Mitigating climate risksTechnologies to remove CO2 from air and sequester it key to climate change mitigation

Published 6 November 2018

To achieve goals for climate and economic growth, “negative emissions technologies” (NETs) that remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the air will need to play a significant role in mitigating climate change, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences.

To achieve goals for climate and economic growth, “negative emissions technologies” (NETs) that remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the air will need to play a significant role in mitigating climate change, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report calls for the launch of a substantial research initiative to advance these technologies as soon as possible. Although climate mitigation remains the motivation for global investments in NETs, the committee that carried out the study and wrote the report determined that advances in NETs also could have economic rewards, as intellectual property rights and economic benefits will likely accrue to the nations that develop the best technology.

“Negative emissions technologies are essential to offset carbon dioxide emissions that would be difficult to eliminate and should be viewed as a component of the climate change mitigation portfolio,” said Stephen Pacala, the Frederick D. Petrie Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University and chair of the committee. “Most climate mitigation efforts are intended to decrease the rate at which people add carbon from fossil fuel reservoirs to the atmosphere.  We focused on the reverse – technologies that take carbon out of the air and put it back into ecosystems and the land.  We determined that a substantial research initiative should be launched to advance these promising technologies as soon as possible.”

NAS says that unlike carbon capture and storage technologies that remove carbon dioxide emissions directly from large point sources such as coal power plants, NETs remove carbon dioxide (the most important greenhouse gas that causes climate change) directly from the atmosphere or enhance natural carbon sinks.  Storing the carbon dioxide from NETs has the same impact on the atmosphere and climate as simultaneously preventing an equal amount of carbon dioxide from being emitted.  For example, combustion of a gallon of gasoline releases approximately 10 kilograms (kg) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Capturing 10 kg of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and permanently sequestering it using a NET has the same effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide as any mitigation method that simultaneously prevents a gallon of gasoline combustion.