Climate Feedback

Considered by some a silver bullet and by others a hopeless dream, the idea that we can simply capture our carbon dioxide emissions and store them safely away is nothing if not compelling. After all, it lends an air of practicality to the notion that human ingenuity can somehow continue the unabated use of fossil fuels over the coming decades without dangerously warming the climate.

This week’s Science (subscription) looks at how close we are to being able to capture carbon dioxide, both from the point of emission at coal- or gas-burning power plants, and directly from air. A series of news, opinion and review articles shows that while many obstacles need to be overcome before carbon capture and storage (CCS) is implemented effectively, there are also abundant reasons to hope that it will happen.

But the scale of the challenge is palpable. In a review, Stuart Hazeldine of the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that the construction of many tens to hundreds of large CCS plants worldwide would be needed to reduce future worldwide emissions from energy by 20%. And in order for the technology to make a substantial contribution to climate mitigation, a viable CCS industry needs to be in place between 2020 and 2030. Construction would have to start now if plants fitted with CCS technology are to be operational by 2014, giving enough time to demonstrate commercial credibility by 2020.

Last year, G8 leaders called for upwards of 20 demonstration CCS projects around the globe. A recent report from
the U.S. National Research Council reiterated this statement, calling for a suite of 15 to 20 power plants with CCS to be built before 2020. Today, a few such projects are in development, each of which is shown on a map accompanying the Science news feature. Most of these projects will take CO2 from natural gas reservoirs and bury it or pump into oil reservoirs to force more oil to the surface, thus making the whole process commercially viable. One such project is China’s first large-scale CCS effort, which is due to launch at a site on the plains of Inner Mongolia in the coming weeks.

But many more such plants are needed, and despite a recent boost in available money for CCS, Hazeldine notes that there is still a “lamentable lack of financial commitment to real construction”. His take home message? Technology isn’t the bottleneck in getting CCS off the ground. On the 10 year timescale, it’s legal permission, business development, and public opinion that could prevent CCS from being up and running by 2020.

Also featured in the Science special issue is a perspective by David Keith on the potential for direct capture of CO2 emissions from air, which Nicola Jones covered in a news feature for Nature (subscription) back in May. The special also has a number of perspectives on the technological aspects of CCS, from capturing CO2 to storing it onshore in geological formations or offshore in deep-sea sediments.

Olive Heffernan

Image credit: Carbon storage at Sleipner field, North Sea. Alligator film /BUG / StatoilHydro

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 24, 2009
Categories: Funding, Mitigation, Olive Heffernan, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK's Met Office has had its funding for climate research slashed by a quarter, following withdrawal of financial support by the government's Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The loss of £4.3 million (US$7.0 million) in funding from the MoD will affect the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change in Exeter, the world-class climate modelling institute whose researchers made key contributions to the last assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

"This news comes as a shock," says climate scientist Martin Parry, formerly at the Met Office and now at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. "The UK's core modelling work on climate change has been funded from this source, up to now."

The Met Office is now in negotiations with other goverment departments in an effort to recoup some of the lost funding.

Read the full story over on Nature News.

Olive Heffernan

Image: UK Met Office

Posted by Olive Heffernan on June 26, 2009
Categories: Features, Funding, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that remarkable headway has been made into understanding the physical science of climate change, there’s a feeling among climate experts – including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and among funding agencies of the need to shift the focus of climate research from identifying the cause to assessing the impacts, whether hurricanes, oceanic dead zones or forest fires.

A case in point is the new study just launched by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the US to examine how climate change will influence hurricane activity in the coming decades.

In an excellent news feature in Science magazine, Eli Kintisch takes up the issue by looking at how the $1.8 billion available for the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) is likely to be reoriented towards climate impacts research under a new administration.

But evaluating climate impacts will require more than a shift in CCSP’s vision. As Kintisch points out, the research budget available to CCSP has declined from $1.9 billion in 1994, whereas climate research advocates estimate approximately $4.5 billion will be needed by 2014 to sustain the needs of both academic and federal climate scientists. The widening gap between escalating costs and narrowing research budgets is placing a strain on basic earth monitoring and means that fewer scientists are tackling increasingly complex issues, such as the impacts of aerosols, writes Kintisch.

Continue reading "Impacts research – the next frontier" »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 15, 2008
Categories: Features, Funding, In the News, Olive Heffernan, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)