Carbon Takeback places the responsibility for safe storage of CO2 onto companies that extract or import fossil fuels.
Excerpt from this story from Carbon Takeback:
Here’s how:
The Challenge
- The Paris Agreement sets out a global framework to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.
- Global temperatures in 2020 have already passed 1.1°C and are increasing at over 0.2°C per decade, driven predominantly by CO 2 emissions, over 85% generated by fossil fuels and industry.
- We have only a few decades to reduce global CO 2 emissions to net zero if we are to meet the more ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.
- We cannot ban developing countries from using fossil fuels in 40 years’ time, so we have to work out a way to halt global warming before the world has stopped using fossil fuels.
- The only way to do this is to ensure that one tonne of CO 2 is safely and permanently stored, not just dumped into the atmosphere, for every tonne generated by continued use of fossil fuels.
- Right now, this stored fraction is less than 0.1%, and increasing at least 100 times too slowly to limit warming to 2°C, let alone 1.5°C.
The Idea
- In order to incentivise development and growth of long-term CO 2 storage, extractors and importers of fossil fuels are required to permanently store a percentage of the CO 2 generated by the products they sell. This is called a Carbon Takeback Obligation (CTBO).
- Over time, as levels of cumulative emissions monotonically increase, the CTBO will increase. Based on current projections, the CTBO could start at ~1% in 2023 before increasing to 10% in 2030 and reaching 100% (which means net zero emissions) by 2050.
- Companies need not be obliged to store CO 2 themselves. We envisage the growth of a marketplace, based around tradable certificates of storage, significantly reducing costs.
- Stored CO 2 could initially come from factories, refineries and cement plants. Once these have all been tapped, getting to 100% storage would mean recapturing CO 2 from the atmosphere.