Captured carbon may fuel new markets and help climate

Laurie Goering -

Capturing planet-warming carbon dioxide and turning it into useful products, from plastics to jet fuel, could make climate action cheaper and become a good business - but market obstacles need to be overcome first, researchers said on Thursday.

Companies are already turning carbon dioxide captured at industrial plants into materials such as road aggregate and low-carbon cement, scientists said in a paper published in the journal Nature.

Eventually products could also be made from carbon dioxide captured directly from the air, as the costs of that technology fall, they added.

“There are a lot of weird and wacky ideas out there, and we’re just scratching the surface,” said Cameron Hepburn, a University of Oxford professor in environmental economics and a lead author of the study.

But efforts to turn captured carbon into products are still largely small-scale because most countries have yet to put an economic value on eliminating climate-changing gases while some of the processes require a lot of energy, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Construction standards and other regulations also make creating markets for new products difficult, said Hepburn, also director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

With emissions from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests continuing to rise, scientists now believe holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times will require sucking some carbon back out of the atmosphere.

In a landmark 2018 report, they said keeping global temperature rise to that more ambitious of two limits adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement would substantially cut risks linked to planetary warming, from water shortages to wilder weather.

Scientists say carbon dioxide captured from smoke-stacks or the air could be stored permanently underground, but investment and policy to make that happen on a large scale have been slow to emerge.

In Europe, “we’re so far off trend it makes you wonder what we’re doing”, Andrew Cavanagh, an emissions storage expert at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, told a September conference.

Instead, turning some of the carbon into products with a market value could be another way to drive investment into carbon capture, economists say. The Nature study, which examined thousands of papers on technologies to remove and use carbon, including natural processes, to gauge their viability, predicted they could together remove between 1 and 10 gigatonnes of emissions a year.

— Thomson Reuters Foundation