Carbon capture struggles to accelerate in race to avert climate crash

(Eco Business, 16 Sep 2019) Catching and storing climate-changing emissions is seen as key to many plans to stave off a worsening climate crisis—but it’s way behind schedule, experts say.

Capturing planet-warming gases and storing them below ground is a key part of many plans to keep climate change in check - but very little progress has been made on it, scientists, industry officials and environmentalists warn.

In Europe, capacity to store carbon dioxide - sucked from power plants, industries or straight from the air - is only a thousandth of what is needed, said Andrew Cavanagh, an emissions storage researcher at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh.

And very little of the “extraordinarily large amounts of storage” likely to be needed is even in development, he added.

“We’re so far off trend it makes you wonder what we’re doing,” he told a conference in the English city of Oxford this week on efforts to rapidly slash emissions.

Bjorn Haugstad, head of climate, industry and technology at Norway’s energy ministry, agreed that plans for “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) seemed both “inevitable but impossible”.

“We are struggling with making a good business case for CCS,” he admitted.

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Eco Business, 16 Sep 2019: Carbon capture struggles to accelerate in race to avert climate crash