This 12 months’s local weather summit in Dubai (COP28) is focussing closely on carbon seize and storage (CCS).
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who’s each the COP president and boss of United Arab Emirates oil big ADNOC, has been selling carbon seize as a local weather answer.
And main oil and gas-producing nations are anticipated to unveil shared carbon storage objectives.
”If we’re critical about curbing industrial emissions,” Al Jaber stated earlier this 12 months when selling the know-how, ”we have to get critical about carbon seize applied sciences.”
The know-how has been closely criticised, nevertheless. Worldwide Vitality Company chief Fatih Birol delivered a scathing evaluation of CCS heavy pathways as ”pure fantasy” final week.
And new analysis revealed on Monday (4 December) by Oxford College’s Smith Faculty of Enterprise and the Setting discovered that heavy reliance on CCS to achieve net-zero targets could be ”vastly economically damaging”, costing at the very least $30 trillion [€27 trillion] greater than decarbonisation primarily based on renewable power would.
The Oxford researchers made estimates for 2 totally different units of pathways to web zero in 2050 — one which makes use of CCS to mitigate about one-tenth of right this moment’s emissions and the opposite that makes use of it to mitigate about half of right this moment’s emissions.
Though the know-how nonetheless wants scaling as much as meet the low-pathway calls for, the researchers say it ought to solely be used for specific-use circumstances, restricted to the manufacturing of hard-to abate sectors — reminiscent of cement.
Utilizing CCS to facilitate ongoing fossil-fuel burning as Saudi Arabia and the UAE have proposed would ”be extremely economically damaging,” the report notes, including that $30 trillion in extra price by 2050 is nearly actually an underestimate of the true price distinction.
CCS know-how has been round because the Seventies and is used primarily for extracting extra oil. The explanations 80 p.c of all CCS tasks have failed thus far are each technological, and botched economics.
The associated fee for CCS has not declined anyplace near as a lot as photo voltaic and wind energy prices have. And at current no know-how has confirmed able to sequestering carbon to the extent wanted to stop much more world warming.
However requires restraint of over-relying on carbon seize are unlikely to search out help at this 12 months’s UN local weather summit.
CCS is key to the UAE’s ambitions to grow to be a significant hub for producing and buying and selling blue hydrogen and blue ammonia.
It’s totally different from the ’gray hydrogen’ at present utilized in industrial processes in that the ensuing CO2 is transferred and injected into the underground reservoirs in Al Reyadah, Abu Dhabi Nationwide Oil Firm (ADNOC)’s carbon seize and storage plant close to Abu Dhabi.
However latest analysis by International Witness reveals that in 2030 alone, when ADNOC says it can seize 10 million tonnes of carbon, the corporate may also produce 492 million tonnes, catching simply two p.c.
’Unabated code’ for CCS
In the meantime, Al Jaber lately instructed Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN particular envoy for local weather change in a testy change that there was ”no science” to indicate that phasing-out fossil gasoline burning will repair the local weather.
As an alternative, different leaders, together with EU local weather commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, have talked about constructing ”an power system freed from all unabated fossil fuels.”
The time period ”unabated” has grow to be a reference level in local weather negotiations because the local weather summit in Glasgow two years in the past and serves as a qualifier to recommend fossil gasoline burning could be made ’clear’ by CCS.
”Unabated can not grow to be a kind of loophole for nations to cover behind,” Tom Evans, a coverage advisor at power assume tank E3G, beforehand instructed EUobserver. ”CCS won’t be a significant know-how that can permit us to maintain polluting.”