To quote the article: "Actions that could stabilize climate as desired include the deliberate removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by human intervention — called here ‘negative emissions’. Along with afforestation, the production of sustainable bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is explicitly being put forth as an important mitigation option by the majority of integrated assessment model (IAM) scenarios aimed at keeping warming below 2 °C in the IPCC’s fifth assessment report (AR5)6. Indeed, in these scenarios, IAMs often foresee absorption of CO2 via BECCS up to (and in some cases exceeding) 1,000 Gt CO2 over the course of the century7, effectively doubling the available carbon quota. BECCS is the negative emissions technology most widely selected by IAMs to meet the requirements of temperature limits of 2 °C and below. It is based on assumed carbon-neutral bioenergy (that is, the same amount of CO2 is sequestered at steady state by biomass feedstock growth as is released during energy generation), combined with capture of CO2 produced by combustion and its subsequent storage in geological or ocean repositories. In other words, BECCS is a net transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere, through the biosphere, into geological layers, providing in addition a non-fossil fuel source of energy...." etc.
My comment: Great - let's again prematurely crown the winning technology and pin the success or failure of negative emissions entirely on BECCS, just as the singleminded pursuit of CCS has completely stalled point source CO2 mitigation. If conventional CCS is too costly and too risky for existing power plants, it will be for BE as well. Expensively making supercritical CO2 from dilute flue gas, putting it in the ground, and hoping it stays there is one of many ways to mitigate CO2, and in my opinion the least obvious. Given what is at stake, how about a broader and more inclusive initial advocacy of negative emissions technology? We can narrow down the focus as research identifies the highest capacity and most cost effective methods. For example why ask technologies that only work on <30% of the Earth surface area (and compete with existing food and fiber production) to do 100% of the CDR? Under the circumstances, do we really want to potentially bet the planet on BECCS (and CCS) to the exclusion of the (many) other ideas being discussed? Greg >________________________________ > From: Andrew Lockley <[email protected]> >To: geoengineering <[email protected]> >Sent: Monday, December 22, 2014 3:56 PM >Subject: [geo] Fuss, Sabine; et al. (2014): Betting on negative emissions > > > >Fuss, Sabine; et al. (2014): Betting on negative emissions >Attached -- >You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >"geoengineering" group. >To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >email to [email protected]. >To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
