“We need a lot of 10- and 20- percent solutions, and this is one of them. Others say that we need to pursue multiple routes to slow climate change “There is no 100-percent solution,” Dr. “If you’re doing too little on the emissions mitigation side, then there is no point of carbon dioxide removal,” said Glen Peters, research director at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway.Ī recent study found that after taking into account the energy used to capture and isolate CO2 from flue gas at a fossil fuel-burning industrial plant, the carbon capture system would reduce the plant’s net emissions by only 10 to 11 percent, not the estimated 80 to 90 percent cited by proponents. Some experts and environmentalists have pushed back against efforts to develop carbon capture, saying it is at best only a partial solution, and at worst it may impede a global transition to clean energy by letting the fossil fuel industry continue doing business as usual. Those proposals have been met with skepticism, though, by some environmentalists who say carbon capture could distract from efforts to reduce emissions in the first place.Ĭan these technologies make a significant difference to climate change? Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CC U S), also referred to as carbon capture, utilization and sequestration, is a process that captures carbon dioxide emissions from sources like coal-fired power plants and either reuses or stores it so it will not enter the atmosphere. Encouraged by tax incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act, some companies have proposed projects in the United States to capture CO2 and either use it or store it deep underground. Though carbon capture is not yet being done on a large scale, it is being pushed by companies and politicians as a key part of plans to guide the country to a carbon-neutral future. But is there anything we can do about all the carbon dioxide that is already in the air, and the millions of tons being emitted every day?įor most of human history, carbon emissions were balanced out by nature, said Rebecca Benner, a deputy director of the Nature Conservancy, but now we are “producing CO2 much faster than nature can recapture it.”Ĭarbon capture is an umbrella term for technologies, some of them first proposed in the 1980s, that aim to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or catch emissions and store them before they are released into the air. Carbon capture and storage (or sequestration)known as CCSis a process intended to capture man-made carbon dioxide (CO 2) at its source and store it permanently underground. To solve it will require moving away from burning carbon-emitting fuels and relying instead on cleaner energy sources like wind turbines and solar cells.
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