CCS is essential to cut carbon at lowest cost

The IPCC's latest report shows a cost-effective response to climate change may be impossible without carbon capture and storage, says Judith Shapiro, policy and communications manager at the CCS Association.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group III published their contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) on the 13^th April 2014.

I was very pleased to see the strong emphasis on carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the report. In particular, two messages came out very strongly on CCS:

1)      Most climate change mitigation models show that without CCS (or even a considerable delay), the world will fail to limit atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide to 450ppm

2)      Without CCS, the total cost of limiting carbon dioxide emissions to 450ppm could increase by 138%.

The second message is especially stark, particularly when compared to other scenarios with limited availability of technologies. “Nuclear phase out” leads to a 7% cost increase, “limited solar/wind” a 6% cost increase and “limited bio-energy” a 64% cost increase.

The report also picks up on the importance of combining CCS with biomass to create bio-CCS (BECCS), stating that this plays an important role in many low-stabilization scenarios. Interestingly, many of the scenarios covered in the report that reach 450ppm atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, include an aspect of temporary ‘overshoot’ of this level. The ability to ‘overshoot’ in these scenarios relies heavily on the availability and deployment of BECCS, to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

The above messages bear striking similarities to work done in the UK by the Energy Technologies Institute which shows that without CCS, the cost of delivering a UK low-carbon energy mix in 2050 would increase by £30-£40 billion per year – the equivalent of one per cent of GDP. And interestingly, the ETI’s Energy Systems Modelling Environment picks out CCS and biomass as the two key technologies that have the biggest impact on costs when they are unavailable.

It is clear that the body of evidence on the importance of CCS is growing and that a cost effective response to climate change may well be impossible without CCS. Globally we see CCS beginning to be delivered at commercial scale with 12 large scale projects in operation and another 48 in various stages of development. Crucially, these include the first two commercial scale CCS projects fitted to coal-fired power stations which will start operating this year – in Canada and the US. The UK needs to catch up and get commercial scale CCS projects on the ground that can start to deliver the major benefits identified by the IPCC. The two projects in the UK’s CCS competition are now progressing through front end engineering design studies and once these are operational, the UK CCS industry will truly be on its way.