Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects

By Sabine Fuss, W. Lamb, M. Callaghan, Jérôme Hilaire, Felix Creutzig, T. Amann, T. Beringer, Wagner de Oliveira Garcia, Jens Hartmann, Tarun Khanna and 8 more. 2018

1,270 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The most recent IPCC assessment has shown an important role for negative emissions technologies (NETs) in limiting global warming to 2 °C cost-effectively. However, a bottom-up, systematic, reproducible, and transparent literature assessment of the different options to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is currently missing. In part 1 of this three-part review on NETs, we assemble a comprehensive set of the relevant literature so far published, focusing on seven technologies: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), afforestation and reforestation, direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), enhanced weathering, ocean fertilisation, biochar, and soil carbon sequestration. In this part, part 2 of the review, we present estimates of costs, potentials, and side-effects for these technologies, and qualify them with the authors’ assessment. Part 3 reviews the innovation and scaling challenges that must be addressed to realise NETs deployment as a viable climate mitigation strategy. Based on a systematic review of the literature, our best estimates for sustainable global NET potentials in 2050 are 0.5–3.6 GtCO2 yr−1 for afforestation and reforestation, 0.5–5 GtCO2 yr−1 for BECCS, 0.5–2 GtCO2 yr−1 for biochar, 2–4 GtCO2 yr−1 for enhanced weathering, 0.5–5 GtCO2 yr−1 for DACCS, and up to 5 GtCO2 yr−1 for soil carbon sequestration. Costs vary widely across the technologies, as do their permanency and cumulative potentials beyond 2050. It is unlikely that a single NET will be able to sustainably meet the rates of carbon uptake described in integrated assessment pathways consistent with 1.5 °C of global warming.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca2b06bf3d1bd787e7941d46ef0e673b8e288399

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Citations in the corpus

A Review of Criticisms of Integrated Assessment Models and Proposed Approaches to Address These, through the Lens of BECCS (2019, background): “, [89]) would all help clarify the role of BECCS.”
How to measure, report and verify soil carbon change to realize the potential of soil carbon sequestration for atmospheric greenhouse gas removal (2019, background): “Global estimates of soil C sequestration potential vary considerably, but a recent sys‐ tematic review by Fuss et al. (2018) suggests an annual technical po‐ tential of 2–5 Gt CO2/year.”
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (2019, background): “[449] Sabine Fuss, William F Lamb, Max W Callaghan, Jérôme Hilaire, Felix Creutzig, Thorben Amann, Tim Beringer, Wagner de Oliveira Garcia, Jens Hartmann, Tarun Khanna, et al.”