CO 2 Capture Going BIG
“Currently, the world is way off track in meeting the Paris Agreement climate goals. It cannot get back on track without CCS”. This statement, issued by the Global CCS Institute in its recent report on The Global Status of CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage), underlines the importance of developing new methods and technologies to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the atmospheric CO 2 concentration has increased from 280 to 410 parts per million (ppm), which is a 46% increase. Most of the added CO 2 can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions from energy production (i.e., burning coal, natural gas, and oil) and other industries (e.g., cement, steel). The CO 2 level will likely continue to rise in the coming decades, as the world population and the energy consumption continue to increase and rely on fossil fuels. While the Earth’s ecosystems have mechanisms for reducing the amounts of CO 2 present in the atmosphere, absorbing roughly half of our annual emissions, the other half, consisting of about 18 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year, will have to be addressed through CCS technologies. At the same time, the global average temperature has already risen about 1 °C over the course of the 20th century, and will likely exceed the 1.5 °C increase limit in a few decades. Undeniably, as the Earth is out of energy balance with the current atmospheric composition, there is more warming in the pipeline even if the global emissions were to be cut to zero today. A recent report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that limiting the increase in the global temperature to less than 2 °C by the end of this century becomes exceedingly challenging without large-scale deployment of Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs). NETs, such as Direct Air Capture (DAC), remove CO 2 out of the atmosphere, in effect reducing past emissions. They also can address dispersed emissions from transportation and buildings, which currently account to about 50% of global annual emissions.