Carbon capture must quadruple by 2050 to meet climate targets: report June 4, 2024

Climeworks sucks carbon dioxide from the air and stores it underground in Iceland (Halldor KOLBEINS)

By AFP - Agence France Presse

Carbon capture must quadruple by 2050 to meet climate targets: report

By 2050, humanity will have to remove four times more CO2 from the air than today to limit global warming below the crucial two degrees Celsius target, researchers said on Tuesday.

However, the massive expansion of CO2-absorbing forests - 99% of current carbon removal - could claim the land needed to grow food and biofuels, while it remains highly uncertain whether new technologies to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere can be scaled up fast enough, they warned in a major report.

Considering the various emission reduction scenarios, between seven and nine billion tons of CO2 should be captured from the atmosphere by 2050, according to the second edition of the Oxford University report on the subject.

The first edition of The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal reported that two billion tons were being removed mainly through reforestation, compared to the 40 billion tons emitted worldwide in 2023.

“In addition to rapidly reducing emissions”, which remains the “most important mitigation strategy”, removing CO2 from the atmosphere “is also necessary” to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, said more than 50 researchers.

Some of the scientists are also part of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has recognized the need for carbon capture, but has given it a limited role in its scenarios for achieving “carbon neutrality”.

CO2 elimination has recently “experienced rapid growth in research, public awareness, and start-up companies,” the report said.

“However, there are now signs of a slowdown” due to politics and a lack of public funding, the experts said.

They called on governments to create policies that boost the development of the sector.

According to the report, the carbon capture market has grown thanks to corporate demand for carbon credits - a contested tool that allows companies to offset their emissions by financing carbon reduction projects.

Carbon capture start-up Climeworks, which has an extensive underground storage facility in Iceland, is among those benefiting from the demand.

Its two plants currently capture and store 10,000 tons of CO2 a year with funding from private financiers and the sale of carbon credits.

To reach one million tons, Climeworks said it will need several billion euros (dollars), just like other start-ups - but the report warned that such funding is highly uncertain at this stage.

So far, only the United States has announced a plan, worth $3.5 billion, dedicated specifically to carbon capture.

- Environmental risks

The Center for Environmental Law (CIEL) said that the report “highlights a worrying trend in which carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is increasingly being presented as a solution to climate change”.

“This focus on carbon removal technologies represents a dangerous distraction from what is urgently needed to tackle the climate crisis: a complete, rapid, fair, and financed phase-out of all fossil fuels,” said CIEL expert Lili Fuhr.

Removing the CO2 already present in the atmosphere can be done through nature-based actions, such as planting forests, and also through new technologies that store carbon underground or in reused materials, but this only represents less than 0.1% of what is currently removed.

Technological removal methods include direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS), biomass post-combustion capture (BECCS), converting biomass into bio-coal, or spraying crushed rocks that absorb carbon on land or at sea.

CIEL said that some of these techniques, such as DACCS, “pose immense risks to ecosystems and communities”.

Acknowledging the risks, the authors of Tuesday's report noted that some “methods present high environmental and ecosystem risks, while others have the potential to generate co-benefits”.

They acknowledged that conventional carbon dioxide removal, “if poorly executed”, could pose risks to “biodiversity and food security”.

While calling for the rapid development of carbon capture technologies, the report states that this should not divert attention from efforts to reduce emissions.

“Failure to strongly reduce emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation will put the Paris temperature target out of reach, even if we have strong action on carbon removal,” said one of the report's authors, William Lamb, in his presentation.

Mathilde DUMAZET

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