2023-05-13 04:42:31
Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) – Concentrations of carbon pollution from global warming in the air have reached their highest level in more than two million years – and the world has not yet reached the peak of fossil fuel emissions.
The crisis has been so urgent that scientists and governments are scrambling to find ways to remove some of the carbon pollution from the air, capturing what is still produced by power plants and industrial facilities.
These technologies have long been considered controversial, and they are increasingly playing a starring role in climate politics.
In its 2022 report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that “all available studies require at least some form of carbon dioxide removal to reach net zero” – where the world removes some amount of planet-warming pollution from the atmosphere Like it emits.
Even if emissions were to drop dramatically, the world would still need to remove 10 to 20 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Very few people claim that carbon capture and removal alone will solve climate change.
Others, however, fear that this is a reckless bet on technology that is too expensive, widely unproven, and too far from fully developed to provide a meaningful answer to the climate crisis.
They criticize these technologies as a dangerous distraction from policies to reduce fossil fuel use.
What is carbon capture technology?
Carbon capture is often used as a generic term for what are actually two groups of technologies – carbon capture and carbon removal. But there are important differences.
Carbon capture reduces the amount of carbon pollution that can go into the atmosphere by capturing it at the source of the pollution, and then storing or reusing it.
It works like this: Instead of sending carbon pollution (or “flue gas”) from burning fossil fuels up smokestacks and into the atmosphere, it is trapped and removed through a chemical process.
What is carbon removal technology?
The term carbon removal refers to a large number of different technologies aimed at removing and permanently sequestering carbon pollution already present in the atmosphere.
Trees and oceans are the natural carbon sinks – they remove more carbon from the atmosphere than they contribute to it.
Why are these technologies controversial?
Each form of carbon removal or sequestration comes with questions and potential problems.
There are concerns about the amount of land required for mass planting of trees or bioenergy with CCS, and the potential for this to collide with the land needed to grow food.
Live air capture is still very expensive, and despite big industry promises that costs will come down as the technology develops, there’s a long way to go to see if this is possible, Herzog said.
This technology also requires massive amounts of clean energy to operate, said Holly Buck, associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo, which increases demand as the world looks to electrify everything from cars to homes.
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