If carbon capture and storage technology is embraced, significant amounts of “unburnable carbon” would become burnable, according to a new report by the Imperial College London’s Sustainable Gas Institute. It is widely accepted that to hold global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, some known fossil fuel resources will have to remain unused. Unsurprisingly, less of those resources would need to stay in the ground in a 2-degree world when CCS is used. According to the paper, in a 2-degree future without CCS, 26 percent of global fossil fuel reserves are consumed by 2050. This total increases to 37 percent when CCS is available.
The gap widens as time goes on, the report says. “[B]y 2100, the scenarios without CCS have only consumed slightly more fossil fuel reserves (33%), whereas scenarios with CCS available end up consuming 65% of reserves. This … demonstrates the significance of CCS in enabling access to fossil fuel reserves post 2050,” the report says.
The researchers offered three main suggestions to bring CCS to the maturity level needed for the sustained use of fossil fuels:
- Move forward with demonstration of large-scale CCS in the power and industry sectors, and establish what conditions will enable the technology to become mainstream;
- Invest in research to establish the trade-off between CCS cost and maximum capture rate achievable, including further development of capture engineering, with a view to achieving a lifetime capture of greater than 95% of emissions produced; and
- Ensure any jurisdiction considering large-scale deployment of CO2 storage perform regional dynamic assessments of the geo-storage resource and research, development, and demonstration on increasing storage efficiency (e.g., through brine extraction for pressure management).
