This mixed-bag sentiment is basically true. There is no point at which it makes sense to give up on trying to mitigate climate change. The more greenhouse gasses are deposited into the air, the warmer and the worse it will get. The case for keeping the 1.5 Celsius target alive, however, looks increasingly far-fetched. The more optimistic possibility explored by UNEP researchers involves approaching that 1.5 Celsius goal “from above,” i.e. rapidly cutting carbon dioxide emissions enough to limit warming through 2100 to just 1.8 degrees Celsius. The world would then have to achieve not just “net-zero” but “net-negative” emissions by steadily removing enormous amount of excess carbon dioxide.
This type of headline misses the point. As is made clear by the tens of thousands who have died in heat waves, landslides, and floods this summer, we are already in the danger zone, and we will spend the rest of our lives there. And as the report emphasizes, “there are no good outcomes above 1.5°C,” and the path to getting back to that level is extraordinarily long and uncertain.
Enter “engineered” and “novel” CDR. The years since the Paris Agreement have seen enthusiastic interest from Houston to Silicon Valley in these more sci-fi-style means of getting to net zero. These tend to appeal greatly to industry. Back when fossil fuel executives were feeling pressured to talk about rising temperatures, they rallied around carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration as a key climate solution—and a means of keeping their business models intact. Oxy CEO Vicky Hollub may have put her company’s interest in these technologies best in 2023: “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
Climate models tend to treat the considerable limits of these technologies as economic: If you can bring down the price per ton of carbon dioxide captured, producers will be able to achieve economies of scale and those technologies will proliferate. As Ravikumar told me, however, the models “are not based on physical principles,” but on cost optimization. “That assumption that the deployment of a technology is simply a function of its cost breaks down when you look at very new technologies” like carbon capture and storage, “where you have not reached the stage of building a thousand copies of the same thing.” In other words, the models take for granted that if carbon removal gets cheap enough, it will be deployed at scale. But that’s not the situation at all.
There are physical limits on the infrastructure and space available for sequestering carbon. An influential study outlining ways for just the United States to achieve net-zero emissions indicates that the country will need to capture and store 2.5 Gt per year—a relatively low level that mainly accounts for industrial processes that don’t have readily available zero-carbon alternatives, like steel and concrete production. The biggest project Daigle and Ravikumar looked at was Shell’s Gorgon Plant in Australia, which faced numerous engineering challenges in capturing emissions from one of the world’s largest liquified natural gas terminals. That facility currently captures and sequesters just 0.4 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon per year—far less than the 3.5 Mt Shell projected when operations began in 2019. The projects Daigle and Ravikumar studied hit 59 percent of their projected injection rates on average; the mean amount of carbon captured at commercial-scale projects was only 0.19 Mt per year. To reach even the modest quantities of carbon capture entailed in the Net-Zero America study would mean building 250 Gorgon-scale facilities in the United States every year between now and 2050.
The UNEP report outlines capturing between 15 and 24 Gigatonnes of carbon per year in 2100, and is careful not to posit carbon capture as a substitute for reducing actually existing emissions now. The world’s leading climate modelers have also just released a new set of scenarios that will be used to inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next assessment report, AR7. These new scenarios—the seventh Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP7—all entail considerable amounts of conventional, engineered, and novel carbon removal. The “low-to-negative” scenario—using lots of CDR and breakneck emissions cuts to limit warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius by 2100—would capture and inject around 1,750 Gt of carbon underground by 2150. Another scenario—where the world reaches net-zero by 2100, and is 2.8 degrees Celsius warmer—would entail storing 800 Gt of carbon underground along the same timeline.
Ravikumar was also skeptical of how such massive amounts of carbon could be captured and reliably stored. “Just knowing what we know, these are to me very concerning because you could do anything with a model. But can you actually put these wells in the ground?”
Like nearly every climate expert I speak with, Ravikumar is eager to see carbon capture and sequestration expand massively, as quickly as possible. Because the equipment and expertise required to sequester carbon is similar to the kinds needed for oil and gas extraction, he says, recent advancements in drilling techniques could be leveraged to put and keep carbon underground. His paper outlines a number of routes for working through the physical and engineering barriers to large-scale carbon capture and sequestration. But while the Department of Energy has been willing to support research into capturing carbon along fairly bipartisan lines, there’s comparatively little support for research into the realities of large-scale sequestration. Ravikumar and Daigle recommend a global database for detailed information from carbon management experiments and pilot studies “to disseminate learnings rapidly and avoid costly mistakes.”
As Daigle and Ravikumar make clear, the world doesn’t always operate like it does in climate models. If anything, those models’ typically bleak futures can be too optimistic. Among other things, they’re optimistic about how much carbon dioxide can realistically be removed from the air, and about the power of price signals to drive real-world change. Models’ bad-faith interpreters—polluting governments and corporations—leaned on marketing paltry investments in carbon capture and storage to maintain the illusion that the world could have virtually unlimited fossil fuel production and combustion while still keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. They’ve now mostly stopped pretending to care about climate change one way or another; that’s partly why news that surpassing 1.5°C of warming is now imminent and inevitable barely made headlines. Whenever climate politics enters the political mainstream again, let’s hope its latest iteration is more clear-eyed about what futures are still possible, and what’s going to get us there.
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