To keep the rise in global average temperature to 1.5°C over the preindustrial baseline, humanity must stabilize the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at around 350 parts per million. Unfortunately, this year, it reached 410 ppm meaning there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere. Humanity has surpassed the safe point and is now in the red zone.
What this ultimately means is that it’s too late to convert all electricity and transportation sources to renewable power. We now have to pull the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere, as well. The fact that carbon emissions are still rising – with hundreds of gigatonnes about to be pumped into the atmosphere from existing fossil fuel infrastructure – means that carbon capture is a necessity.
Practically every model used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows it’s possible to reach a safe climate by burying gigatonnes of CO2. The problem is, it is costly. However, there are ways of taking the captured CO2 and using it as an ingredient for many things. The process is called carbon dioxide sequestering.
A new international study led by UCLA and Oxford University analyzed the potential of carbon sequestering. Their findings show how a variety of commercial uses for CO2 could see up to 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere every year. The research has been published in Nature.
The researchers examined ten separate industrial applications for CO2, such as concrete, synthetic fuels, and chemicals, products from microalgae, forestry, enhanced weathering, and biochar. Every single method (individually) could capture an average of 0.5 gigatonnes. A high-end scenario could see double that. In 2018, 37 gigatonnes of CO2 were emitted worldwide. Sequestering ten gigatonnes is not even enough, but it’s better than nothing.
Cameron Hepburn, director of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and Environment and one of the lead authors of the work, said:
Greenhouse gas removal is essential to achieve net-zero carbon emissions and stabilize the climate. We haven’t reduced our emissions fast enough, so now we also need to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Governments and corporations are moving on this, but not quickly enough. The promise of carbon dioxide utilization is that it could act as an incentive for carbon dioxide removal and could reduce emissions by displacing fossil fuels.
To make an impact, many different techniques will have to be deployed simultaneously. No one solution alone will be able to remove the requisite levels of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Study co-author Emily Carter, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, as well as the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost, said:
I would start by incentivizing the most obvious solutions – most of which already exist – that can act at the gigatonne scale in agriculture, forestry, and construction. At the same time, I would aggressively invest in R&D across academia, industry and government labs – much more so than is being done in the US, especially compared to China – in higher-tech solutions to capture and convert carbon dioxide to useful products that can be developed alongside solutions that already exist in agriculture, forestry and construction.
The bottom line is humanity needs to use more CO2 and emit less of it. Carbon dioxide is a useful feedstock, a necessary input to various industrial processes, from plastic to concrete. So why not pull it out of the air rather than taking it out of the ground?
