Climate Intervention Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration (2015) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
5 Way Forward
5 Way Forward
Pages 103-112
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From page 103... ...
Climate science has revealed that there are substantial risks to society posed by the large emissions of GHGs that have been and are continuing to be emitted into the atmosphere. These risks include not just warming, but threats from sea level rise, rapid ecosystem changes, ocean acidification, and extreme weather events (IPCC, 2013a,b, 2014a; NCA, 2014)
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From page 104... ...
. Furthermore, since climate stabilization requires GHG emissions to be essentially zero, it is almost inevitable that some CDR will be needed in the long term to deal with residual emissions by nonparticipatory nations, or by sectors for which fossil fuel substitutes prove difficult to implement (e.g., aviation)
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From page 105... ...
has the theoretical potential to effectively sequester substantial quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere provided nonfossil sources are used to power the separation of CO2 from air, but it is unclear that this approach will be cost effective in the near term. Last, the environmental and sociopolitical risks of deploying ocean iron fertilization at a large scale would likely outweigh the potential benefits.
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From page 106... ...
and thus could potentially provide substantial environmental benefit to neutralizing some of the acidification of the ocean caused by excess anthropogenic CO2. There may be other CDR approaches that may be unable to scale up to match current or future CO2 emissions, but they may nevertheless be cost effective at modest scale and/or provide valuable co-benefits.
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From page 107... ...
Overall, the committee concludes that there would be great value in the United States pursuing • An expanded program of research and field studies to assess and improve strategies for performing and monitoring geologic sequestration; • The exploration of strategies such as accelerated mineral weathering that enhance ocean uptake of carbon dioxide and/or increase the ocean's ability to store carbon without causing adverse effects (ocean iron fertilization does not appear to be a promising strategy in this regard) ; • Continued research on combining biomass energy with carbon dioxide cap ture and sequestration, including exploration of approaches that do not form and sequester concentrated CO2; and 107
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From page 108... ...
. Thirteen departments and agencies participate in USGCRP, and USGCRP agencies interact with a wide variety of groups around the world including international, national, state, tribal, and local governments, businesses, professional and other nonprofit organizations, the scientific community, and the public.
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From page 109... ...
• Many of the strategies discussed for carbon dioxide removal provide viable and reasonably low-risk approaches to reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Because the natural rate of carbon dioxide removal is cur rently being overwhelmed by anthropogenic emissions, additional CDR would need to be sustained at large scales over very long periods of time to have a significant effect on carbon dioxide concentrations and the associated risks of climate change.
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From page 110... ...
Ocean alkalinization and/or ocean iron fertilization would need to be applied over vast regions to have a chance at making a climatically detectable difference, and thus both ideas potentially involve intervening in Earth system processes, for better or worse, at a massive scale. The idea of interfering in Earth system properties at large scale is also common to albedo modification proposals, such as putting particles in the stratosphere.
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From page 111... ...
Some of these approaches may never be cost effective, creating challenges to the development of a research portfolio that does not negatively affect research into mitigation opportunities that may be less expensive. Overall, there is much to be gained in pursing multiple parts of a portfolio of climate change strategies including research on various CDR techniques.
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