>Britain leads the world in efforts to extract carbon from the air as countries seek technology to slow climate change, experts have said.
>
>Machines that suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and power stations that capture emissions from burning trees could become the biggest growth industry for the UK. Scientists said Britain was a global frontrunner in CO2 removal technologies and was well placed because removed CO2 could be stored in old North Sea oilfields.
The energy company Drax hopes to build a “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (Beccs) plant near Selby, burning trees, grass and other biomass to generate electricity, then capturing the CO2 and piping it under the North Sea.
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>”There’s potentially a big growth industry story for the UK, because the world is probably going to need lots of this [CO2 removals]. The UK is thinking on the front foot about it,” said Steve Smith at Oxford University, whose international team publishes a study today that finds humanity is removing about two billion tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere. However, he said that 99.9 per cent of that was from tree-planting and managing soils, with new technologies accounting for only 0.1 per cent.
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>He said Britain also had the skilled workers, regulatory environment and infrastructure to do “really well” at deploying CO2 removal technologies.
>
>The UN’s climate science panel said last year that the world would need to increase the use of such technologies to meet climate change goals. The latest study found that meeting even the Paris agreement’s goal of holding global temperature rises below 2C would require today’s CO2 removal technologies to increase 1,300-fold by 2050.
>
>Jan Minx, at the Mercator Research Institute in Berlin, one of the study’s authors, said: “We need to aggressively develop and scale up CO2 removal.”
Separately, an investigation into one of the leading carbon offset standards found that 94 per cent of its offsets were unlikely to have delivered carbon reductions.
The analysis into Verra by The Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and the non-profit SourceMaterial concluded that many credits approved by the organisation and bought by companies including Disney, Gucci and Shell were in effect worthless. Verra disputed the conclusions and the methodology underpinning them.
Today’s report suggests that Drax’s favoured removal technology is the least popular with the public. An analysis of tweets by the researchers show that public sentiment towards 11 approaches has become more positive over the past decade, with the sole exception of Beccs. Ministers want to remove five million tonnes of CO2 from new technologies by 2030.
>
>**How to capture carbon**
>
>**Direct air capture and storage**
>
>Machines that use fans to suck in air and chemicals to capture and store CO2 have become the poster child of removal technologies. Greta Thunberg has visited facilities built by the Swiss company Climeworks, which opened Orca in Iceland, the world’s biggest direct air capture plant, in 2021.
>
>**Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage**
>
>Beccs is the latest technology for removing CO2, thanks to a plant in Illinois where plants capture CO2 as they grow, so capturing and storing the CO2 released when burning them. In theory this lowers atmospheric CO2 levels.
>
>**Biochar**
>
>Burn wood or other biomass at a high temperature without oxygen and you create biochar, a carbon-rich, charcoal-like material that can then be buried. Proponents argue it can also increase crop yields.
Adam Vaughan, Environment Editor
“Leading the world in efforts”, “could”, not much actually happening then, lots of dreaming going on.
Carbon capture doesn’t work at scale anywhere in the world due to high cost – it’s better and cheaper to simply create energy using renewables instead and to store it in batteries than to burn something and capture the carbon.
The only cost effective application for carbon capture is offshore gas which naturally contains CO2, then simply filtering it off and using it as an injection fluid to extract even more gas.
Sounds like a load of bollocks to me. I’m not eating ze bugs either.
Who ever figures out how to send it to space beyond the atmosphere without excessive costs will be forever remembered.
And yet the picture shows Climeworks, a Swiss company busy extracting CO2 in Iceland; rather than just talking about how it could be a front runner.
Why is this country all about saying “world beating” or that we could be a front runner rather than just quietly getting on with it?
How do we deal with the climate crisis?
Do we deindustrialize? Do we make sweeping changes like removing private transportation? Do we change how we consume our products or what we consume?
No? We’re just going to try to capture more greenhouse gasses than we’re emitting, with an experimental technology not working at any sort of significant scale?
Yep, we’re boned, pack it in folks. This is about as logical as desalination.
Carbon capture doesn’t work in practice, and third party analysis has shown that pretty much all attempts at is release more CO2 into the atmosphere than they capture.
8 comments
Article Text
>Britain leads the world in efforts to extract carbon from the air as countries seek technology to slow climate change, experts have said.
>
>Machines that suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and power stations that capture emissions from burning trees could become the biggest growth industry for the UK. Scientists said Britain was a global frontrunner in CO2 removal technologies and was well placed because removed CO2 could be stored in old North Sea oilfields.
The energy company Drax hopes to build a “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (Beccs) plant near Selby, burning trees, grass and other biomass to generate electricity, then capturing the CO2 and piping it under the North Sea.
>
>”There’s potentially a big growth industry story for the UK, because the world is probably going to need lots of this [CO2 removals]. The UK is thinking on the front foot about it,” said Steve Smith at Oxford University, whose international team publishes a study today that finds humanity is removing about two billion tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere. However, he said that 99.9 per cent of that was from tree-planting and managing soils, with new technologies accounting for only 0.1 per cent.
>
>He said Britain also had the skilled workers, regulatory environment and infrastructure to do “really well” at deploying CO2 removal technologies.
>
>The UN’s climate science panel said last year that the world would need to increase the use of such technologies to meet climate change goals. The latest study found that meeting even the Paris agreement’s goal of holding global temperature rises below 2C would require today’s CO2 removal technologies to increase 1,300-fold by 2050.
>
>Jan Minx, at the Mercator Research Institute in Berlin, one of the study’s authors, said: “We need to aggressively develop and scale up CO2 removal.”
Separately, an investigation into one of the leading carbon offset standards found that 94 per cent of its offsets were unlikely to have delivered carbon reductions.
The analysis into Verra by The Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and the non-profit SourceMaterial concluded that many credits approved by the organisation and bought by companies including Disney, Gucci and Shell were in effect worthless. Verra disputed the conclusions and the methodology underpinning them.
Today’s report suggests that Drax’s favoured removal technology is the least popular with the public. An analysis of tweets by the researchers show that public sentiment towards 11 approaches has become more positive over the past decade, with the sole exception of Beccs. Ministers want to remove five million tonnes of CO2 from new technologies by 2030.
>
>**How to capture carbon**
>
>**Direct air capture and storage**
>
>Machines that use fans to suck in air and chemicals to capture and store CO2 have become the poster child of removal technologies. Greta Thunberg has visited facilities built by the Swiss company Climeworks, which opened Orca in Iceland, the world’s biggest direct air capture plant, in 2021.
>
>**Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage**
>
>Beccs is the latest technology for removing CO2, thanks to a plant in Illinois where plants capture CO2 as they grow, so capturing and storing the CO2 released when burning them. In theory this lowers atmospheric CO2 levels.
>
>**Biochar**
>
>Burn wood or other biomass at a high temperature without oxygen and you create biochar, a carbon-rich, charcoal-like material that can then be buried. Proponents argue it can also increase crop yields.
Adam Vaughan, Environment Editor
“Leading the world in efforts”, “could”, not much actually happening then, lots of dreaming going on.
Carbon capture doesn’t work at scale anywhere in the world due to high cost – it’s better and cheaper to simply create energy using renewables instead and to store it in batteries than to burn something and capture the carbon.
The only cost effective application for carbon capture is offshore gas which naturally contains CO2, then simply filtering it off and using it as an injection fluid to extract even more gas.
Sounds like a load of bollocks to me. I’m not eating ze bugs either.
Who ever figures out how to send it to space beyond the atmosphere without excessive costs will be forever remembered.
And yet the picture shows Climeworks, a Swiss company busy extracting CO2 in Iceland; rather than just talking about how it could be a front runner.
Why is this country all about saying “world beating” or that we could be a front runner rather than just quietly getting on with it?
How do we deal with the climate crisis?
Do we deindustrialize? Do we make sweeping changes like removing private transportation? Do we change how we consume our products or what we consume?
No? We’re just going to try to capture more greenhouse gasses than we’re emitting, with an experimental technology not working at any sort of significant scale?
Yep, we’re boned, pack it in folks. This is about as logical as desalination.
Carbon capture doesn’t work in practice, and third party analysis has shown that pretty much all attempts at is release more CO2 into the atmosphere than they capture.
Like paying indulgences for sins.