Don’t bet on carbon removals alone, EU climate scientists warn

The promise of future technological fixes could deter urgent action to immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions, the chair of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC) Ottmar Edenhofer has warned.

As the climate emergency grows ever more acute, and emissions reduction targets agreed in Paris a decade ago slip out of reach, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is back on the policy agenda in Brussels.

“We recommend a progressive integration of permanent removals in the [emissions trading system] ETS,” Edenhofer said while briefing reporters ahead of the publication of a weighty report into the potential and risks of carbon removals in EU climate action.

The ETS, the EU’s central climate policy tool, where companies must buy allowances for every tonne of carbon dioxide they pump into the atmosphere, has been credited with driving a switch from coal-fired to renewable electricity generation.

If removals were integrated into the cap-and-trade scheme, polluters could theoretically reduce this bill by investing in CCS.

But including removals – which could also involve other offsetting strategies such as tree planting – should only be done under very strict conditions. “And the first condition is this is only acceptable when we can prevent mitigation deterrence,” Edenhofer said.

The board’s report recommends separate targets for natural and technological carbon removal methods, with strict certification and monitoring.

“Once a robust certification framework is in place, integrating permanent removals into the EU Emissions Trading System will help balance reductions and removals in a cost-effective way,” Edenhofer said.

Carbon Management Strategy

CCS involves sequestering carbon dioxide, for example from factory chimneys, then purifying, compressing and transporting it to permanent storage sites, typically in depleted gas fields offshore.

Critics argue that after more than two decades of development – largely by the petroleum industry, with substantial public funding – this energy-intensive process has yet to be proven at anything like the scale needed to make a meaningful contribution to arresting global temperature rise.

Still, the European Commission published a year ago an Industrial Carbon Management Strategy that envisages a multi-billion-euro market-based system to capture and transport huge volumes of CO2 around Europe for use by industry or permanent storage.

The EU executive estimates that Europe must be locking away 280 million tonnes annually by 2040, rising a decade later to 450 MT (about a sixth of the EU’s total emissions today), if it is to reach its target of net-zero emissions by mid-century.

Let the market decide

Edenhofer suggested that the market could be allowed to test the credibility of expansive claims of the potential to scale up and bring down the cost of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies.

Another climate action policy suggested in the advisory panel’s report is ‘extended emitter responsibility’ – that is, making polluters pay for the removal from the atmosphere of any CO2 they produce.

Oil and gas firms could be allowed to enter into a contract associated with a future commitment to carbon removals, posting collateral with a secure intermediary that would only be paid back if the removal is successfully delivered, Edenhofer suggested while discussing various concepts explored by the ESABCC.

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“Such a contract would be an important proof of concept,” he said. “[If] this contract would not be accepted in the market, this would reveal that most of the cost reduction expectations are probably too optimistic.”

“And this would also reveal some information about the realistic expectations about the future costs,” he said.

Before any of that, petroleum producers face a concrete test of their commitment to CCS in 2030, by which date they are legally required to put in place storage facilities capable of absorbing 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year.

For comparison, by far the largest and most advanced CCS project in Europe to date, outside the EU in petroleum-rich Norway, was nearly a decade in development and has an estimated initial injection capacity of just 1.5 MT.

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The ESABCC report on carbon removals follows another last month in which the advisory board called for urgent action and an end to fossil fuel subsidies to prevent the 2030 target of a 55% emissions cut from slipping out of reach.