I think the evidence on CCS says it hasn't really worked anywhere yet, and will be difficult to scale.
Whereas the evidence re: trees is that there is a lot of mis-use, malarky and corruption involved. Getting credits for trees you fell in 10 years for instance. Or planting non-indigenous trees all over Ireland, to the detriment of biodiversity and political acceptance.
I'm not a dreamy techno-optimist nerd but in light of the nonlinearity of climate change, I say we need to do massive amounts of both, as well as possible, and hope for the best.
As for CCS, all major oil companies have pilot projects at the moment and the stuff is expected to come online at scale by 2030. Current projections for the amount of carbon sequestered are likely to be wildly optimistic, but we won't be able to abandon fossil fuels ever (at least not as long as we want to have cement and most industrial chemicals, all of which are made out of natural gas to start with), so we need to find a way to sequester the carbon produced in industrial facilities. And CCS is essentially our only hope we have in that area.
Hello,
The only large scale CCS facility I am aware of is the one Occidental Petroleum is setting up.
And whilst I find it great that someone does it, I am still wondering if it should make me nervous that it is a Oil company.
On a side note. Is there any good research on why we shouldn't just simply plant more trees instead of building these artificial CCS facilities?
I think the evidence on CCS says it hasn't really worked anywhere yet, and will be difficult to scale.
Whereas the evidence re: trees is that there is a lot of mis-use, malarky and corruption involved. Getting credits for trees you fell in 10 years for instance. Or planting non-indigenous trees all over Ireland, to the detriment of biodiversity and political acceptance.
I'm not a dreamy techno-optimist nerd but in light of the nonlinearity of climate change, I say we need to do massive amounts of both, as well as possible, and hope for the best.
We need to do both as was said by Martin before. I have written about the problems with tree-planting (and counting the trees) before: https://klementoninvesting.substack.com/p/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon-credits
As for CCS, all major oil companies have pilot projects at the moment and the stuff is expected to come online at scale by 2030. Current projections for the amount of carbon sequestered are likely to be wildly optimistic, but we won't be able to abandon fossil fuels ever (at least not as long as we want to have cement and most industrial chemicals, all of which are made out of natural gas to start with), so we need to find a way to sequester the carbon produced in industrial facilities. And CCS is essentially our only hope we have in that area.
I wasn't quite aware of the described cumulative effects. Thank you for pointing them out. I think they are a BFD.