A global research effort spearheaded by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has assessed two promising technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
A global research effort spearheaded by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has assessed two promising technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While still in the early stages of development, direct air carbon capture and sequestration (DAC)—together with other carbon dioxide removal strategies—are considered critical to achieving a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy by 2050 and limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Despite this important role, DAC technologies have yet to be assessed in a forward-looking, dynamic system context. That is why scientists from NREL, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland as well as in Pennsylvania and California provided a dynamic life-cycle assessment of two promising DAC technologies to separate carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it in geological storage sites. The article, which appears in the journal Nature Communications, provides a first evaluation of the technologies’ environmental trade-offs over a long-term planning horizon.
“We will not hit our carbon-neutral targets by midcentury or our climate targets by the end of the century if we don’t push heavily for additional removal of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” said Patrick Lamers, a senior researcher in NREL’s Strategic Energy Analysis Center and corresponding author of the new paper, “Environmental trade-offs of direct air capture technologies in climate change mitigation toward 2100.” He had initiated this work and supervised another key contributor, Yang Qiu, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, during his internship at NREL last year.
Read more at DOE/National Renewable Energy Laboratory
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