is very controversial. On one side is the camp that thinks the solution to climate change is renewable energy, period. On the other side are the proponents of the "all of the above" strategy. (…) The experience in Germany shows the difficulty of a narrow renewables policy as opposed to a broader climate policy.

A big lesson from the German experience is the distinction between a renewable energy policy and a climate mitigation policy. The major thrust in the Energiewende is to increase the amount of renewable energy used in Germany. (…) If one is interested in addressing climate change, then the primary goal is decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, not necessarily increasing renewable generation.

Politics (2/2):
How times have changed. Today, the right hates anything to do with climate change, even if it could benefit fossil fuels. Similarly, the left hates anything to do with fossil fuels, even if they can help mitigate climate change. One can say that carbon capture has become an orphan technology.

Politics (1/2):
(…) in 1989, I anticipated that the field would bring together both sides of the political spectrum. On the right, carbon capture meant we could address climate change without ending our use of fossil fuels. On the left, it meant another technology was available to enlist in the fight against climate change. It turns out that I could not have been more wrong.

There is a good chance that we cannot count on NETs in the long-term to compensate for our failure to do enough mitigation in the near-term.

Negative Emission Technologies (NETs):
Using NETs to correct an overshoot means that instead of paying for relatively cheap mitigation options today, we pay many times more in the future for NETs. This makes no economic sense. If we are unwilling to adopt the relatively cheap mitigation technologies available today, what makes anyone think that future generations will adopt NETs, which are much, much more expensive?

On Direct Air Capture (DAC):
“The best way to remove CO2 from the air is to not release it into the air in the first place.”

“… I fall into the camp that looks at CCU as a bit of a side-show. I try to keep an open mind, and realize that there may be some niche markets that can be beneficial. How-ever, scaling up carbon capture to the required gigatonne scale to have a significant impact in climate mitigation will be through CCS, not CCU.”

“Some researchers, like a recent paper in Nature Climate Change, go further: "CCU [beyond EOR] may prove to be a costly distraction, financially and politically, from the real task of mitigation." They argue that the narrative that CCU will make carbon capture profitable is too simplistic and may distract from developing storage capability.(…)”

Negative Emission Technologies (NET):

• Bioenergy CCS (BECCS)
• Direct Air Capture (DAC) of CO2

“There is no doubt that the world will need to implement adaption strategies to deal with climate change, but it should not be at the expense of mitigation.”

Intervention strategies:

1. Mitigation
2. Adaptation
3. CO2 Removal (CDR)
4. Solar Radiation Management (SRM)

Geoengineering (3&4)
Carbon capture (1&3)