As negotiators at the United Nations COP28 climate talks underway in Dubai consider a phaseout of fossil fuels, a new term has opened a potential middle ground in the debate: "abated emissions."
In this "abated" scenario, greenhouse gas emissions from some continued use of fossil fuels would be trapped using technology called carbon capture and storage, or CCS. It's not a new idea—the technology has been around for decades—but it is gaining new currency at COP28.
When Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry described the U.S. position on fossil fuels to reporters on Wednesday, he said CCS will play a role to abate emissions.
"We've got to have largely—largely—a phaseout of fossil fuels in our energy system by 2050, focusing carbon capture technologies on the hardest-to-abate sectors," Kerry said.
Carbon capture and abatement of emissions have been frequent topics in the first week of climate talks as negotiators consider ways to keep alive the Paris Agreement's most ambitious goal, to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Dubai's Expo City, where the annual U.N. event is taking place this year, has a generous number of representatives from CCS companies and their trade groups eager to promote the technology's promise.
"In the U.K., we're focusing on industrial emitters, industries like cement, steel and other manufacturing, and also power generation," Olivia Powis told Newsweek. Powis is U.K. director at the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, a trade group advancing CCS in Europe. "In all the independent studies, in all scenarios, they acknowledge we need CCS in order to decarbonize," she said.
The U.K.'s government-appointed Climate Change Committee called CCS "a necessity, not an option, for reaching net-zero emissions," and the International Energy Agency, or IEA, has called it "an essential technology" for sectors of the economy that are hard to decarbonize.
However, IEA also cautioned against "excessive expectations and reliance" on CCS. The technology is extremely costly and has so far generated more controversy than actual carbon reduction.
A recent report found that heavy reliance on CCS would be "highly economically damaging," prominent clean energy expert Mark Jacobson called CCS "a complete scam," and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres made his position on abated emissions clear in his opening remarks at COP28.
"The 1.5-degree limit is possible only if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels," Guterres said. "Not reduce. Not abate. Phase out."
Cost Concerns
CCS is more a combination of technologies, rather than one. The first technology uses a chemical process to pull the heat-trapping carbon dioxide emitted from power plants, refineries or industrial facilities before it reaches the atmosphere. The CO2 is then piped or shipped to a suitable site and is then pumped deep under the ground or sea where natural chemical reactions store it away.
The entire process is energy intensive and requires large-scale infrastructure, which explains why so few of the facilities have been built. According to the Global CCS Institute, an industry research group, there are just 41 CCS facilities currently operating worldwide.
The oil and gas industry has used CCS for a process called enhanced oil recovery, where the force of pumping captured CO2 underground pushes up more oil from low-producing petroleum patches.
What was perhaps the highest-profile moment for CCS came over a decade ago when the U.S. Department of Energy invested heavily in a program called FutureGen intended to remove emissions from coal-fired power plants. The effort wound up with little result, chiefly because of cost concerns.
Cost remains one of the key barriers to widespread adoption of CCS. A report from Oxford University's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment found that the cost of CCS implementation "has not declined at all in 40 years," a sharp contrast to the falling costs of renewable sources such as wind and solar.
The Oxford researchers found that heavy dependence on CCS to achieve net-zero emissions in 2050 is expected to cost "at least $30 trillion more" than a low CCS pathway emphasizing renewable energy, efficiency and electrification.
But the CCS Association's Powis predicted that CCS costs will come down as more facilities come online.
"We need to deploy at scale," she said. "We expect cost per unit will reduce over time, but we need to reach that critical mass."
The industry could be heading for a growth spurt. The Global CCS Institute report found 26 facilities under construction and 392 in some phase of development.
Powis would like to see an outcome from COP28 that recognizes the importance of CCS to tackle the emissions from heavy industry that renewable energy alone might not be able to address.
"It's a critical part of the whole solution moving forward," she said. "It's not either-or. We need all of those solutions."
Skeptical Science
"This is just a complete scam," Mark Jacobson told Newsweek. Jacobson is a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford University, where he directs the Atmosphere and Energy Program.
"I mean, there is nothing beneficial about carbon capture," he said.
Jacobson has published peer-reviewed studies on CCS as applied to coal power, the production of hydrogen and the production of ethanol. In each case, he found that when the entire cycle of the CCS process is measured, it does not result in any significant emissions reductions.
Part of the problem, Jacobson explained, is that the CCS process itself requires a large amount of energy. To reduce emissions, that energy would have to come from sources that do not produce CO2, such as wind and solar, and there's only so much of that to go around.
"There's a limited amount of renewable energy that we have available today and every bit of it needs to go to the replacement of fossil sources," Jacobson said. "By taking that renewable electricity away and using it to run carbon capture equipment, we're increasing carbon dioxide by a huge amount."
Despite all the talk of abatement and CCS at COP28, Jacobson is adamant that the focus should remain on rapid deployment of renewable energy sources.
"There's only one type of carbon capture that helps anybody, and that's a tree," he said.
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