Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
4/18/2014
A new report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released this week includes carbon capture and sequestration among the technologies that could play a significant role in helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and emphasizes that a move toward a low-carbon future could have less of an economic impact than previously concerned. The report lays out roughly 900 mitigation scenarios aimed at avoiding a two degree Celsius increase in the world’s temperature. The scenarios focus not only on avoiding the two degree limit, but also apply a consideration to the economy in analyzing various pathways and their benefits and risks. “Under the absence or limited availability of technologies, mitigation costs can increase substantially depending on the technology considered. Delaying additional mitigation further increases mitigation costs in the medium to long term,” the report’s executive summary states. “Many models could not achieve atmospheric concentration levels of about 450 ppm CO2eq by 2100 if additional mitigation is considerably delayed or under limited availability of key technologies, such as bioenergy, CCS and their combination (BECCS).”
Concerning CCS, the report says that the technology needs to be incentivized through either regulation or becoming more cost-competitive for wide deployment. “CCS power plants could be seen in the market if this is incentivized by regulation and/or if they become competitive with their unabated counterparts, if the additional investment and operational costs, caused in part by efficiency reductions, are compensated by sufficiently high carbon prices (or direct financial support),” the report’s executive summary states.
The summary says, “For the large-scale future deployment of CCS, well-defined regulations concerning short- and long-term responsibilities for storage are needed as well as economic incentives. Barriers to large-scale deployment of CCS technologies include concerns about the operational safety and long-term integrity of CO2 storage as well as transport risks. There is, however, a growing body of literature on how to ensure the integrity of CO2 wells, on the potential consequences of a pressure build-up within a geologic formation caused by CO2 storage (such as induced seismicity), and on the potential human health and environmental impacts from CO2 that migrates out of the primary injection zone.”
CCS Supporters Say Report Will Help Aid Development
CCS supporters have welcomed the report, saying the importance it gives to CCS and other technologies, as well as the implication that the cost of such actions would not be as destructive as some have assumed, will raise support of the technology in the larger climate change community. “The Global CCS Institute considers the release of the IPCC’s Working Group III report on mitigation as both a timely and very welcome contribution to the international climate change negotiations and supporting national policy developments for the deployment of mitigation technologies such as CCS,” Victor Der of the Global CCS Institute said in a written response to GHG Monitor. “CCS is a key technology for delivering the deep emissions reductions required to keep global temperatures below the internationally agreed goal of 2°C. Around the world, industrial processes for sustainable biomass production and energy conversion including co-firing and gasification are well advanced. Bio-CCS couples these processes with conventional CCS to achieve negative emissions. …. While the technologies are available, their development needs to be accelerated via strong policy action that ensures CCS is not disadvantaged compared to other low-carbon technologies.”
Patrick Falwell, Solutions Fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions said, “I think it underscores the importance of CCS to climate mitigation policy. I think it pretty much confirmed the findings of others that CCS is a very important technology for meeting climate objectives both before 2050 and for the rest of the century.” He also stressed the importance of a quick response to the findings of the report. “One thing that the report did highlight was the need to invest in CCS in the next decade or two.”
