Tag: negative emissions

Peer-reviewed Publications

Kirppu et al. (2025): District heating with negative emissions – Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage combined with Small Modular Reactors

Heidi Kirppu, Miika Räma, Esa Pursiheimo, Kati Koponen and Tomi J. Lindroos, IN: Carbon Capture Science and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccst.2025.100533

Achieving Paris Agreement targets for climate change mitigation requires an urgent shift away from fossil fuels. In addition, negative emissions by permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are required. Both targets require substantial amounts of carbon neutral electricity and heat production. While electricity can be produced and transferred over long distances, the heat production needs to be local. This study investigates an energy system integrating both carbon neutral heat production and carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Li et al. (2025): Innovative performance evaluation and process simulation of a 550 MW staged, pressurized oxy-biomass combustion power plant for negative carbon emissions

Xiangdong Li, Hui Lin, Guan Wang, Gaofeng Dai, Yongqiang Chen, Yong Luo, Bin Liu, Jiaye Zhang, Richard L. Axelbaum and Xuebin Wang, IN: Renewable Energy, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2025.124534

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technology is crucial for improving carbon capture efficiency but faces challenges due to high electricity costs. Staged, pressurized oxy-combustion addresses this by efficiently recovering latent heat from flue gas within the steam Rankine cycle, improving net plant efficiency in power plants. Integrating biomass with this technology holds promise for reducing fossil fuel consumption and achieving negative carbon emissions. However, the performance of staged pressurized oxy-biomass combustion (Bio-SPOC) has not been studied yet. This study used ASPEN Plus to analyze the performance of a 550 MW staged, pressurized oxy-biomass combustion power plant.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Lu et al. (2025): Earth system responses under a global 2 °C-target scenario aligned with China’s carbon neutrality pledge

Yixiong Lu, Lei Jin, Junting Zhong, Xiaoye Zhang, Yanwu Zhang, Fanghua Wu, Fang Zhang, Zhili Wang, Jie Zhang, Xiaoge Xin, Tongwen Wu, Deying Wang, Da Zhang, Tianpeng Wang and Wei Hua, IN: Environmental Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adfbfb

Achieving the Paris Agreement’s 2 °C target demands regionally tailored climate policies and proven negative emission strategies. This study uses a novel SSP2-com scenario that integrates updated emissions trajectories, China’s carbon neutrality pledge, and mid-to-late 21st century CDR deployment to assess Earth system responses.

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Media

Some nations want to remove more pollution than they produce. That will take giving nature a boost

by David Keyton on apnews.com, December 11, 2023

“As countries at the COP28 climate talks are wrangling over ways to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, a Danish-led group of countries has decided to set the ultimate goal: to remove more carbon dioxide, the main source of global warming, from the atmosphere than they emit. The Group of Negative Emitters was launched Sunday in Dubai by Denmark, Finland and Panama, and aims to reach that goal by slashing emissions, protecting and expanding forests, and investing in new technologies. Panama has already reached the goal with its vast forests that act as a huge carbon sink. Finland and Denmark hope to achieve this by 2035 and 2045, respectively.”

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Nature – Lei et al. (2023): Global iron and steel plant CO2 emissions and carbon-neutrality pathways

Tianyang Lei, Daoping Wang, Shijun Ma, Weichen Zhao, Can Cui, Jing Meng, Xiang Yu, Qiang Zhang, Shu Tao, Dabo Guan IN: Nature; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06486-7

The highly energy-intensive iron and steel industry contributed about 25% of global industrial CO2 emissions in 2019 and is therefore critical for climate-change mitigation. Here the authors develop a CO2 emissions inventory of 4,883 individual iron and steel plants along with their technical characteristics, including processing routes and operating details (status, age, operation-years etc.). They identify and match appropriate emission-removal or zero-emission technologies to specific possessing routes, or what the authors define thereafter as a techno-specific decarbonization road map for every plant.

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Almaraz et al. (2023): Model-based scenarios for achieving net negative emissions in the food system

Maya Almaraz, Benjamin Z. Houlton , Michael Clark, Iris Holzer, Yanqiu Zhou, Laura Rasmussen, Emily Moberg, Erin Manaigo, Benjamin S. Halpern, Courtney Scarborough, Xin Gen Lei, Melissa Ho, Edward Allison, Lindiwe Sibanda, Andrew Salter IN: PLOS Climate, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000181

Consumers, technology innovation, industry, and agricultural practices offer various degrees of opportunity to reduce emissions and remove CO2. However, a question remains as to whether food system transformation can achieve net negative emissions (i.e., where GHG sinks exceed sources sector wide) and what the capacity of the different levers may be. The authors use a global food system model to explore the influence of consumer choice, climate-smart agro-industrial technologies, and food waste reductions for achieving net negative emissions for the year 2050. 

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German News

Städtebau soll klimafreundlich werden

sueddeutsche.de, 12. September, 18:28 Uhr

“Nairobi (dpa) – Der Bausektor könnte einem Bericht zufolge bis 2050 weltweit klimaneutral werden. Möglich sei dies, wenn Material gespart, Baustoffe wie Beton und Stahl klimafreundlicher hergestellt und zudem mehr nachwachsende Rohstoffe genutzt würden. Das betont ein am Dienstag veröffentlichter Bericht des UN-Umweltprogramms (UNEP) und des Zentrums für Ökosysteme und Architektur (CEA) der US-Universität Yale.”

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Peer-reviewed Publications

Chimuka et al. (2023): Quantifying land carbon cycle feedbacks under negative CO2 emissions

V. Rachel Chimuka, Claude-Michel Nzotungicimpaye, Kirsten Zickfeld IN: Biogeosciences, 20, 12, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-20-2283-2023

This study investigates land carbon cycle feedbacks under positive and negative CO2 emissions using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity (EMIC) driven with an idealized scenario of symmetric atmospheric CO2 concentration increase (ramp-up) and decrease (ramp-down), run in three modes. The results show that the magnitudes of carbon cycle feedbacks are generally smaller in the atmospheric CO2 ramp-down phase than in the ramp-up phase, except for the ocean climate–carbon feedback, which is larger in the ramp-down phase.

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Scientific Theses

PhD-thesis: Action Levers towards Sustainable Wellbeing: Re-Thinking Negative Emissions, Sufficiency, Deliberative Democracy

Sascha Nick, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), https://doi.org/10.5075/epfl-thesis-10487

This thesis explores how some of our most pressing issues, especially climate, biodiversity, or inequality, could be effectively solved using “action levers”, coordinated action on multiple leverage points, like mindset (#2), system goal (#3), power to change system structure (#4), or rules (#5). Three action levers are identified, explored and partly tested: Negative Emissions, Sufficiency, Deliberative Democracy. If suitably governed, Negative Emissions could reverse their current effect of extending the fossil era and its power relations and, while limited to perhaps 10% of current emissions, significantly accelerate decarbonization – a beneficial case of the “tail wagging the dog”. 

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