Carbon offset programmes rightly get a lot of criticism. There’s plenty of evidence of offsets not delivering all the GHG emissions reductions they are credited for. Though still on the international agenda, should they be ditched? Or can they be improved with better analysis and evaluation, and making that a pre-condition for creating carbon offset credits, asks Meredith Fowlie at the Energy Institute at Haas. She starts by looking at those … [Read more...]
How much Carbon Capture will Germany need? Both nature-based and technological
Yet more studies have been published that show Germany needs carbon removal to meet its emissions targets. Simon Göss and Hendrik Schuldt at cr.hub add two, from the German Energy Agency and the Ariadne report (funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research), to those that already exist to shine more light on a carbon capture pathway. The main observation is that nature-based solutions (LULUCF: land use, land use change and forestry) … [Read more...]
Land Use and Forestry: existing LULUCF rules allow EU’s carbon sink to decrease. Change them
The EU’s current Regulations for Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) allow the region’s carbon sink to decrease, explains Ulriikka Aarnio at CAN Europe. It’s due to exclusions and a lack of transparency and proper accounting for emissions. As a result, the EU’s carbon sink has already decreased significantly in the last few years, extracting only 265 Mt of CO2 in 2019. Different activities both emit and absorb carbon. 2019 saw 135 Mt … [Read more...]
Bioenergy is the undervalued pillar of the clean energy transition
Bioenergy is already the world’s largest source of renewable energy, responsible for 70% of the supply (and around 10% of total primary energy). Burning organic matter goes back to the invention of fire and is still commonplace around the globe. Yet it gets hardly any of the attention and policy support that’s given to other clean energy technologies like solar, wind and now hydrogen. Bioenergy can and should play an even greater role, explain … [Read more...]
10 Carbon Capture methods compared: costs, scalability, permanence, cleanness
We need to understand carbon capture, storage and utilisation (CCUS) better. To do so, this article looks at 10 methods and estimates how much CO2 each will take out of the atmosphere by 2050, and the cost per tonne. In their list the authors, Ella Adlen and Cameron Hepburn at the University of Oxford, cover the industrial (e.g. CO2-EOR, synfuels) to the biological (e.g. forestry, soil carbon sequestration). They say there are six that can be … [Read more...]
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