At the current rate of deployment, 700 million tonnes of CO₂ storage capacity will be added by 2050 – 10% of what is required.Ĭountries would have to massively ramp up investment to be compliant with the Paris agreement's target of limiting global warming to 1.5☌. In new research, myself and environmental engineer Joe Lane at Princeton University in the US argued that, regardless of the method, leaving decisions about where to store carbon to commercial entities would mean avoiding an important moral dilemma.įunding for carbon capture and storage is insufficient. Other methods capture carbon directly from the air, either by using chemical reactions that bind the carbon using lots of energy or by growing carbon-hungry plants which can be burned for energy and the resulting emissions subsequently captured.
Some involve absorbing emissions immediately after burning fossil fuels in chimneys and smokestacks where the CO₂ is highly concentrated. The technology to capture carbon is in development, but one burning question remains: where on Earth should we store all that carbon?ĭifferent methods of carbon capture will take place at different sites. Unabated coal refers to when power stations or factories burn coal without capturing and storing the carbon dioxide (CO₂) generated.īecause the world has made such little progress in eliminating coal, oil and fossil gas, climate modellers foresee some use of carbon capture and storage as necessary to reach zero emissions in enough time to avert catastrophic warming.
The recent Glasgow climate pact committed 197 countries to “phas down unabated coal”.