Full Title: Who Should Use NETPs? Managing Expectations for NETP Demand: Considerations for Allocating Carbon Dioxide Removals
Author(s): Dr Allanah Paul, Adam Whitmore, Ana Šerdoner, Aravind Dhakshinamoorthy, Mark Preston Aragonès, and Dr Samantha Eleanor Tanzer
Publisher(s): Bellona Europa
Publication Date: March 28, 2024
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Description (excerpt):
Negative Emissions Technologies and Practices (NETPs) will be essential to remove and store carbon dioxide (CO2) permanently and reach net-zero targets. Some sectors may not be able to completely abate all emissions. NETPs will play a crucial role in counterbalancing these so-called “residual emissions”.
Many NETPs are emerging technologies with a range of technological readiness, potential physical limitations, adverse impacts, and co-benefits. Hence, there is large uncertainty as to how much of the theoretical potential for each NETP to remove carbon permanently can be achieved in the next 30 years, and still respect physical limits in the natural environment, sustainable resource use and other planetary boundaries, as well as technological and societal constraints to the large-scale deployment of NETPs.
What is clear is that expectations on how much carbon removal can contribute to achieving net-zero goals needs to be managed. All sectors will need to pursue decarbonisation with maximum effort to minimise their emissions, independent of the rate at which NETP deployment develops. This analysis of published data indicates that the availability of CDR from NETPs will be insufficient to fully counterbalance even one sector’s level of current emissions, despite rapid scale-up of available technologies. Furthermore, our analysis implies that the supply of removals will certainly be insufficient for the current expected demand.
This raises the question of how to best allocate the scarce resource that CDR is and will remain for the foreseeable future. This report cannot provide a specific answer to the question of “Who should use NETPs?”, however it aims to highlight a range of questions and considerations that should be used to guide such decisions.