A high-CCS pathway to decarbonisation to potentially mitigate half of today’s emissions in oil and gas industry will cost an additional $30 trillion by 2050
Photo: iStock Excessive dependence on carbon capture and storage (CCS) to reach Net Zero goals would be “hugely economically damaging”, a report led by Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and Environment showed.
The costs were calculated with the help of data already in use for two pathways envisioned for varying amounts of carbon captured and stored. When it came to developing scenarios to make the assessment, they used the same ones developed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report.
A high-CCS pathway to decarbonisation to potentially mitigate half of today’s emissions in the oil and gas industry will cost an additional $30 trillion by 2050, compared to a low-CCS pathway to mitigate about a tenth of today’s emissions, the researchers warned.
According to the low-CCS pathway envisaged by the researchers, 4.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) on average in 2050 would be mitigated compared to an average of 19.2 GtCO2 in the high-CCS pathway.
In 2022, according to the scenarios, the amount of CO2 being captured worldwide stood at just 49 MtCO2 per year, the researchers said.
From 2021 to 2050, taking a low-CCS pathway to Net Zero emissions will save approximately $1 trillion per year and these figures likely underestimate the cost difference between the two approaches.
Richard Black, the study’s author and Honorary Research Fellow at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, wrote on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter), that as CCS is likely to be a scarce resource, governments should target CCS in sectors where it’s most likely to be needed, such as some industries.
“Governments must abandon claims that blanket CCS rollout is a sensible way to deliver net zero and the Paris Agreement goals. It isn’t: renewable energy, efficiency, and clean electrification can do the job with much greater feasibility, lower sustainability risks, and lower cost,” Black said.
The land-use requirements for energy crops are smaller in low-CCS pathways by 1.3 million square kilometers on average. This could lead to threats to food and water security due to reliance on biomass which is often coupled with CCS.
“It could also further pose risks to human rights, and put into jeopardy biodiversity and ecosystem services, deteriorating the resilience of our ecosystems,” Andrea Bacilieri at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, The University of Oxford warned in a statement.
In 2023, 41 CCS projects are operational worldwide, of which 29 are Enhanced Oil Recovery projects, partially or completely, nine of which came online last year. Further, 351 CCS projects are in the pipeline.
Applications of existing CCS facilities
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Over the last four decades, costs of solar, wind and battery storage have fallen. On the other hand, the costs of fossil power with CCS have not declined at all, indicating a lack of technological advances.
“Almost all decarbonisation scenarios consistent with the 1.5°C target in the Paris Agreement contain some level of carbon capture and storage (CCS), either for abating emissions at source, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or both,” the paper explained.
“But the amount of CCS varies widely. Therefore the scenarios, even when analysed in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), do not show policymakers a single ‘optimum’ or even ‘preferable’ pathway to 1.5°C, leaving room for alternative interpretations based on different priorities,” the paper elaborated.
Oil and gas-producing countries are expected to use the COP28 conference in Dubai to keep pushing for CCS to continue drilling.
In the IEA’s Net Zero emissions scenario, 6 GtCO2 will be mitigated by 2050 using CCS.
However, in the scenario, most of it was applied to steel, cement production and chemicals, where emissions are harder and more expensive to abate.
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