Could Australia Use Plants To Pull CO2 Out Of The Air And Store It Underground?

Australia is in dire straits when it comes to climate change. An obstinate government has been tenacious in the quest to perpetuate fossil fuel extraction while sidelining clean energy and climate change efforts. Meanwhile the country is experiencing extreme weather events on a regular basis, including droughts, heat waves, floods, and massive cyclones. With its already hot and dry climate, Australia is projected to be one of the most dramatically affected developed nations from climate change. With this in mind, the Climate Institute, a think tank focused on finding solutions to climate change, set out to determine if a controversial process called bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECSS) could help the country mitigate its emissions to meet ambitious climate goals.

BECCS involves burning biomass — trees, plants, crop materials, woodchips — to generate electricity or other forms of energy, then capturing the carbon that is released and pumping it underground in geological reservoirs. The technique, which is unproven at a large scale, was proposed as a possible means of mitigation in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released over the weekend. The report both warns that avoiding 2 degrees Celsius in temperature increases by 2100 was nearly impossible without carbon-removal technologies and that the costs and risks widespread deployment of carbon dioxide removal technologies are uncertain. Proponents of the technique suggest that the process might be “negative emission” because it could reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, while opponents argue that it would require large amounts of land and ecosystem destruction and is based on the risky conclusion that we can indeed find an economic way to bury carbon dioxide in the ground as a large-scale endeavor.

The Climate Institute study, conducted by energy modelling firm Jacobs SKM, found that BECCS could play a significant role in meeting Australia’s climate goals. It determined that by 2050, BECSS has the potential to remove and displace up to 71.5 million tons of CO2 per year, about 1.5 times the current emissions of Australia’s transportation sector. The total from now to 2050 could be 860 million tons. Australia has a large agricultural economy and substantial geological storage areas, and the researchers state that this could be done without devoting any new land to bioenergy production but rather relying on food wastes, sustainable plantation forest biomass and crop residues. The study does not overlook the need for parallel efforts to mitigate emissions, and says that BECSS would be another effort alongside the need for renewable energy sources and gains in energy efficiency.

The report both warns that avoiding 2 degrees Celsius in temperature increases by 2100 was nearly impossible without carbon-removal technologies and that the costs and risks widespread deployment of carbon dioxide removal technologies are uncertain.