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Companies that sponsor carbon capture3/15/2024 ![]() ![]() The IPCC sees CCS capturing as much as 60,000 million tonnes in 2100 (blue bar, below right), a scale 15 times that of the world’s current oil industry. ![]() It posits a minimum 200-fold increase in CCS capacity by 2030, and the IPCC scenarios see capture capacity grow to around 10,000 million tonnes per year in 2050 (below right) – somewhat higher than the IEA expectation. It sees capture rates needing to increase at a “remarkable” rate through to 2030 (chart, below left). The amount of carbon dioxide capture in CCS facilities also grows very rapidly in the most cost-effective IPCC scenarios that are consistent with a two degrees warming target. Capturing all that carbon, compressing it and injecting it underground uses some of the power that would otherwise have gone to the grid or factory requirements. There are challenges, too, in the energy overhead imposed by CCS facilities. Building a global CCS industry to match and then exceed the oil industry will be no small challenge. This far exceeds the scale of the world’s oil industry, which extracted 4,133 million tonnes of oil in 2013, according to BP data. And it should expand even further to 7,000 million tonnes in 2050 (goal 3).īy 2050 the IEA thinks we need a CCS industry capable of capturing 7,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year and storing it underground. That’s not too ambitious given the projects that are already underway and a further 34 in the planning stages.īut after 2020 the scale of the industry needs to grow rapidly, to capture at least 2,000 million tonnes in 2030 (goal 2 below), the IEA thinks. What scale does CCS need to reach if it to play its part in avoiding dangerous climate change? The International Energy Agency thinks that by 2020 CCS capacity needs to reach a fairly modest 30 operational projects, capturing over 50 million tonnes. So these 22 CCS projects – once they are up to speed – will be shaving 0.1 per cent off global emissions each year. Global emissions are due to reach 40,000 million tonnes this year, with nearly 16,000 million tonnes from coal alone. The Global CCS Institute says these 22 projects will be able to capture 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, once they are all operational. But it does raise interesting questions about the net climate impacts. This set-up allows companies to actually make money from capturing carbon rather than it just being a financial burden. Infographic by Rosamund Pearce for Carbon BriefĪnother surprising conclusion is that 16 of the schemes will pump the captured carbon dioxide underground to force more oil out of oil wells. Then there are ten projects at natural gas processing facilities. The remainder include nine industrial facilities manufacturing iron or processing tar sands, for instance. Only three of the 22 active global projects are power stations. Their progress has been rocky at best, despite a government pledge of £1 billion in funding. There are five planned CCS projects in the UK but none has reached the construction phase, let alone started operating. The US boasts 16 of the 22 operational or under construction schemes and the lion’s share of capture capacity, as the map above shows. We’ve plotted the location and size of the world’s CCS on this map. North America has the largest number of CCS projects by far. We take you around the world in 22 CCS projects that are operational or under construction according to the Global CCS Institute. So where in the world is CCS being developed, and how much carbon will be captured? So the opening of the world’s first major power station CCS project at Boundary Dam in Canada is being hailed as a historic milestone in efforts to tackle climate change.īoundary Dam is significant because it’s the first commercial scale power station to use the technology, even if CCS is fitted to just one of its generating units. Former UK chief scientist David King has called CCS “the only hope for mankind”. If the world is going to avoid dangerous warming then CCS is probably going to play a pretty important role. The executive director of the International Energy Agency Maria van der Hoeven says it is “essential”. That’s what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded earlier this year. Avoiding dangerous climate change is still possible but will cost more than twice as much if we don’t have plenty of carbon capture and storage (CCS). ![]()
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