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Review of Lefebvre, et al., Biomass residue to carbon dioxide removal: quantifying the global impact of biochar

Literature Review Series

Authored by Wil Burns, Co-Director, Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy, American University

To date, the vast majority of purchases of durable carbon dioxide removal have been for biochar, a process that can transform biogenic carbon dioxide into a far more stable form via the process of pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is a thermal process that, in the absence of oxygen, can deconstruct bio-polymers into, among other things, biochar, a charcoal-like substance that can securely store carbon for hundreds to thousands of years when applied to soil. Conversion of biomass to biochar can sequester 50% of initial carbon, compared to 3% associated with burning, or less than 10-20% after 5-10 years from biological decomposition.

Image Credit: Lefebvre, et al. The above image is a graphical abstract.

A number of studies in recent years have suggested that biochar potential could be much greater in the future, perhaps in the range of 3.5 GtCO2/yr., or up to 350 Gt during this century. However, to date, studies have focused on global or regional aggregate estimates. In a recently published study, researchers led by David Lefebvre of the University of British Columbia sought to extend these analyses by assessing the potential of biochar sequestration in each of 155 countries. The study restricts itself to the assessment of sequestration potential associated with biomass residue feedstocks in the contexts of agriculture, forestry wood residues, animal manure, and wastewater biosolids. The study also presumes that 30% of residues are left in the fields in the interest of maintaining long-term soil health.

Among the conclusions of the study are the following:

  • Four countries, all characterized by large populations, land areas, and agricultural sectors have the greatest potential, including:
    • China: 468 Mt CO2e/yr.
    • United States: 398 Mt CO2e/yr.
    • Brazil: 303 Mt CO2e/yr.
    • India: 225 Mt CO2e/yr.
  • North America and South America are characterized by a large number of countries with biochar sequestration potential of 25 Mt CO2e/yr., with bands of relatively low potential across North Africa into the Middle East, with low potential in portions of Europe and southern Africa.
  • 28 countries have the potential to sequester more than 10% of their CO2 emissions with biochar, with the largest number in Europe
  • The “conservative approach” of the study (including assessment of only recalcitrant carbon with permanence factors based on national averages) yielded an estimated carbon dioxide removal potential of 6.23% of total greenhouse gas emissions of the 155 countries in the study.

Notably, the researchers observed that its estimates didn’t take into account a number of potentially compelling co-benefits, such as potentially reducing emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, enhancement of crop yields and displacement of fossil fuels. Any effort to assess the potential costs and benefits of biochar deployment in individual countries, as well as globally, will require a more granular assessment of these factors, suggesting one potential research tributary flowing from this study.

Overall, this study could prove extremely helpful in helping to operationalize biochar programs nationally, and regionally, moving forward. It suggests that biochar could play an important role in the carbon dioxide removal portfolio of many countries.

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Carbon Removal Meets Environmental Justice: A Fellow’s Perspective

Authored by Jake Ferrell, Carbon Justice Fellow at the National Wildlife  Federation

Set up in their on-site warehouse, company leadership gathered perhaps fifty people, myself included, around a large presentation screen to show what went into building and deploying their climate-saving direct air capture (DAC) technology. They presented their aims, a polished pitch: DAC modules widely deployed with low-costs, at commercial scale, and located in the desert somewhere so it wouldn’t bother anyone. A hand shot up – had they considered the environmental justice (EJ) dimensions of their projects? Doubts were voiced that projects would, in reality, be located so far away from communities, let alone sensitive wildlife and ecosystems. The question was shouted, barely audible in the cacophonous mechanical environment. “We didn’t think about that yet,” company leadership replied. “We’ve been focused on the engineering of building a DAC plant.”

A group of people pose for a photo inside a building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Carbon Removal Justice Fellows meet with members of the Senate Budget Committee on Capitol Hill. Photo credit: Jake Ferrell

The Carbon Removal Justice Fellowship was created to center equity and justice considerations in carbon removal policy. National Wildlife Federation partnered with American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy to co-run the program. The fellowship’s creators saw an opportunity to gather a diverse group of talented people to meet at the intersections of environmental justice and carbon removal in order to facilitate important conversations on how to avoid this industry becoming another harmful iteration of the status quo. The fellowship’s inaugural cohort was made up of folks working in environmental law, community advocacy for frontline communities, clean water, decarbonizing heavy industry, carbon removal social science, and more.

What is Carbon Dioxide Removal?

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is a strategy whereby CO2 is removed directly from the ambient air and sequestered in a form that prevents it from re-entering the atmosphere. CDR addresses the climate crisis by targeting excess atmospheric CO2, a result of societal industrialization. Examples of CDR range from natural solutions like reforestation to more technological processes like DAC.

Several people sit on couches and various seats in an office.

Fellows meet with representative offices on Capitol Hill. Photo credit: Jake Ferrell

Centering Environmental Justice in Carbon Dioxide Removal

The potential benefits of CDR include the prospect of addressing legacy emissions, and the ability to make room for self-determined development in places that might require steel, concrete, or other emissions-generating industries during the energy transition. The growing CDR industry, however, still has a series of challenges to grapple with regarding its energy demands, water use, climate-relevant scalability, economic cost, and transportation of CO2 from capture to sequestration sites. Additionally, this sector cannot afford to ignore the country’s long-standing legacy of racist pollution, siting injustices, and undelivered promises. Projects and communities are always inextricably intertwined, both economically and environmentally, so projects need to incorporate environmental justice considerations such as self-determination, informed consent, and mutual respect from the early planning stages of a project.

But environmental justice is more than listed principles – it is an active and variable movement with many facets, so it is vital that as the carbon removal sector experiences rapid growth, justice, conservation, and labor voices claim a seat at the table to be heard. Thus far, many active EJ organizations have been understandably critical of CDR conversations that do not appear to take seriously the social implications and historical legacies of adding more industrial projects in their communities. There is a risk that carbon removal provides an excuse for mitigation deterrence, or the postponing of society’s necessary transition away from fossil fuels. Many in the Carbon Removal Justice Fellowship carried forward this skeptical EJ ethos into conversations in the CDR space.

Urging the Industry to Consider its Impacts

The eleven Fellows managed to visit Washington, D.C., New York, NY, Laramie, WY, and Denver, CO within a packed 15 days in July. We talked to folks at organizations like the BlueGreen Alliance, Carbon180, Carbon Business Council, US Department of Energy, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and World Resources Institute to name a few. The Fellows also spent two days engaging in CDR conversations on Capitol Hill. In my view, our purpose – the red thread guiding us through our manifold meetings – was to hold space, to parse through some of the complex issues at the intersections of EJ and CDR, and to challenge existing perceptions. In this last aspect we were especially successful, and success in this instance often meant tension and uncomfortable exchanges. But tension is often necessary for progress, and many participants across the program appreciated our candor.

Some of the Fellows’ recurring questions from the duration of the program include: What does it mean to center environmental justice in relation to carbon removal? What does it look like for a project to get enthusiastic consent from a community? How are a project’s community benefits determined, and who gets to make those decisions? What does an A+ on a project’s environmental justice and community benefits scorecard look like? How do we move from well-intentioned plans to legally enforceable agreements? Who is accountable to whom, and where does the buck stop?

While historic policy related to carbon removal has been passed and big announcements like the $1.2 billion dollars for DOE’s DAC Hubs continue to roll out, the Carbon Removal Justice Fellows will continue to wrestle with these questions and others in the weeks and months to come. Those two weeks in the July heat mark the beginning of our ongoing engagement with carbon removal and environmental justice.

A group of people pose for a photo outside.

Photo credit: Jake Ferrell

Such an impactful group could not have come together without Dr. Simone H. Stewart and Shannon Heyck-Williams at the National Wildlife Federation, and Dr. Simon Nicholson and Jenn Brown at the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University, most of whom participated alongside the cohort during the fellowship.

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When essential research might be a bad thing. The carbon removal research dilemma

Authored by Nils Markusson and Duncan McLaren of Lancaster University

 

The UK recently adopted a legislative 2050 target for ‘net-zero’ climate-changing emissions. Other countries are also moving towards similar goals. Such targets are hugely welcome in the face of growing climate change impacts. Yet delivering ‘net-zero’ depends not only on accelerated mitigation, but also critically on the development and deployment of carbon removal techniques. This creates something of a dilemma.

Our research into the social and political implications of carbon removal techniques makes two things starkly clear. First, there is little or no hope of reaching such targets or avoiding harmful climate change without significant deployment of carbon removal techniques. Alongside rapid emissions reductions, humanity needs to remove carbon from the atmosphere to balance any residual emissions and to actively lower CO2 concentrations thereafter. Second, large-scale carbon removal techniques are complex socio-technical systems that are, as yet, only imagined. Placing our hope in them is likely to enable further delay in essential emissions reductions. We need what carbon or greenhouse gas removal (GGR) techniques promise to deliver, but at the same time those promises are likely to also deter and delay essential emissions reductions. GGR promises are thus double-edged swords, and we need to understand whether and how we can wield them without them causing more trouble than they’re worth.

This would not necessarily constitute a dilemma if research into carbon removal could be undertaken in an open ‘warts and all’ fashion. We could explore how to deliver more carbon removal, and avoid making simplistic or excessive promises. But in the world we live in, that isn’t how research is funded or delivered. There are at least four problems:

First, researchers are tempted and even encouraged to exaggerate the potential of their research and minimise downsides in the quest for funding and impact. Early claims are often the most extreme – such as the idea that ocean iron fertilization could deliver ‘a new ice age’ – but even growing evidence and peer review combined cannot eliminate such tendencies. Such irresponsible behaviour is made worse where researchers from natural sciences traditions misunderstand the role of social and political factors in the uptake and impact of their research, presenting it rather as a simple question of a knowledge deficit that needs to be erased.

Second, the media (in a repeated cycle of ignorance) often misinterprets scientific findings in simplistic and exaggerated ways. Take the recent hyped media coverage of Cambridge University’s new ‘Centre for Climate Repair’, which seeks to ‘solve climate change’, and ‘fix the climate’ with ‘radical new technologies’. ‘And we can’t fail at it’, one of the researchers is quoted as saying, somewhat breathlessly.

Third, research is also routinely expected by policy makers to deliver domestic economic ‘impact’, so is driven to approaches that seem to offer commercial applications, and to exaggerate the potential to access subsequent venture capital funding. Yet commercial applications of carbon removal technologies typically act not to remove and store carbon – but to utilise carbon in short-lived applications such as fertilising greenhouses, or making synthetic fuel. This does not reduce atmospheric CO2 levels.

Fourth, add to this the fact that fossil companies are among the largest and most influential in the world, and that their future depends on finding ways of continuing to make profits from burning fossil fuels, and we have a context encouraging simplistic and excessive promises about carbon removal technologies.

We can thus see vicious circles through which scientific hubris is reinforced by media hype, the growth mantra of policy makers, and the self-interest of fossil-dependent industries. This vicious dynamic is at its most intense in well-heeled, elite, Northern institutions like Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard – but ripples out more broadly than that to include certainly also our own institution – Lancaster University.

Fossil-fuelled imperialism means peoples in the global South are already suffering from climate change impacts. As a consequence, the Global North has a responsibility to deal with climate change. But can we trust the academic institutions that have supported imperialist fossil capitalism to provide the knowledge to address the problem it has caused? Should we be surprised when they come up with commercializable technical fixes that would be controlled from the global North? Let’s be wary of initiatives that place Oxbridgevard at the epicentre of knowledge-making on responses to climate change, without any explicit recognition of their historical and contemporary societal roles.

The ‘we’ that can’t fail to ‘solve’ the climate change problem is a problematic category. Being highly privileged, from the global North, and keen to get funding from industry and growth-focussed governments is a tricky starting point when you set out to ‘save the world’. Scientists (engineers, even economists) are of course trained to see themselves as not being political in their daily working lives, as producing objective science. But nevertheless, in situations where so much is at stake, and the topic is as (inevitably) politicised as climate change, all researchers need to be reflexive about the roles the products of their work have out there in the world. And this means the research itself will need to change. As will how we talk about it.

We argue that the right starting place for such research would acknowledge:

  • Climate is not a ‘problem to be solved’, but a chronic condition that we need to learn to live with, with the assistance of new technologies and techniques, but primarily through behavioural, cultural and political changes.
  • The research needs to include explicit consideration of different possible global societal futures, and be reflexive about the politics of how knowledge is produced, presented and used to make those futures come about.
  • Talking of ‘repairing the climate’ is an instrumental understanding of repair, which addresses the wrong subject: what needs repair is the relationship between humans and planet in the Anthropocene
  • That although carbon removal techniques are diverse they all share the risk that as promises, they could deter necessary emissions reductions, and their delivery at scale cannot be guaranteed. Both problems need to be part of the research projects examining carbon removal.
  • That carbon removal techniques all face limitations and constraints, and can only be a supplement to accelerated emissions reductions, not a substitute.

This takes us a long way from the conditions in which such research is currently promoted and highlights the dilemma faced by researchers in this area.

Climate change is a huge issue. And the more researchers bring their knowledge and skills to bear on it, the better. However, promising technological solutions to climate change can be problematic. Research has already demonstrated that living in a climate-changed world demands social and cultural responses too, not just technological ones. Worse, raising expectations of a technical fix to climate change also empowers commercial and political interests who want to delay urgent action to cut emissions. The way we conduct and govern research on carbon removal needs to be reformed. We hope that groups like the Cambridge Centre will combine learning like this from social sciences and humanities, with their expertise in natural science and technology to find better ways forward.

We think that our research at Lancaster could help. We seek to expose this problem of mitigation deterrence, and empower researchers, activists and policy makers to engage with it. We have set mitigation deterrence into a framework of cultural political economy, and identified different mechanisms whereby the problem arises, beyond the conventional understanding of a ‘moral hazard’. We see equally serious risks where carbon removal is planned for, but fails to materialise due to technical, economic or social obstacles; or is diverted into ‘carbon utilisation’; or through unintended rebounds or side-effects, such as additional emissions from land-use change or enhanced oil recovery. We have also deliberated with stakeholders about how the problem might emerge in different political settings, and it seems we can’t rely on strong markets, strong leaders or even strong publics to deliver GGR unproblematically. There is no technical fix, but there is no social fix either: in all these settings, as under ‘business as usual’, research could be distorted, co-opted, or ignored in ways that reflect powerful interests and the technology and innovation regimes they construct.

Our research is now moving on to explore ways in which research, development and deployment of GGRs could be governed so as to minimise mitigation deterrence. The ‘declarative approach’ in which researchers assert that GGRs must be an addition to emissions reduction can only take us so far in societies where GGRs can be co-opted to sustain fossil economies. Amongst other tools we see potential for a legislative and administrative separation of negative emissions from emissions reduction in targets, policy and funding. This would enhance awareness of the problem, and build firewalls between GGR and emissions reduction in much the same way as the UK’s Climate Change Act has helped protect climate action from political meddling and vested interests. We welcome input and feedback on such proposals.

And of course we seek to promote our work too, and we currently sustain our careers from doing research about GGR techniques. We believe that this is justifiable through the kinds of contribution outlined above, but welcome feedback on this too.

 

Assessing the Mitigation Deterrence Effects of Greenhouse Gas Removal (AMDEG) is funded by grant NE/P019838/1, part of the Greenhouse Gas Removal from the Atmosphere programme, funded by NERC, EPSRC, ESRC, BEIS, Met Office & STFC in the UK.

About the Authors

Nils Markusson

Lecturer, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University
Contact: n.markusson@lancaster.ac.uk

The core of Nils Markusson’s interest is about the politics of environmental technology. He wants to understand the relationship between how we develop and use technology in response to environmental problems on one hand, and political processes at varying scales in society on the other.

He is a social scientist, with a background in engineering, innovation policy, innovation studies and science & technology studies (STS), and most recently cultural political economy. Much of his work is done in multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations, spanning social science, natural science, engineering and the humanities.

Duncan McLaren

Professor in Practice, Research Fellow, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University
Contact: d.mclaren@lancaster.ac.uk

Duncan McLaren researches the politics and environmental justice implications of environmental technologies and imaginaries such as climate engineering, carbon removal, smart cities and the circular economy. As a Professor in Practice, he works to make academic research more accessible and useful to activists and campaigners for environmental justice.

Prior to entering academia, he worked for many years in environmental research and advocacy, including as Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland from 2003 until 2011, where he was influential in the adoption of world-leading climate change legislation by the Scottish Parliament. He has also served on the UK Research Councils’ Energy Programme Advisory Council and the UK Government’s Energy Research Partnership, and as an advisor to the Virgin Earth Challenge.

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Reflections on the IPCC special report on pathways to and impacts of 1.5ºC

Author: Matthias Honegger

This post originally appeared on the blog for the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS).

How is this report different from previous IPCC reports?

The main difference to previous reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that, according to the last assessment report, we have now used up the so-called “carbon budget” for the 1.5°C target. Therefore, in principle, we should not emit another single ton of CO2 going forward. The last report did not pay much attention to the 1.5°C target because too few studies even addressed this ambitious scenario. The Paris Agreement and the request to the IPCC for this latest report have changed this: more and more studies have considered how the goal could be achieved – with similar results, but greater urgency. What has changed since the last assessment report is that we are running out of time. More and more observers rate it as extremely unlikely that we can still get close to 1.5°C without the use of controversial solar geoengineering to directly alter the energy balance of the planet (also known as “Solar Radiation Management”). The latter is mentioned in the report as Solar Radiation Modification, but dismissed as too risky and insufficiently understood, which is understandable given the necessarily cautious approach of the IPCC in light of the still limited amount of research dedicated to seriously exploring the possibilities of SRM. However, a growing number of climate modelling studies consistently conclude that the use of SRM to partially counteract warming could help contain climate change and possibly avoid much suffering and harm. The same studies also consistently find that SRM could under no circumstances be a substitute for CO2 reduction and CO2 capture, but would potentially be useful as a risk-reducing supplement.

What political signals does the report send?

In the context of international climate policy the special report is expected to serve as a wake-up call for decision-makers. The IPCC report shows that the 1.5°C target, which in Paris gave hope to the most vulnerable populations, is slipping through our fingers. Unless the international community immediately and dramatically changes course, this goal is no longer within reach. A study from last year, which to my knowledge is not quoted in the report, found a one percent (1%) likelihood that warming would remain at 1.5°C if current trends continue. The international community is not even on a path to the less ambitious 2°C target. If today’s nationally determined contributions (NDCs) are implemented unchanged, warming is expected to reach 3°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 – and more beyond the turn of the century. With millions of people depending on robust climate policy to secure their futures, this state of affairs should not be taken as an excuse to give up. The report unequivocally states that warming of 1.5°C would cause much less suffering and harm than warming of 2°C. There is not a shred of doubt that the corresponding steps must be taken now.

To what extent does it still make sense to talk about the 1.5ºC or 2ºC target? Do we have to admit that these goals are now barely achievable?

Achieving the 1.5°C goal with existing means of CO2 emission reductions will require drastic measures comparable perhaps only to the transformative efforts undertaken by societies in the face of war. The vast majority of scenarios assume that billions of tons of CO2 will also have to be removed from the atmosphere through the widespread application of emerging technologies such as bioenergy and CO2 capture and storage (BECCS) or the direct air capture and storage of CO2 (DACS) – with the corresponding costs. However, both of these approaches present their own challenges when deployed on this scale and have accordingly been largely ignored by decisionmakers to date. The use of bioenergy could potentially result in massive land use conflicts, while direct air capture requires vast amounts of energy and is, in its present state, both under-researched and prohibitively costly. Politics should not rely on such approaches without doing what is necessary to shape them into feasible policy options, and yet that is what happens every time we calculate our chances for the 1.5°C or 2°C target.

What are we to make of the current situation?

The IPCC authors were faced with the dilemma that the 1.5°C target is now practically out of reach despite significant political efforts to reduce or remove CO2 emissions. In conversations with colleagues in climate research, it has repeatedly struck me that many consider it unethical to even consider the possibility that current forms of action could fail to achieve the goal: Many colleagues suspect that expressions of doubt would undermine the political will to further pursue these crucial measures. Whether this is indeed the case is hard to answer and pragmatic optimism definitely has an important role to play. However, I think society has a right to be fully informed by science: We should all be aware of the risk-laden future we are approaching and not limit our focus to the best possible scenario. Accordingly, we would not be well advised to prematurely exclude potential options – from emissions reductions to adaptation, CO2 removal and solar geoengineering (SRM) – even if these options do not appear perfect at first glance and require further research. Anyone who deals with financial investments knows about the necessity of diversification when dealing with risks.

The full report can be found here on the IPCC website.

 

Matthias Honegger is a project scientist at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany. In his role there, he focuses on the question, whether biased risk perceptions of climate engineering contribute to a marginalization of climate engineering as a potential element of a broader strategy to address climate change. He is also exploring the current climate policy regime to identify governance elements, which could help consider carbon removal technologies and eventually solar radiation management approaches in an adequate manner within the international climate regime.

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Ensuring That We Hear the Voices of the Vulnerable: Toward a Human Rights-Based Approach to Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Storage

Author: Wil Burns

A version of this piece with references can be found here: Burns, The Paris Agreement and Climate Geoengineering Governance, CIGI Papers No. 111 (October 2016)

In the past few years, there has been growing interest in potential large-scale deployment of Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). The vast majority of the integrated assessment models in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment model which effectuated holding temperatures to below 2°C contemplated large-scale deployment of BECCS, with a median commitment of 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide removal annually in the latter half of the century. Many commentators and policymakers have also argued that so-called “negative emissions technologies,” such as BECCS, will be critical to meet the Paris Agreement’s objectives to “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.”

BECCS seeks to generate energy by converting vast amounts of biomass into liquid biofuels, or via the direct burning of biomass at appropriately equipped power stations. Bioenergy systems in BECCS are paired with a carbon capture method, facilitating the capture of carbon dioxide emissions at the source of combustion. Carbon dioxide can then be stored terrestrially or under the world’s oceans, or potentially utilized for other purposes, such as enhanced oil recovery, biochemical conversion into biofuels, or for energy storage technologies.

Some members of the climate engineering community have sought to portray carbon dioxide removal options such as BECCS as “benign,” or “safe,” perhaps in comparison to potential risks associated with solar radiation approaches. However, at least in the case of BECCS, this clearly may not prove to be true. Delivery of a relatively modest three gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent negative emissions annually from BECCS would require conversion of a land area of approximately 380-700 million hectares in 2100, translating into 7-25% of agricultural land and 25-46% of arable and permanent crop area. This could result in massive increases in food prices for some of the world’s most vulnerable people. For example, one recent study indicated that even modest increases in bioenergy development could increase the number of malnourished children in sub-Saharan Africa by 3 million, with an 8% decline in calorie availability.

BECCS could also have a huge water footprint. By 2100, BECCS feedstock production at scale could require approximately 10% of the current evapotranspiration from all global cropland areas, or of the same magnitude as all current total agricultural water withdrawals This is at a time that when global water withdrawals are projected to increase by 20% and the number of people experiencing water shortages could grow by billions. Large deployment of BECCS could also exacerbate this threat by further degrading water quality by salinization, and from fertilizer and pesticide runoff associated with production of bioenergy feedstocks.

Many of the most propitious areas for bioenergy development are also characterized by high-levels of biodiversity, with a large share of endemic species. Recent research indicates that large-scale BECCS deployment could have profound impacts on biodiversity, primarily due to potential land conversion. More specifically, BECCS could “vastly accelerate the loss of primary forest and natural grassland, resulting in the loss of up to one-fifth of natural forests, grasslands and savannahs. This could precipitate habitat loss for many species, and ultimately, “massive” changes in species richness and abundance. Indeed, one recent study concluded that large-scale deployment of BECCS could result in a greater diminution of terrestrial species than temperature increases of 2.8°C above pre-industrial levels. Other potential impacts of BECCS deployment could include undermining the income of those without land tenure in developing countries where large amounts of land might be diverted for bioenergy production, including through “land grabs,” as well as substantial increases of pollution, including through massive new perturbations of the nitrogen cycle.

Institutional governance mechanisms for climate engineering research and/or deployment should be structured to facilitate consideration of the potential impacts of BECCS on human rights.

How could individuals and groups that might be adversely impacted by BECCS deployment seek to protect their interests, and encourage strategies that can ameliorate associated risks? One approach would be to invoke human rights interests. For example, a persuasive case could be made that  BECCS’ potentially negative impact on food security and prices could violate the right to food, as recognized, inter alia, under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The threats to water supplies that might be posed by BECCS could be construed to violate the right to water, recognized, inter alia, under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Loss of biodiversity could undermine the right to health under instruments such as Universal Declaration of Human, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as the rights of indigenous peoples to access to the benefits of biodiversity as a resource under instruments such as the Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries and United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Institutional governance mechanisms for climate engineering research and/or deployment should be structured to facilitate consideration of the potential impacts of BECCS on human rights. This could be operationalized by incorporating a Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) into such institutions. A HRBA The hallmark of the HRBA is a focus “on the relationship between the rights-holder and the duty-bearer and revealing gaps in legislation, institutions, policy and the possibility of the most vulnerable to influence decisions that have impact on their lives.” An HRBA establishes a normative framework for addressing systematic and structural injustices, social exclusions and human rights repressions. The HRBA has been embraced by international, national, and sub-national governmental and non-governmental organizations in a wide array of contexts, including, health, development, and environmental protection.

Drawing on guidelines developed by human rights and development institutions, applying the HRBA to consideration of BECCS as a climate engineering option should include the following elements:

1. Human Rights Impact Assessments

The HRBA would facilitate a process to identify the specific potential impacts of BECCS and associated potential human rights considerations, as well as the specific groups likely to be impacted. A reliable method to effectuate this goal would be to mandate the preparation of a Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) for individual BECCS programs, and on a programmatic basis.

HRIAs are assessment protocols that assess the consistency of policies, legislation, projects, and programs with human rights. It is a particularly appropriate instrument in the context of emerging high-risk technologies such as climate engineering in that its focus is not on past violations, but rather on developing tools to avoid violations of rights in the future.

An HRIA process in the context of BECCS should include the following elements:

    • A scoping process that would identify rights-holders and duty-bearers, and develop relevant indicators to use in the process to help assess potential impacts and their relevance to the human rights interests of rights-holders.

In identifying rights-holders, the HRBA focuses on protection of the rights of excluded and marginalized populations, including those whose rights are most likely to be threatened. Indicators should be designed to assess State intent to comply with human rights mandates, measure State implementation of human rights obligations, and measure State human rights performance.

    • An evidence gathering process to help assess the potential impacts of deployment of BECCS.

One critical requirement of the HRBA process would be greatly enhanced scientific understanding of the impacts of large-scale deployment of BECCS, including regional impacts that might adversely impact specific potential rights-holders.

    • An ex ante deliberative process between rights-holders and duty-bearers that would help identify specific concerns of rights-holders and duty-bearers.

A critical component of any potential governance architecture for climate engineering is engagement of populations in regions where impacts are likely to be most extreme, especially in developing countries. This participatory component of the HRIA process could help promote this objective by operationalizing procedurally oriented human rights provisions, including the right to information and the right to public participation.

In developing this component of the HRIA, efforts should be made to go beyond merely soliciting public opinion on climate engineering issues, usually characterized as public communication or public consultation, to the establishment of large-scale public deliberative processes.  Public deliberative processes seek to afford citizens, or a representative subset thereof, the opportunity to discuss, exchange arguments, and deliberate on critical issues, as well as to seek to persuade one another of the judiciousness of their solutions.

2. Analysis and Recommendations

This element of the HRIA process should include assessment of the human rights impacts of BECCS proposals, and an assessment of State responsibilities to respect, protect and fulfil human rights in this context. This step should also include the critical element of the development of recommendations to avoid or ameliorate potential impacts on human rights, or alternative means to achieve climatic goals that would avoid human rights violations. This obligation discussing mitigation and alternative options is also an important component of environmental impact assessments at both the international and national levels.

    • Assessment of the capacity of rights-holders to exercise their rights and duty-bearers to fulfill their respective obligations, as well as strategies to bolster capacities.

Capacity, broadly defined, is a critical consideration in determining the ability of duty-bearers to meet their obligations and rights-holders to claim their rights. In the context of a human rights assessment of BECCS, this should include an assessment of human and economic capacity of duty-bearers to protect human rights interests. It should also an assessment of rights-holders’ capacities, including access to pertinent information, especially for marginalized or traditionally excluded groups, and ability to obtain redress.

    • Establishment of a program to monitor and evaluate both outcomes and processes, guided by human rights standards and principles

Implementation of a human rights monitoring programs in the context of BECCs should include the use of role and capacity analysis to assess the obligations of institutions at the international and national level to monitor the impacts of climate engineering, as well as their capacity and analysis of existing information systems and networks to assess critical information gaps to effective monitoring by decision makers, rights-holders and rights-bearers.

Monitoring could be particularly effective in terms of deployment of BECCS. Projections of potentially sustainable levels of bioenergy deployment are “systematically optimistic” and not based on empirical observations or practical experience.  One way to address this challenge is to foster “learning by doing” by close monitoring of incremental efforts to expand the role of biomass in energy production. Close monitoring of the first few exajoules of energy crops would help realistically assess purported benefits of integrated crop and energy production, and the sustainability of energy crop extension into allegedly marginalized, degraded and deforested lands.

    • Ensure that programs are informed by recommendations from international human rights bodies and mechanisms

The UNFCCC would benefit from collaboration with human rights bodies, including UN bodies, such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; the United Nations Human Rights Council; human rights treaty bodies, such as the Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Rights of the Child; regional bodies, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights; and non-governmental organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross.  Collaboration should also be explored with other organizations that may help inform the process, such as the Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP), comprised of both State and non-State actors.  The GBEP has developed a set of sustainability indicators intended to inform decision-making and foster sustainability, including in the context of socioeconomic considerations.

The Paris Agreement is likely to be the key institution for governance of BECCS, as it explicitly provides for the use of carbon dioxide removal processes to help meet party INDCs. Given the fact that the Agreement explicitly calls for consideration of the human rights impacts of climate response measures in its Preamble, I would suggest that the Parties begin to consider how a HRBA might inform consideration of BECCS in the future. This could be facilitated through the Forum on the impact of the implementation of response measures, which is administered by the Subsidiary Body for Science and Technological Advice and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation. This could provide a good model for incorporation of the HRBA into other pertinent institutions in the future also.

There has been extensive discussion in recent years of how climate change is adversely affecting the human rights of some of the world’s most vulnerable peoples. Every effort should be made to ensure that our efforts to address climate change do not do the same.

Wil Burns, PhD, is a Co-Executive Director of FCEA and is based in Berkeley, California. He also serves as non-residential scholar at American University’s School of International Service and a Senior School at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada. He previously served as the Director of the Energy Policy & Climate program at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC. He also serves as the Co-Chair of the International Environmental Law Committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association. He is the former President of the Association for Environmental Studies & Sciences, and former Co-Chair of the International Environmental Law interest group of the American Society of International Law and Chair of the International Wildlife Law Interest group of the Society. He has published over 80 articles and chapters in law, science, and policy journals and books, and has co-edited four books. He holds a Ph.D. in International Environmental Law from the University of Wales-Cardiff School of Law.

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A talk by Holly J Buck – Why Climate Engineering and Sustainable Agriculture Need to Be Part of the Same Conversation

Holly J Buck, FCEA Faculty Fellow and PhD candidate at Cornell University gave a brief talk this afternoon on her recent work investigating the cultural, practical, and conversational binaries that imagine geoengineering as distinctly, problematically separate from agriculture. She argued that the false dichotomy between issues of food security, land reform, and progressive farming must be deconstructed and replaced with a language of cooperation.

That conversation would require thinking about the ways techniques of each influence one another. The two issues are inextricably linked. Food systems as they exist already impact the planet on massive scales. Reciprocally, climate engineering would fundamentally challenge the status quo in terms of social organization and power distribution. Competition for land itself as well as for the means to tend, sow, develop, or redefine that land would be a disruptive force within communities. Land tenure changes would challenge conventional social roles, responsibilities, and notions of ownership. Some climate intervention schemes would directly employ cultivation and agricultural initiatives. Ultimately, the potentiality of a food crisis could be an economic, humanitarian, and geopolitical rationale for turning to climate engineering.

Holly depicted the current conditions in which this debate are occurring as rife with deep divisions created by a binary perspective: agroecology on one side and the industrial agricultural system on the other—a conflict further simplified to mean traditional vs modern, pluriethnic vs Western, resilient and flexible vs rigid and restrictive. This model of thought structures and limits the interactions we are able to have regarding any progress in this area. It speaks to how deeply entrenched our thought patterns are when it comes to economic development and land reform. The “centuries long domination” of colonial powers over indigenous populations have had (sometimes) inexplicit but (often) irremovable influences on international policies. Such frameworks are embedded in the potential implementation of reformative environmental technology; in what she referred to as “green grabbing,” we must recognize the tendency to alienate, appropriate, and financialize a space (and thus—a people). Models of engineering similarly approach the subject matter scientifically, often at the expense of thoroughly evaluating any number of other unforeseen obstacles and repercussions. It’s likely, she posited, that a major reason we have made so few actionable declarations thus far is that we’ve been unable to navigate this fraught web of responsibility-assignment and social-structure-reordering.

So how to move forward? A dialogue must occur at the nexus of academia, policy, and civilian engagement. Interdisciplinary voices must contribute to a broader, less reflexive conversation. Educational practices should begin to encourage creativity, addressing the training and incentivizing that typically encourages participants to stay in compartmentalized spheres. Specialty knowledge could then speak to the expansive implications of geoengineering—instead of simply noting that such factors weren’t considered within the model. Finally, the inescapable presence of the media means that if effective public communication on this controversial issue isn’t a priority, predictable storylines pitting one monolithic side against the other will continue to prevail. These patterns must be challenged, producing a new narrative that reckons with historical human-environmental relations as well as exploring a novel—but not new—frontier.

Find slides from Holly’s talk here.

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‘Uncertainties’ is an understatement, when it comes to BECCS

Author: Rachel Smoker, Biofuelwatch

In 2012, Biofuelwatch published a report titled “Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage: Climate savior or dangerous hype?”  We had long been working to reveal and oppose large scale industrial and commercial scale bioenergy in various forms ranging from ethanol refineries to soy and palm oil biodiesel to coal plants converting over to burn wood. We had argued that corn ethanol would drive biodiversity loss, cause food prices to rise and contribute to chronic hunger, while failing to reduce emissions, as it has in fact done. We argued that burning wood as a substitute for coal would create a new driver of deforestation, even as protecting forests and ecosystems was recognized as a “best line of defense” against climate change. We pointed out that large scale bioenergy was incompatible with the simultaneous push to quantify, commodify and protect land based carbon sinks and their “services” (often for the dubious purpose of providing offsets to polluters…). We highlighted the human rights impacts, as land grabs for bioenergy escalated in Africa and elsewhere. And we argued over and over that the carbon consequences of bioenergy were far from “climate friendly” or “carbon neutral,” a myth that has been perpetuated by industry proponents and even parroted by many naive environmentalists.

When we learned that BECCS was being advocated as an approach to “mitigation,” we turned our attention to providing a critique based on many of those, by now familiar, arguments.  When BECCS spilled into the debates on climate geoengineering, we were outraged. Then even the supposedly scientific body, the IPCC released their Working Group III (Mitigation) Summary for Policymakers in April 2014, it stated that:  “Mitigation scenarios reaching about 450 ppm CO2eq in 2100 typically involve temporary overshoot of atmospheric concentrations as do many scenarios reaching about 500-550 ppm CO2 eq in 2100. Depending on the level of the overshoot, overshoot scenarios typically rely on the availability and widespread deployment of BECCS and afforestation in the second half of the century. The availability and scale of these and other Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies and methods are uncertain and CDR technologies and methods are, to varying degrees associated with challenges and risks (see Section SPM 4.2, high confidence).”  While they acknowledge “uncertainties,” they nonetheless incorporate BECCS into models as if its feasibility and effectiveness is a given.

While they acknowledge “uncertainties,” they nonetheless incorporate BECCS into models as if its feasibility and effectiveness is a given.

In fact, “uncertainties” is an understatement. Over the years we have been making our arguments heard and fighting to oppose large scale bioenergy projects and policies, a burgeoning body of peer reviewed scientific literature has been published supporting and substantiating the concerns we raised, and public opinion has evolved and shifted. Witness for example how corn ethanol, the darling of big agribusiness, some farmers, the oil industry and many environmentalists – has fallen out of favor in public perception. Over the past few years the EPA has been lobbied by a diverse assortment of industry groups to repeal the ethanol mandate, and policymakers have supported that with introduction of legislation.

In Europe, policymakers have (at least) taken note of the evolving understanding of bioenergy, though that has not been reflected back on policy as of yet.  There have been drawn out debates over indirect land use change and “sustainability standards” in particular, with the European Commission and Council suggesting that biofuel targets should be eliminated from the next climate and energy package (after 2020).

Nonetheless, avid proponents of BECCS hold fast to the simplistic claim that it can provide a “fix” for the climate, even permitting “overshoot” – allowing greenhouse gas concentrations to rise above what is indicated for long term stabilization based on the assumption that the excess can later be “cleaned up”.

In a recent reality check, scientists estimated what it would take to sequester 1 billion tonnes of carbon using BECCS based on switchgrass feedstock. Their findings showed a startling 218-990 million hectares of land would have to be converted to switchgrass (which is 14-65 times as much land as the US uses to grow corn for ethanol); also 17-79 million tonnes of fertiliser a year – which would be 75% of all global nitrogen fertiliser used at present; and 1.6-7.4 trillion cubic metres of water a year.

Even if such a BECCS-project was to actually sequester a billion tonnes of carbon a year, the authors point out that the nitrous oxide emissions from the extra fertilizer use alone would, over the course of a century ‘offset’ 75-310% of that sequestered CO2. In other words: Increased fertilizer use alone would likely mean that either of those projects would increase greenhouse gas emissions overall and thus make climate change even worse. That does not even include the vast carbon emissions from clearing trees, shrubs and grass from hundreds of millions of hectares of land, destroying large reservoirs of soil carbon, or the emissions from all the fossil fuels burned to transport and process switchgrass. Nor does it include emissions from producing the synthetic fertilizers.

BECCS advocates also adhere to the simplistic notion that all bioenergy (from corn ethanol to burning wood) is “carbon neutral.”

BECCS advocates also adhere to the simplistic notion that all bioenergy (from corn ethanol to burning wood) is “carbon neutral.” Therefore, it is argued, adding CCS further renders it “carbon negative”.  The “carbon neutral” claim has been refuted time and time again in scientific literature.  Timothy Searchinger was among the first to do so with a paper entitled “A Critical Climate Accounting Error“. Others have further elaborated on the carbon implications of various forms of bioenergy, from corn ethanol to crop residue cellulosic fuels to wood bioenergy. When full consideration is given, including impacts on soils, fertilizer use and both direct and indirect land use change, bioenergy processes are, in reality, far from “neutral”.

A case in point is wood bioenergy. Conversion of coal plants to burn wood, dedicated new-build wood burning power plants as well as combined heat and power and biomass boilers for heating are creating huge new demand for wood pellets. Wood burning is subsidized as renewable energy and also favored for use in dirty older coal plants that must meet new regulations on sulphur dioxide emissions.[1]  Hence large coal plants such as DRAX in the UK are converting to burn wood pellets. In the UK, these are largely imported from the southeastern USA.  While the energy industry claims to use only “wastes and residues”, those are clearly not abundantly available. Recent investigation of the largest pellet producer in the US, Enviva, revealed that they were sourcing wood from remaining pockets of endangered Atlantic coastal forests and then shipping them across the Atlantic to burn with coal.

Cutting trees to burn (or refine) for bioenergy can hardly be considered carbon neutral or climate friendly.[2] Though this would seem to be common sense, there are now many scientific studies showing that uncut forests (and their soils) store more carbon than those that are disturbed and harvested[3], and continue to do so as they grow older, storing far more than fast rotation industrial tree plantations. Even ignoring the impacts on forests, harvest and transportation and looking only at the emissions coming from smokestacks, wood releases around 50% more CO2 per megawatt of electricity generation than coal!

If bioenergy is not carbon neutral, then it simply cannot be rendered carbon negative by adding CCS, even if captured carbon were securely stored away (which we will see below, is unlikely).

So the enthusiasm for BECCS and continued “carbon negative” rhetoric seems a bit puzzling.  Are proponents of BECCS just horrifically poor at math?  Or is there some other motive behind the ongoing support for a technology that appears entirely nonsensical and lacking credibility?  Perhaps BECCS supporters are scared stiff about the pace and scale of global climate change, understand that desperate measures are needed, and consider BECCS, in spite of shortcomings, to be “more benign” than other approaches such as sulphate particle injection into the stratosphere? That was certainly the overarching mood at the recent IASS conference on climate geoengineering in Potsdam, Germany.

Or perhaps there is something else going on?  Many climate “solutions” that are being offered to us are in fact those that large and powerful corporations such as the oil companies are willing to engage.  We have been hearing the term “clean coal” for decades now.  Why the persistence?

Here is one possibility: according to an analysis commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) there are large amounts of oil lying around in the difficult to access depths of previously depleted oil wells.  That oil could be accessed using “enhanced oil recovery”, which can be achieved by pumping compressed CO2 into those wells to force out the remaining difficult to access oil.[4]  They project that at least 137 billion barrels of oil could potentially be extracted, 67 billion barrels of which could be economically recoverable at a price of $85 a barrel.  That is three times the current U.S. proven reserves!

The National Energy Technology Laboratory “EOR Primer” states that “somewhere around 85 billion barrels of oil are recoverable using CO2 EOR, which currently is responsible for about 4 percent of U.S. oil production, displaying a long-term growth trend that stands in stark contrast to the long-term decline trend for U.S. oil production overall. Certainly, the volume of “stranded” oil left behind in U.S. reservoirs after conventional primary and second recovery techniques is massive—as much as two-thirds of all the oil discovered in the United States resides in this category.”[5]

In short, with oil reserves becoming more and more difficult to access and extract, EOR is becoming more and more attractive.

The US Chamber of Commerce recognizing this, states: “In terms of economic and energy security, this [EOR] means billions of dollars of new investment in the U.S. and production potential of 4 million barrels a day of oil for 50 years from existing US oil fields. The investment required would not just be in oil fields themselves but also in power plants, pipelines and other industries that capture CO2 from their industrial processes., The economic benefits will also flow to the state and federal governments with an estimated 1.4 trillion in new government revenues. In addition to the direct benefits to the U.S., the technology used to produce this additional oil will help maintain US leadership in oil production technology, creating opportunities around the world for U.S. companies.”[6]

What is needed to make these dreams of riches come true? Chamber of Commerce states:  “The challenge of realizing this potential is primarily the availability of CO2 at prices that support economic operations. This is also one of the opportunities since CO2 is emitted by power plants and many industrial processes.”  And the MidwesternGovernors Association, major advocates for CCS development state: “With unstable oil prices, commercially proven technology and know-how readily available and private capital waiting to invest, the MGA CCS Task Force aims to address the major remaining barrier to ramping up EOR: the lack of industrial sources of captured CO2 large enough and sufficiently long-term to justify private investment in pipelines and other infrastructure needed to expand EOR to additional fields.”

According to the National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative there is a market for somewhere around 20 billion metric tons of CO2.  The Natural Resources Defense Council (purportedly an environmental group!) offers that supplying adequate supplies of CO2 would require installation of between 69-109 gigawatts of coal and natural gas power plants equipped with carbon capture.[7] Indeed, what they are advocating for is construction of vast new fossil fueled power plant capacity as a way to provide cheap CO2 to facilitiate extraction of more oil.[8]

Somehow, many in industry, academics and policymaking as well as certain members of the public, have been convinced that this is a “solution” to the climate crisis.

Carbon capture is costly in part because it requires additional energy to capture and separate CO2 from a heterogeneous mix – as emerges from the stack of a coal combustion facility for example. Capturing the nearly pure stream of CO2 emitted from corn ethanol refinery fermentation processes is cheaper however, and footing the bill for the added costs associated with carbon capture can be further offset by taking advantage of the market for CO2 availed by EOR.

According to advocates from the Great Plains Institute, “Ethanol won’t be a large source of CO2 over time compared to power plants, but it will be an important one because it can be an early participant in providing CO2 to the oil industry—there really are no technological barriers whatsoever.”

A key question (assuming we even wanted to pursue it this far), is whether CO2 used for EOR, is “sequestered” or not?  Projects that employ EOR are after all, referred to as CCS – but is the “S” really happening? Or is the CO2 used for EOR just re-released into the atmosphere along with the carbon from yet more oil extraction?  Finding the answer to that question has not proven straightforward. One almost gets the sense there is deliberate obfuscation. In the EOR process, CO2 mixes with the oil, much like detergent mixes with grease when dishwashing. That expands the volume and forces the oil out. So once the oil/CO2 mixture has been extracted, presumably it must then be separated out again and perhaps then reinjected back into the well.  All of those added steps ust contribute  to costs and energy demands of the process. The term “Carbon Capture and Storage thus appears to be largely a misnomer and indeed the term “Carbon Capture and Utilization” is now coming into use along with terms such as “Negative Emissions”.

In other words: we don’t know, and we will leave it to future generations to deal with the consequences.

If CO2 is captured following EOR and re-injected into underground storage spaces, those wells would need to be capped and sealed to ensure no leakage.  The Chamber of Commerce states that “If CO2 sequestration for long term storage is planned for the site, then a monitoring plan is developed and implemented. Once monitoring demonstrates that CO2 has not migrated out of the rock formation over the near term (tens of years) then there can be great certainty that no migration will occur in the long term (hundreds or thousands of years).”  In other words: we don’t know, and we will leave it to future generations to deal with the consequences.

Common sense, informed by our current understanding of earth history, plate tectonics and earthquakes tells us that assuming long term CO2 storage would be foolish. CO2 is not only a danger to climate, but in concentrated form, it is a lethal poison. Any abrupt release of concentrated CO2 could have serious impacts on those exposed, as well as contributing a sudden spike of CO2 to climate. Multiple small leaks also pose risks. They can occur at many points from capture process to compression to pipeline transport to injection, separation and reinjection and storage site leaks.

Assuming long term storage of CO2 underground is foolhardy.  Experience with the wrongful claims made by the nuclear industry (Chernobyl, Fukushima etc.) or by the oil industry (Deep Horizon) should serve as clear lessons:  Relying on industry claims about safety and reliability is unwise. Precaution is very highly advised!

The underlying motive behind CCS remains  to perpetuate the ongoing use of fossil fuels. At the recent UN Climate Summit in New York City, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development released a bizarre animated portrayal of the city buried under endless floods of oil. Their conclusion to the problem of such gluttonous and ongoing oil consumption: a carbon tax with the proceeds directed to developing “carbon capture and utilization” (EOR).

Concerns aside, what experience do we have with CCS? The coal industry has been proclaiming the potential for “clean coal” in spite of virtually no existing practice, for decades. Yet CCS remains very expensive, largely nonexistent and where it does exist, “storage” remains a misnomer.

A “groundbreaking” was just held for the Petra Nova facility in Texas, slated to be the “world’s largest”. This facility will use captured CO2 for EOR in the nearby Hilcorp owned West Ranch oil field, where oil extraction is to be increased from 500 to 15,000 barrels per day. In news interviews, CEO of partner company JX “insisted” that some of the Co2 would be permanently sequestered and thus the project “does tackle climate change to some extent.”

The $1.3 billion dollar SaskPower Boundary Dam Power Station CCS project recently started operation – the first post combustion coal plant fitted with CCS. The project is proclaimed as “making a viable technical, economic and environmental case for the continued use of coal.” Further they claim to provide a “90% greenhouse gas reduction…the equivalent of taking more than 250,000 cars off the road annually.”  And yet the facility will sell the majority of captured CO2 to Cenovus for EOR. Emissions from the additional oil extraction are invisible in the hype surrounding the facility opening.

The notorious “FutureGen” CCS project in Illinois was initially funded in 2003 under the Bush administration, then cancelled due to high costs and a legal challenge. It was recently granted a new lease on life with $1 billion in DOE funding yet still remains far from operational.

In Kemper County Mississippi, a coal CCS project  was initially projected to cost 2.4 billion and to date estimates have risen to 5.4 billion and rising. Again, the captured CO2 is to be used for EOR at nearby Denbury Resources owned wells. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report: “The only thing the Kemper power plant is burning now is money. The plant has suffered almost every kind of cost overrun, beset by bad weather, labor costs, shortages and “inconsistent” quality of equipment and materials, and contractor and supplier delays.”

The AEP owned Mountaineer Plant, a coal burning facility in West Virginia was put on hold due to excessive costs.

And, the contentious Duke Energy coal gasification facility in Edwardsport Indiana was reportedly using more energy than it produced even after massive cost overuns and ratepayer outrage. THe Sierra Club refers to this project as “A monument to cost overuns, concealment and malfeasance.”

Capturing CO2 streams from natural gas extraction processes has been demonstrated (Sleipner and elsewhere) But even that has been frought with difficulties.  A much touted plan to capture CO2 from the Mongstad facility in Norway was recently abandoned after monumental cost overuns.

The largest bioenergy project with CCS by far involves a corn ethanol refinery owned by Archer Daniels Midland, in Decatur, Ill. This project aims to store captured CO2 in nearby Mount Simon saline aquifer. The estimated costs are 207 billion and has required construction of a separate power plant to provide energy for capture, dehydration and compression of the CO2.

In reality, CCS is the oil and coal industry’s dream technology.

Just as the myth that burning biomass is “carbon neutral” has been relentlessly perpetrated, now another myth has emerged.  This myth refers to CCS as a means of sequestering carbon – removing it from the atmosphere and fixing the problem of climate change.  Yet in reality CCS is the oil and coal industry’s dream technology! Through a tangled web of misinformation and rhetoric they have convinced many that we should build more fossil and bioenergy industrial facilities, which will need even greater capacity to power carbon capture, which will then facilitate extraction of yet more oil.  This is sold to us as a “solution” to the climate crisis and in the case of bioenergy applications, as “climate geoengineering”.

While a remarkeable number of people, including IPCC scientists and even some environmentalists even appear easily fooled, the atmosphere and earth systems certainly will not be!

 

Smolker_Rachel_HeadshotDr. Rachel Smolker is a codirector of Biofuelwatch, and an organizer with Energy Justice Network. She has researched, written and organized on the impacts of biofuels, bioenergy and biochar on land use, forests, biodiversity, food, people and the climate. She works with various coalitions, national and international including the Mobilization for Climate Justice, Climate Justice Now and others opposing market-based solutions to climate change and other “false solutions”. She is the daughter of one of the founders of Environmental Defense Fund and participated in a protest against that organization because of the key role EDF played in advocating market based solutions to climate change. She has a Ph.D. in ecology/biology from the University of Michigan and worked previously as a field biologist, gaining first hand experience with the complex balance between the needs of people and the ecological systems they depend upon. She is author of “To Touch A Wild Dolphin” (Doubleday 2001) and lives in Vermont. A list of publications is available on request.

 

[1] But note burning wood emits vastly greater quantities of many other pollutants including particulates, VOCs, NOx and CO. see: http://www.pfpi.net/trees-trash-and-toxics-how-biomass-energy-has-become-the-new-coal

[2] see also: http://www.rspb.org.uk/Images/biomass_report_tcm9-326672.pdf

and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-1707.2012.01169.x/abstract

and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3617913/

[3]  Smith, L.J. and Torn. M.S.  2013.  Ecological Limits to terrestrial biological carbon dioxide removal.  Climate Change vol. 118 (1): 89-103 

[4] Note: there are other approaches to EOR that do not involve CO2, such as injection of gas, water and other substances.

[5] Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery Untapped Domestic Energy Supply and Long Term Carbon Storage Solution, National Energy Technology Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, March 2010.

[6] CO2 enhanced Oil Recovery.  Institute for 21st Century Energy and US Chamber of Commerce

[7] U.S. Oil Production Potential From Accelerated Deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage, Advanced Resources International, prepared for the Natural Resource Defense Council, March 2010.

[8] NOTE: CO2 enhanced oil recovery is not the only approach to EOR, though it is the most common and so far most established.

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Ocean Iron Fertilization and the Southern Ocean- Hype or hope?

Author: Wil Burns

In recent weeks, there have been a number of publications touting the alleged effectiveness of the iron fertilization experiment conducted by Russ George and his team of researchers off the coast of Vancouver in 2012. The most prominent of these pieces, by Robert Zubrin in the National Review, focused on the huge uptick in salmon stocks allegedly stimulated by creation of a phytoplankton bloom in the region as a consequence of the fertilization. Pertinent to climate geoengineering observers, Zubrin also argued that the experiment helped to demonstrate the merits of ocean iron fertilization (OIF), concluding that “since those diatoms that were not eaten went to the bottom, a large amount of carbon dioxide was sequestered in their calcium carbonate shells.”

However, an “inconvenient truth” for proponents of ocean iron fertilization is that stimulation of phytoplankton blooms is only the first step in any successful ocean fertilization effort. As researchers concluded in a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, ocean iron fertilization can only prove successful as a climate geoengineering approach if, in addition to phytoplankton bloom stimulation, “a proportion of the particulate organic carbon (POC) produced must sink down the water column and reach the main thermocline or deeper before being remineralized . . . and the third phase is long-term sequestration of the carbon at depth out of contact with the atmosphere.”

The researchers, from the University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre of Southampton, sought to investigate the long-term fate of carbon that reaches the deep ocean, employing an ocean general circulation model to conduct particle-tracking experiments. They injected 24,982 Lagrangian particles across the Southern Ocean (identified as the most propitious region for deployment of ocean iron fertilization) at a depth of 1000 meters and 2000 meters to assess water mass trajectories over a 100-year simulation and the long-term fate of carbon that allegedly can be sequestered at great depths.

Among the conclusions of the study:

  1. Of the 24,982 Lagrangian particles injected into the Southern Ocean at a depth of 1000 meters, 66% were advected (in an average of 37.8 years) above a designated mixed layer depth boundary that the researchers deemed to be “a key boundary to separate failed and successful carbon sequestration.” By the end of the 100-year experiment, only 29% of the particles injected at a depth of 2000 meters had breached this boundary;
  2. 97% of the carbon brought back into contact with the atmosphere in the 1000 meter simulation was upwelled into the Southern Ocean. The authors concluded that “such a ‘leakage’ within the vicinity of the fertilization patch questions whether the [Southern Ocean] is as good a location for OIF as initially thought;”
  3. At the end of the 100-year simulation, only 46% of sequestered carbon injected at 1000 meters remained within the Southern Ocean, and only 56% in the 2000 meter experiment;
  4. The “global-scale dispersal” of more than 50% of sequestered carbon would make monitoring very difficult; as well ascribing ownership that would be critical for potentially allocating carbon credits;
  5. While it may be critical to sequester ocean carbon at depths greater than 1000 meters, this might prove extremely difficult given very high rates of respiration of particulate matter and remineralization by bacteria, resulting in only 1-10% of sinking particulates reaching depths below 1000 meters. Of sinking material only an estimated 14% made it to 1000 meters and 8% to 2000 meters;
  6. One important caveat is that climate change may increase oceanic vertical stratification in the future, which could decrease the amount of carbon that is re-exposed to the atmosphere.

This study is a clear shot across the bow against some previous research showing higher potential rates of oceanic sequestration, all of which used coarser resolution models that may not have accurately simulated critical variables, including particle circulation. It is yet another warning that the mainstream media’s exuberance about climate geoengineering options as a silver bullet may be belied by evidence on the ground.

 

WilBurnsBioThumb

Wil Burns is Director, MS in Energy Policy and Climate Program, Johns Hopkins University & co-founder of the Washington Geoengineering Consortium.

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Bioenergy CCS and Potential Tradeoffs with Food Production

Author: Wil Burns

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its Fifth Assessment Report’s Working Group III contribution, “[b]ioenergy coupled CCS (BECCS) has attracted particular attention since AR4 because it offers the prospect of energy supply with negative emissions.” However, as the IPCC report also cautions, BECCS poses serious challenges, among them, the potential threat to food supplies posed by diversion of biomass to energy production. A study, “Global bioenergy potentials from agricultural land in 2050: Sensitivity to climate change, diets and yields,” published a few years ago in the journal Biomass & Bioenergy (subscription required) provides an excellent overview of the potential interrelations between food and energy production, and the potential for projected climatic change to either ameliorate or exacerbate the tensions between food and energy production. The study employed what it termed a “socioeconomic metabolism approach” to formulate a biomass balance model (to 2050) to link supply and demand of agricultural biomass, excluding forestry.

Among the conclusions of the study:

    1. Climate change could have dramatic impacts on available biomass in 2050. If some projections of the CO2 fertilization effects are correct, bioenergy potential could rise by a whopping 45% to 151.7 EJ y-1, or it could decline to 87.5 EJ if CO2 fertilization is completely ineffective.  To put this in context, humans currently harvest and utilize a total of amount of biomass with an energy value of 205 EJ y-1. “This implies that the global bioenergy potential on cropland and grazing areas is highly dependent on the (uncertain) effect of climate change on future global yields on agricultural areas.”
    2. However, part of the potential benefits of the CO2 fertilization effect could be obviated by potential decreases in protein content and higher susceptibility to insect pests
    3. There is huge uncertainty in potential bioenergy from forests, ranging from zero to 71 EJ y-1 in 2050;
    4. After taking into account projected food needs, primary bioenergy potential is estimated to be between 64-161 EJ y-1 However, this is “only a fraction of current fossil-fuel use.” Moreover, realizing bioenergy potentials on grazing lands of this magnitude would require “massive investments” in agricultural technologies, e.g. irrigation and could also particularly threaten populations practicing low-input agriculture.

This study demonstrates that BECCs remains a highly contested proposition in terms of potential tradeoffs of food and energy production. Moreover, the “wildcard” of the potential impacts of climate change on biomass production are likely to remain unknown for many decades, making it difficult to determine if large-scale BECCS should be pursued as a policy option.

Related reading

 

WilBurnsBioThumbWil Burns is Director, MS in Energy Policy and Climate Program, Johns Hopkins University & co-founder of the Washington Geoengineering Consortium.

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Biochar could exacerbate existing inequalities

Author: Wil Burns

Biochar is charcoal produced through the thermochemical decomposition of organic material at elevated temperatures in the absence of oxygen. The process has been touted by some proponents as a potentially important component of climate policymaking over the course of this century. Because biochar can sequester carbon in soil for hundreds to thousands of years, supporters argue that it constitutes a “carbon negative” process:

“Ordinary biomass fuels are carbon neutral — the carbon captured in the biomass by photosynthesis would have eventually returned to the atmosphere through natural processes — burning plants for energy just speeds it up. Sustainable biochar systems can be carbon negative because they hold a substantial portion of the carbon in soil.” (International Biochar Initiative)

Biochar

(image courtesy International Biochar Initiative)

Biochar has been fulsomely characterized by climate activist Bill McKibben as “the key to the New Carbon Economy,” and received prominent coverage in the Working Group III report of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report as one of the technologies that could effectuate negative emissions scenarios that might be critical to avoiding the passing of critical temperature thresholds. However, an article by Melissa Leach, James Fairhead and James Fraser in 2012 in the Journal of Peasant Studies (free subscription required) sounds a cautionary note in terms of potential implications of a full-scale commitment to biochar for farmers, with a focus on Africa.

Among the conclusions of the article:

    1. Analyses that contemplate large drawdowns of carbon from biochar (e.g. one study projecting a potential sink of 5.5-9.5 GtC/year by 2100) “suppose an enormous growth in the resources and land areas devoted to the production of biochar feedstocks . . .” Some advocates have proposed dedicating somewhere between 200 million-1 billion hectares of forests, savannah and croplands to biochar projects. Such opponents have invoked the specter of large-scale “land grabbing” that they contend could threaten agricultural, pastoralist, collecting and other livelihoods;
    2. Foreign deals for biochar feedstock land could ultimately result in competition between biofuels and biochar projects;
    3. While some have argued that small farmers in developing countries could develop a substantial new income stream from sequestering carbon in biochar systems, many proponents of biochar as a climate solution are advocating development of new technologies to produce “clean char” that are different than indigenous practices in this context. Moreover, in contrast to REDD+, very little attention has been devoted to ascertaining how farmers could financially benefit from biochar projects;
    4. “The logic of the market” is likely to gravitate against small-scale projects that conducive to local priorities and livelihoods;” the need for verification and standardization protocols are likely to lead to large-scale industrialized biochar projects.

In contrast to the rather dry rendition of the potential socio-economic threats posed by biochar projects in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, this article is a stark reminder of how such projects pose the threat of exacerbation of existing inequalities associated with climate change. Moreover, while some proponents of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) climate geoengineering approaches argue that they are more benign than solar radiation management (SRM) approaches because they allegedly don’t threaten trans-boundary impacts, this article is a palpable reminder that this is not necessarily the case.

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