OSLO, Norway (Reuters) — A little-known technology that may be able to take the equivalent of China’s greenhouse gas emissions out of the carbon cycle could be the radical policy shift needed to slow climate change this century.
The technology would allow power plants to burn biomass to generate electricity while extracting carbon dioxide and burying it deep underground.
The process, called bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), would not only make power plants carbon neutral but also make them an active part of extracting carbon dioxide from a natural cycle of plant growth and decay.
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The technology could be twinned in coming decades with planting forests that absorb carbon as they grow, according to a leaked report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It would be a big shift from efforts to fight global warming mainly by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, but it may be necessary given the failure to cut rising emissions.
“BECCS forms an essential component of the response strategy for climate change in the majority of scenarios in the literature” to keep temperatures low, said the report.
The IPCC is the main guide for almost 200 governments that have promised to work out a deal by the end of 2015 to slow warming to avert more floods, heat waves, more powerful storms, droughts and rising seas.
The leaked report is Chapter 6 in a mammoth study due in mid-April in Berlin about solving climate change. It has details of BECCS not included in a draft summary.
In theory, BECCS could extract three to 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air a year and seems more promising than technologies such as blocking sunlight or building machines to extract carbon from the air.
China, the world’s top carbon producer, emitted 9.86 billion tonnes in 2012, according to the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
BECCS, also known as bio-CCS, would cost $60 to $250 per tonne of carbon dioxide eliminated, the IPCC said.
“BECCS faces large challenges in financing, and currently no such plants have been built and tested at scale.”
Archer Daniels Midland Co. has a facility in Illinois, partly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, which can inject 333,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year into the ground from a plant producing ethanol from corn.
“Bio-CCS technology is becoming increasingly recognized as a credible option,” said Brad Page, head of the Global CCS Institute in Australia.
However, it was only a partial fix he added. Like all other experts interviewed, he had not seen the draft.
The IPCC recently met in Japan to approve another report about the risks of climate change, from food and water shortages to a slowdown in economic growth.
Most carbon capture and storage focuses on fossil fuel.
In Saskatchewan, SaskPower’s Boundary Dam coal-fired power plant, will capture a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. It is due to start this year as the first commercial project of its type.
Apart from the high costs of BECCS, “the area you need is vast,” said Joris Koornneef of the sustainable energy consultancy Ecofys in the Netherlands.
He estimated that it would require 864 million acres — bigger than India — to produce enough biomass for BECCS to remove 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air, which would risk taking land from food crops.
Erwin Jackson, deputy head of the Climate Institute in Australia, said governments and companies should do more to research BECCS technologies.
“At the moment, we’re ignoring them and that’s risky,” he said.
The IPCC said it is at least 95 percent probable that climate change is mainly man-made rather than caused by natural swings. However, opinion polls show voters in many nations are unconvinced.
