OSLO, Norway (Reuters) — Many nations want a draft United Nations report to tone down prospects for sucking greenhouse gases from the air to help fix global warming, reckoning the technologies are risky.
The study, which is focused on solutions to climate change, is meant to guide almost 200 governments in preparing a UN pact due by the end of 2015 to curb rising emissions and help limit heat waves, floods, droughts and rising seas.
According to documents seen by Reuters, China, the European Union, Japan and Russia were among nations saying the report should do more to stress uncertainties about technologies that it says could be used to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it below ground to limit warming.
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“(Carbon dioxide removal) technologies are currently not available and would be associated with high risks and adverse side-effects,” the German government said in a comment on the draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Added Russia: “There are no CDR technologies by now.”
The technologies would go far beyond the traditional focus on cutting emissions from burning coal, oil or natural gas.
Several nations were especially skeptical about the report’s mention of stripping greenhouse gases from electricity-generating facilities burning biomass to bury them underground as a way to extract carbon from nature.
Plants soak up carbon as they grow and release it when they rot or burn. Chemicals can extract carbon from the exhaust fumes from burning crop waste or from fermentation of corn to make ethanol.
Archer Daniels Midland Co. has a facility in Illinois to inject 333,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year into the ground from a factory producing ethanol from corn.
Husky Energy in Canada produces carbon dioxide from ethanol for injection into oil wells.
Many nations said the draft should do more to mention drawbacks of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), such as the amount of land needed to grow biomass crops and the risk that it would compete with food production.
Internal IPCC documents show that China said BECCS “bears great uncertainties.”
Japan said that “considerations of trade-offs with water, land and biodiversity are crucial to avoid adverse effects” with CDR technologies.
A sub-chapter of the report said BECCS has the theoretical potential to extract up to 10 billion tonnes a year of carbon dioxide from nature, which is equivalent to China’s carbon emissions.
However, it would cost $60 to $250 a tonne.
Other methods for extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere include planting trees or fertilizing the oceans to promote the growth of algae, hoping that the tiny carbon-rich plants would fall to the seabed when they die.
Delegates at a recent meeting in Berlin to review the report also said that Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, objected to a line in the report pointing out that fossil fuels were the overwhelming cause of rising emissions in the past decade.
