Pro CSS
By Eivind Hoff, head of the Brussels office of the Oslo-based Bellona Foundation.
In 2050, three billion more people than today will inhabit the earth, while at the same time a large section of humanity will need greater access to energy in order to escape poverty. We must therefore do whatever is possible to reduce emissions. Eventually, we will have to become “CO2 negative” by capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and channelling it back underground.
80 per cent of our present energy consumption comes from fossil fuels. No fossil fuel causes as much pollution as coal. Coal is easy to come by, especially for the developing countries that, over the next decades, will increase their energy consumption the most. We will therefore have to find ways of how to continue burning fossil fuels for a certain time without causing emissions. It is possible – with the help of carbon capture and storage (CCS).
CCS involves storing CO2 more than 800 metres underground. Only there, pressure is high enough to make CO2 act as if it were a fluid, thus making it less volatile. Possible storage locations are former oil and gas wells, yet the potentially most sizable storage facilities are in porous formations – the so-called saline aquifers. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) most cautious estimate is that there is a global storage capacity of around 1,700 gigatons; worldwide there are about 30 gigatons of CO2 emissions.
CO2 is already being successfully captured from flue gas. Large quantities of the captured CO2 are then conveyed and stored for many years underground. So far, this process has not been applied to conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants, for which CCS could be a crucial intermediary step on the way into a renewables-only future. Yet, it is to be expected that by 2050 CCS will be able to reduce global CO2 emissions by a third.
The potential of CCS goes beyond cleaning fossil fuels. Should we be able to develop sustainable biomass – biomass that does not run counter to food production, nor depletes nature (e.g., by cultivating marine algae in the Sahara desert) – then CCS would enable us to build biomass power plants. As long as they grow, trees and plants extract CO2 from the air. Thereby, CO2 is captured from the air and stored where carbon originates – underneath the earth.
In addition, CCS offers the only way to reduce CO2 emissions from industry, e.g. from steel and cement factories, which will be needed to build our future solar and wind power plants. Even steel and cement factories that operate exclusively with renewable energies will, in the process of manufacturing, release large quantities of CO2 that can only be disposed of through CCS.
Of course, the future of carbon capture and storage is unknown; the technology will first have to be used on a grand scale. We are convinced by this technology because all emission projections that postulate a maximum ceiling of two degrees of global warming assume the use of CCS. We are also convinced because experience thus far has shown that CCS works and is safe. It is high time to get down to business.
Green New Deal / Great Transformation
- Dossier Conference "The Great Transformation" (english/german)
- Böll.Thema: Green New Deal (english)
- Böll.Thema: Going green (english)
- Böll.Thema: Going green (german)
