Thousands of power plants and factories will need to be fitted with carbon-capture and storage equipment to limit global warming to safe levels, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said.
More efficient vehicles and factories can achieve about half of the necessary reductions in carbon emissions by the middle of this century, Stern said in an interview during United Nations climate talks in Lima. The remaining cuts would result from a combination that must include renewable and nuclear energy, as well as CCS, he said.
“If you ruled it out, you’d be hammering on the other levers,” said Stern, now a member of the U.K. upper chamber, the House of Lords. “You’d make the whole story more expensive and you’d make it less likely.”
Envoys in Peru are trying to devise a global agreement to fight climate change that they aim to seal in Paris next December. They’ve set a goal of capping warming since the Industrial Revolution to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). With warming of 0.8 degrees already registered, theInternational Energy Agency projects the planet is on track to heat up by 3.6 degrees Celsius by 2100.
SaskPower International Inc. in October began the first project to commercially strip carbon emissions from an existing coal plant’s emissions. The company is confident it can reduce costs by 30 percent, Michael Monea, president of CCS at the Canadian utility, said in an interview in Lima.
CCS plants
SaskPower is planning to retrofit two other existing plants, and will use the captured carbon dioxide to help pump more oil from the ground, a process known as enhanced oil recovery. That improves the economics of CCS technology, which is often deemed too expensive.
“A greenfield plant right now is not that economic,” Monea said. “We did the economics and it didn’t work for us.”
The technology, which strips carbon from smokestacks and pumps it underground for permanent storage, hasn’t taken off, because it hasn’t had as much backing as renewable energy, according to Brad Page, chief executive officer of the Global CCS Institute.
“It doesn’t enjoy the same level of policy support as the other mitigation options,” Page said in an interview. “It’s always a question of the right sort of policies to incentivize across the board the technologies and properly price carbon.”
Stern wrote a report for the UK government in 2006 stating that reducing emissions in the near term would cost less than dealing with the future effects of climate change.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide are currently running at about 50 gigatons (50 billion tons) a year, and may increase to 80 gigatons by mid-century without reduction efforts, Stern said. Annual emissions must fall to about 20 gigatons to put the planet on track for 2 degrees Celsius of warming, he said. Of the 60 gigatons of needed reductions, CCS would make up about 15 gigatons, he said.
“The scale of the CCS you’re talking about is a few thousand plants in the electricity sector and probably several thousand outside the electricity sector, because there’s a lot of industrial stuff that’s much smaller scale,” said Stern.
