It is still far too expensive to be more than just demonstration projects, now and for another decade minimum.
And as with all such conversations the promoters never, ever, speak of degrees of warming avoided. If interested see after the jump.
From Dialogue Earth, June 10:
More clarity needed on CO2 removal in national climate action plans, finds Oxford University report
A nascent industry removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in trees, rocks and the ocean will need to quadruple in size by 2050 if the world is to keep temperature rise to within the internationally agreed threshold of 1.5C, a new report has found.
“Carbon dioxide removal” is defined by the UN’s climate science body, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), as human activity that captures CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it for decades to millennia in geological, land or ocean reservoirs, or in products.
Around two billion tonnes of carbon are currently removed in this way each year, mostly using conventional methods such as afforestation and reforestation, wetland restoration and soil improvement.
However, an industry in more novel techniques has seen rapid growth in recent years. Such methods include: storing carbon in products like construction materials or “biochar”, a carbon-rich material produced by heating biomass in an oxygen-limited environment; enhanced rock weathering, which involves spreading finely ground silicate rock onto surfaces to speed up chemical reactions between rocks, water, and air; and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), where carbon is separated from the air using chemical processes and deposited underground.
Last month, the world’s largest commercial DACCS plant, dubbed Mammoth, began operating in Iceland. It will draw down 36,000 tonnes of CO2 from the air every year and store it permanently underground, says the company behind it, Climeworks. The company is planning to build “multiple megaton hubs” in the US, meaning several facilities that can remove a million or more tonnes of CO2 per year.
Today such novel methods remove just 1.3 million tonnes of carbon a year, less than 0.1% of total carbon removals, with conventional methods responsible for the remaining 99.9%, the analysis found. But the researchers behind the report are optimistic that both novel and conventional methods can be scaled up to reach the estimated required level of 7-9 billion tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050.
Taken together, the carbon removal capacity proposed by companies globally would be sufficient to reach this, the authors found. However, they did not assess the likelihood of individual plans or announcements coming to fruition.
Diverse methodsThe report, which was led by academics at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, but also involved more than 50 international experts, stresses that politicians, policymakers and business leaders should still be focussing on reducing emissions as the primary way to achieve net zero.But they argue that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will also be needed to address climate change. CDR is advocated by the IPCC, which cites its potential to reduce emissions in the near term, to counterbalance unavoidable emissions in the medium term, and to achieve net-negative emissions in the longer term....
....MUCH MORE
From the outro of "Reminder of A Reminder of What Net Zero Means":
As always, the correct question to ask of each and every policy is how many degrees C will this proposal reduce the temperature. You don't want the airy-fairy answer in tons of CO₂ or number of automobile-equivalents, you want degrees.
The reason for this is: you have to do comparisons to judge the effectiveness of policy proposals and to do that you have to use the the tools of science (maths).
As we've said over the years - this version is from 2019 but there are many others:
In the last years of the last century there was an international agreement on global warming policy called the Kyoto Protocol. It was a pretty big deal.
It was going to be expensive for the developed economies but worth it.
You heard of it right? It was in all the papers.
And do you recall how much the Kyoto Protocol would cool the planet?
Of course not.
The U.N. and the NGO's and Enron* and the consultants and everybody involved elided right past that number.
The answer was (no, not 42), the answer to the question of how much would the Kyoto Protocol cool the earth was 0.07 degrees. But that's 0.07°C, which is more cooling than if it had been 0.07°F.
The answer was not from me, it's the analysis of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research....****
*The first step is to get honest.
Like this guy, Enron's top lobbyist, John Palmisano, senior director for environmental policy and compliance who emailed from Kyoto:
If implemented [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the [electricity] and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States…. The endorsement of emissions trading was another victory for us…. This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!It was time to turn deeds into dollars, he added:
Enron now has excellent credentials with many ‘green’ interests including Greenpeace, WWF [World Wildlife Fund], NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council], GermanWatch, The US Climate Action Network, the European Climate Action Network, Ozone Action, WRI [World Resources Institute], and Worldwatch [Institute],” reported Palmisano. “This position should be increasingly cultivated and capitalized on (monetized).As gentle reader has surmised, we've been following this stuff for a long, long time.
....This has helped form my personal belief that carbon trading is not going to lower world temperature by even a half-a-degree.Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated that Kyoto would result in a reduction from baseline of 0.06°C to 0.21°C . (under one Kyoto scenario 0.06 to 0.11°C, under another 0.11 to 0.21)....Here's the U.S. NCAR 2006 estimate of Kyoto's effects.
For example, in an October 1998 article in Nature, Martin Parry (Co-chair of the IPCC's Working Group II) said the effect of the Kyoto Protocol (and it's associated carbon trading, CDM etc. [articles 6,12 and 17 of the protocol]) would be a reduction of –0.05°C by the year 2050.
