What is carbon capture and storage?

These new technologies “will play an important role in meeting net zero targets, including as one of few solutions to tackle emissions from heavy industry and to remove carbon from the atmosphere”, the Paris-based intergovernmental organisation said.

CSS has also been backed by Robert Gross, professor of energy policy at Imperial College London and director of the UK Energy Research Centre. “We will need not just net zero but to start to remove CO2 from the air,” he told The Guardian.

“We cannot do one instead of the other, but we have reached the point where it is likely that humanity will need to do both to avoid dangerous climate change.”

False dawn

While interest in CCS is growing, some critics have claimed that “most schemes to capture and reuse carbon actually increase emissions”, New Scientist reported.

Research has found that carbon capture technologies typically “emit more carbon than they remove”, said the magazine, which suggested that such “projects, which have attracted billions of dollars in investment, won’t do much to achieve the Paris Agreement’s emission targets”.

Current efforts to roll out CCS are also “dwarfed by the size of the challenge” of combating emissions, said Sky News’ economics and data editor Ed Conway. The UK “is littered with pilot projects that fell by the wayside”, reported Conway, who questioned whether the technology can “fulfil its promise”. 

The Independent’s Cockburn pointed out that even the world’s largest “direct air-capture” machine, at Iceland’s Orca plant, “is capable of sucking up just 4,000 tonnes of CO2 a year – a tiny fraction of global emissions, which totalled 31.5 billion tonnes in 2020”.

All the same, many governments “plan to rely heavily on still-developing carbon capture technologies, or tree-planting over massive areas of land, in order to offset emissions”, Time reported. 

But the IPCC has repeatedly warned that “​​they should not be considered a substitute for cutting fossil fuel use”, the magazine added.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/environment/956334/what-is-carbon-capture