Month: September 2021

Call for Abstracts: 2nd International Conference on Negative CO2 Emissions

Deadline: 1. December 2021

“The objective of the Paris Agreement is to limit global warming to well below 2ºC, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5ºC. The carbon budget is the amount of carbon dioxide that we can emit while still limiting global temperature rise to a given level, for example 1.5ºC.The exact size of the carbon budget is uncertain and depends on many factors, including potential future warming of non-CO2 climate forcers. This said, the remaining budgets for limiting the warming to 1.5ºC or 2ºC have been estimated at about 420 and 1170 Gt of CO2 . With unchanged present emissions at about 40 Gt CO2/year these budgets would be exhausted in as few as 10 and 30 years, respectively. Most of the IPCC emission scenarios that meet a global two-degree target in 2100 overshoot the carbon budget at first and then remove the excess carbon with large negative emissions, typically on the order of 400‑800 Gt CO2 up to 2100.At the same time as negative emissions appear to be indispensable to meet adopted climate targets, the large future negative emissions assumed in climate models have been questioned and warnings have been raised about relying on very large and uncertain negative emissions in the future. With the future climate at stake, a deeper and fuller understanding of the various aspects of negative emissions is needed.”

LINK

Alcalde, Juan; et al. (2021): A criteria-driven approach to the CO2 storage site selection of East Mey for the acorn project in the North Sea

Alcalde, Juan; Heinemann, Niklas; James, Alan; Bond, Clare E.; Ghanbari, Saeed; Mackay, Eric J. et al. (2021): A criteria-driven approach to the CO2 storage site selection of East Mey for the acorn project in the North Sea. In Marine and Petroleum Geology 133, p. 105309. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpetgeo.2021.105309.

“Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is an essential tool in the fight against climate change. Any prospective storage site must meet various criteria that ensure the effectiveness, safety and economic viability of the storage operations. Finding the most suitable site for the storage of the captured CO2 is an essential part of the CCS chain of activity. This work addresses the site selection of a second site for the Acorn CCS project, a project designed to develop a scalable, full-chain CCS project in the North Sea (offshore northeast Scotland). This secondary site has been designed to serve as a backup and upscaling option for the Acorn Site, and has to satisfy pivotal project requirements such as low cost and high storage potential.”

LINK

Warszawski, Lila; et al. (2021): All options, not silver bullets, needed to limit global warming to 1.5 °C: a scenario appraisal

Warszawski, Lila; Kriegler, Elmar; Lenton, Timothy; Gaffner, Owen; Jacob, Daniela; Klingenfeld, Daniel et al. (2021): All options, not silver bullets, needed to limit global warming to 1.5 °C: a scenario appraisal. In Environmental Research Letters Volume 16 (6).

“Climate science provides strong evidence of the necessity of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. The IPCC 1.5 °C special report (SR1.5) presents 414 emissions scenarios modelled for the report, of which around 50 are classified as ‘1.5 °C scenarios’, with no or low temperature overshoot. These emission scenarios differ in their reliance on individual mitigation levers, including reduction of global energy demand, decarbonisation of energy production, development of land-management systems, and the pace and scale of deploying carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. The reliance of 1.5 °C scenarios on these levers needs to be critically assessed in light of the potentials of the relevant technologies and roll-out plans. We use a set of five parameters to bundle and characterise the mitigation levers employed in the SR1.5 1.5 °C scenarios. For each of these levers, we draw on the literature to define ‘medium’ and ‘high’ upper bounds that delineate between their ‘reasonable’, ‘challenging’ and ‘speculative’ use by mid century. We do not find any 1.5 °C scenarios that stay within all medium upper bounds on the five mitigation levers. Scenarios most frequently ‘over use’ CDR with geological storage as a mitigation lever, whilst reductions of energy demand and carbon intensity of energy production are ‘over used’ less frequently. If we allow mitigation levers to be employed up to our high upper bounds, we are left with 22 of the SR1.5 1.5 °C scenarios with no or low overshoot. The scenarios that fulfil these criteria are characterised by greater coverage of the available mitigation levers than those scenarios that exceed at least one of the high upper bounds. When excluding the two scenarios that exceed the SR1.5 carbon budget for limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, this subset of 1.5 °C scenarios shows a range of 15–22 Gt CO2 (16–22 Gt CO2 interquartile range) for emissions in 2030. For the year of reaching net zero CO2 emissions the range is 2039–2061 (2049–2057 interquartile range).”

LINK