Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) deployment must be progressed as an urgent priority if the world is to achieve the global warming limits identified in the Paris Agreement, a new report says.
The CCS Forum, a group of experts from academia, industry, and government, says that the reservoirs needed to store carbon dioxide and limit global warming to 2°C are available, but that there is an urgent need for funding of CCS research and development.
It also identifies ten priorities for CCS including focusing on £/MWh to measure impact, developing a whole systems approach to energy and infrastructure, and carefully evaluating the role of electricity markets.
The CCS Forum’s report shows that 120-160 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide will have to be stored until 2050 to limit global warming. Oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams and deep saline aquifers are available as storage.
“CCS offers an opportunity to decouple the use of fossil fuels from climate change,” said Professor Stefaan Simons, IChemE’s Energy Centre Chair and Dean of the College of Engineering, Design and Physical Sciences at Brunel University London. “The CCS Forum report is an important step in the future prospects for CCS, as, for the first time, it suggests radical ways in which we can rethink the economic and technological development of the process, making it more attractive to investors and government decision-makers alike.
“Without such changes in perspective, we will not get past the barriers to deployment and, more importantly, we risk not meeting our carbon reduction goals in time to mitigate disastrous climate change.”
Priorities identified for CCS by the Forum include de-risking of carbon dioxide storage infrastructure around the world through exploration studies, increased use of CO2 storage via enhanced oil recovery, the most mature storage method, and the creation of appropriate benchmarks for measuring the development of CCS technologies.
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