Blog Posts: carbon capture

Meeting climate goals will require carbon dioxide removal, likely at the billion-tonne scale by midcentury. Direct air capture (DAC) is gaining traction as a promising carbon removal approach, but will require careful consideration of energy, land and water use to inform siting and minimize resource impacts.

New research shows that natural forest regrowth, as opposed to reforestation through tree planting, can capture more carbon dioxide from the air than previously thought.

What consitutes safe geologic storage? This is a key question for the IRS as it considers how to account for carbon capture and sequestration.

China and the United States established eight new pacts this week to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Half of these announcements focused on a single climate change mitigation measure—carbon dioxide capture, utilization and storage (CCUS).

China and the United States are world’s leaders when it comes to CCUS research and development, and this week’s agreements build on a long history of CCUS collaboration between the two nations. In fact, China-US partnership on CCUS has in many respects now left the theoretical feasibility realm and entered the “steel-in-the-ground” phase.

It is common knowledge that China burns a large amount of coal, with the fuel accounting for nearly 70% of China’s primary energy consumption in recent years. What is less commonly known is that China is also working on ways to reduce the impact of its coal use, including aggressively pursuing research and demonstration of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology.

On April 7th, a group of 24 Energy Ministers met in Abu Dhabi for the 2nd Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM). The group represented the governments of countries collectively responsible for over 80% of global energy consumption, and together they agreed to increase efforts to deploy carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) on a commercial scale worldwide.

S.699 authorizes the Department of Energy to conduct a program to demonstrate commercial application of integrated geologic storage projects, and provides a framework for selection criteria for these demonstrations. Importantly, the bill addresses the long term-stewardship challenges associated with demonstration, including site closure requirements and liability protection.

On January 18, at a ceremony at the U.S.-China Strategic Forum on Clean Energy Cooperation in Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu and China’s Energy Minister Zhang Guogao and Science and Technology Minister Wan Gang signed an agreement to advance the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC). The agreement was announced as part of a “new era” of clean energy cooperation, as Jon Huntsman, U.S. Ambassador to China, put it at the event.

This piece originally appeared as the Foreword to Guidelines for Community Engagement in Carbon Dioxide Capture, Transport, and Storage Projects.

This article originally appeared in The Solutions Journal.