Can Carbon Capture Reverse Climate Change?
Right now, there is a fevered buzz around carbon capture, which is only set to intensify over the coming years. Oil billionaires eye this technology as a route to greenwashing their way to vast mountains of future profits, while climate reports from the likes of the IPCC have found that this technology is crucial to meeting net-zero by 2050 and saving the planet from ourselves. This Jekyll and Hyde nature of carbon capture technology makes it one of the most controversial bits of climate tech out there. Despite this, there are cautious whispers and rumours that carbon capture has the potential to not only stop climate change but reverse the damage we have caused. As such, it can be used in the 2060s and 2070s to make up for us missing our 2050 net-zero goals (which we are on course to do) and, past that, even return the atmosphere and climate to a pre-industrial condition. But is carbon capture really such a get-out-of-jail-free card? A recent study set out to answer this question, and what they found was terrifying.
Before we look at this study, let’s first get a sense of scale here. According to the IPCC, CCS (Carbon Capture & Storage) needs to reach an annual capacity (i.e., the amount removed from the atmosphere each year) of 4.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide for us to reach net-zero. Now, to put this figure into perspective, the total amount of iron (one of the world’s most used materials) mined worldwide in 2022 was only 2.6 billion tonnes! To reach the IPCC’s CCS targets, the carbon capture industry has to scale up to become one of the world’s biggest industries.
0 Comments