Seth B. Darling is the Chief Science & Technology Officer for the Advanced Energy Technologies Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory.
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When people talk about the climate crisis, they tend to agree on one primary solution: Cut carbon dioxide emissions. And indeed, if we want to keep the planet habitable, we must stop pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But decarbonizing the economy is just one of three essential ways to deal with carbon. The other two—carbon capture and carbon removal—tend to get short shrift.
The problem with focusing solely on decarbonization is that it ignores the many carbon sources that are still going strong. Making chemicals and steel still depend heavily on burning fossil fuels. Coal-fired power may be waning in the United States, but it’s thriving in countries like China and India, and global coal use reached an all-time high in 2022 (the latest year for which there is firm data).
Also reaching a record high in 2022 (as well as again in 2023, with a trend line indicating almost certainly another record high in 2024) was the amount of carbon that’s already in the air. Global average atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 421 parts per million last year, trapping heat and driving the climate effects we continue to see, such as extreme weather, droughts and floods and more intense wildfires.
Why Capture And Removal?
Both carbon removal and carbon capture from point sources harvest carbon and either store it indefinitely, use it directly or convert it to useful products. Environmentalists and sustainability advocates often argue that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is just a way for the fossil fuel industry to extend the life of their facilities and thereby perpetuate pollution. Activists argue that subsidizing CCS diverts resources from clean energy and electrification deployment.
It is true that if CCS projects draw on carbon-intensive energy such as coal power plants, or if the captured carbon is employed for enhanced oil recovery, the overall carbon footprint may not be reduced. But we still need CCS and carbon removal for three reasons. First, we have those hard-to-decarbonize parts of the economy such as heavy-duty transportation and industrial processes. This is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now says that carbon removal to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions is unavoidable if net zero emissions are to be achieved.
A second reason CCS is essential is that we’re running low on time. Scientists project carbon emissions need to fall 28% by 2030 to cap warming at 2° C. As of late last year, emissions were still on the rise. Changing decades of status quo is proving more difficult than any of us would want, and we need technologies to meet this reality.
Finally, even if we were to achieve the needed emission reductions, the world would still benefit from removing carbon to mitigate the effects we’re already experiencing. Natural carbon removal approaches include reforestation and agricultural soil management; technological approaches include direct air capture with carbon mineralization, biomass with carbon removal and ocean-based carbon removal.
What Do We Do With The Carbon?
Converting captured carbon into useful products is a fantastic idea and one we should certainly pursue. Conversion alone, however, cannot use enough carbon to achieve our climate goals. The issue is one of scale. If you total up the sheer mass of all the stuff we make and use as a society, from concrete to foods to tissues, it comes out to be a little over 30 billion tons per year. Most of those things cannot be made from carbon (e.g., steel), but some can (e.g., plastic), so this number gives an upper bound on how much stuff we could potentially make from captured carbon. Compare that number to our global annual carbon emissions, which are almost 40 billion tons per year. Even if we made all our plastic, food, fuel, construction materials and more from that carbon, we could not possibly use it all. Moreover, converting to things like fuels or food just delays the emissions rather than permanently removing the carbon from the atmosphere. This is why carbon storage is non-negotiable.
The Missing Links
The top priority remains the decarbonization of our economy through the wide-scale deployment of renewable and nuclear energy production, energy-efficiency measures, electric vehicles and other impactful technologies. While we work toward a full clean energy transition and a rebalancing of global relationships driven by hydraulic fracturing and other game-changing developments, our solutions must include carbon capture, removal and storage.
As mentioned with CCS and enhanced oil recovery, not every carbon capture or removal scenario is a climate win. We need objective, transparent analyses of life cycle emissions and techno-economic impact—these assessments will help in making science-based decisions on technologies that will benefit the climate and make sense financially. Truly considered approaches will evaluate how to incorporate communities that have long borne the brunt of fossil fuel pollution without taking part in the decision-making.
Scientific analysis can also help us understand the interplay between different ecological systems. Just as the link between energy and water cannot be ignored, it is important to understand how carbon is stored and transferred through forests, oceans, soils and other mechanisms.
The nation’s industrial engineering and technology sectors have roles to play in bringing down costs and risks—capturing and storing carbon can be viable only if we can do it with the right safeguards in place. Research partnerships with industry are already uncovering ways to avoid induced seismicity and other potential pitfalls associated with sequestering carbon. The cost of not doing so—and for allowing locked-in carbon emissions to continue unabated—is too high.
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