The adoption of the Paris climate change agreement by member states to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signaled a new era for development of carbon capture and storage, according to Julio Friedmann, former principal deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy.
“It is easy to dismiss [the Paris Agreement]. I think dismissing this happens at your risk. One-hundred-ninety-seven parties, mostly countries, but also groups like the European Union and so forth, have agreed to take action. That represents over 99 percent of emissions and over 99 percent of the countries in the world,” Friedmann said Wednesday in a keynote address at the Exchange Monitor’s annual Carbon Capture, Utilization, & Storage Conference in Tysons, Va.
The Paris Agreement was adopted in December during the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the UNFCCC. Replacing the Kyoto Protocol, it is the world’s first universal international accord to address climate change, requiring action from developed and developing nations alike.
Several important developments for CCS came out of Paris. First, throughout the two-week negotiations process, parties ramped up the ambition of the agreement, which initially had a stated goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. However, due largely to a push from a coalition of small island nations, the final agreement included language setting the goal to “well below” 2 degrees with an aim to reach a 1.5-degree pathway.
Even when the stated goal was simply 2 degrees, it was widely agreed that that goal was unreachable without CCS. The new goal has upped the ante: “1.5 degrees is basically impossible, that actually means that carbon capture and storage is even more important,” Friedmann said, adding that “Because of the 1.5 target, negative emissions is now a trending topic, and it turns out … when you get into the topic of negative emissions, carbon capture and storage ends up being a pretty important component of that.”
Negative emissions technologies, such as direct air carbon capture, are extremely experimental and will draw heavily from CCS practices. However, Friedmann, who now serves as senior adviser for Energy Innovation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said these new technologies do not have the kind of support they really need.
“It turns out there’s no national R&D program on this anywhere in the world,” he said. “At the national labs, we’ve taken this quite seriously. A number of us have said, since we know we’re going to need this, and there isn’t a national program, we should probably start working on it anyways, and I know that there are a number of national labs out there who have started work on this.”
Another important announcement out of Paris was the formation of Mission Innovation, a coalition of 20 nations, including the United States, pledging to double their clean energy investment. For the U.S., that would equate to an additional $4.8 billion annually. “In the United States that [funding] is clearly all of the above, that includes CCS explicitly, overtly. The [Secretary of Energy] has said so and others have thought that’s a pretty good idea,” Friedmann said.
