Yes, we also wish carbon removal tech wasn’t necessary. But it is

In an ideal world, global governments took the threat of climate change seriously in the 1990s, investing heavily in green electricity and electric vehicles. Emissions drifted down steadily. Early action left plenty of the ‘carbon budget’ for 1.5C in the bank, so that aviation, concrete and steel emissions – thorny problems without affordable green solutions – have decades left to make the transition.

Now if you have a time machine and the ability to bend the world’s politicians to your will, we beg you to make that our reality.

Meanwhile, we know the predicament faced in the real world. Humanity’s yearly emissions keep taking ever-bigger bites out of the carbon budget. We must rapidly move away from fossil fuels and also pull greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and store it underground, where it originated.

To clarify: carbon removal is different to carbon capture and storage. The former targets the emissions already in the atmosphere, cooking our planet. It has the potential to produce “negative” emissions: less greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. This is what we want to kickstart in New Zealand.

The latter is tied to fossil fuels and other high-emitting processes, and aims to prevent new emissions from being released.

Backed by experts

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the climate boffins whose warnings governments ignored all those years ago – conclude that the goal to limit global warming to under 2C cannot be achieved without carbon removal.

The IPCC puts trees into this category, which means New Zealand’s many forests have been doing cost-effective carbon removal for years. But when we move to more industrial-sounding processes, such as crushing and spreading carbon-absorbing rocks or pumping carbon into geothermal wells, people start to have doubts.

We must accelerate the uptake of solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, electrified public transport, EVs, heat pumps, insulation, recycling and other efficiency measures. No arguments there. Our research team is working on those very policies in parallel to this project.

But turn the subject to carbon removal, and we hear the same concerns popping up: What if this developing technology consumes valuable green finance, then can’t achieve its promises? Since major emitters are the most likely to fund this, is it truly carbon removal? And will the concept be weaponised by bad actors seeking to once again delay decarbonisation?

As researchers entering this field, we hear you. We have a short answer and a long answer.

The former is: Yes, we expect reluctant companies to attempt everything to avoid a policy they don’t like. But that’s true for a lot of tough social problems – but it's not a valid reason to delay much-needed solutions.

The Government drives the cost of emitting

The longer spiel – and one that is specific to Aotearoa where our research is focused – is that most polluters pay a penalty on every tonne of emissions they produce. That cost incentivises companies and people to switch to green technology.

With the penalty applied, it’s typically more cost effective to generate power from solar panels than fossil fuels: which is why new solar farms are popping up around the country, and why the Huntly power station is looking to reduce the baseload electricity generated from coal.

Carbon removal is already a feature of this system: forest owners get saleable carbon credits for the carbon their trees absorb as they grow. Polluters buy these, or Government-issued units, to cover the greenhouse gas they emit each year.

Our technologies could be approved to get these credits too.

Through the number of carbon credits it issues and the number that polluters must surrender, the Government (at least in theory) can get emissions to reduce and eventually reach net-zero. New Zealand could even go carbon-negative, if for example, the Government only issued credits for carbon removals, and required polluters to surrender multiple credits for every tonne of pollution.

Alternatively, the Government could purchase a large number of removal credits itself from now on, which could also push our emissions towards carbon negative.

Long story short, the Government can pull and push the levers of their system to shift the balance of emissions and reductions. That’s going to be true whether more tech-y carbon removal enters the system or not.

Only paid for what you remove

Ministers and agencies also currently set the guidance for how many carbon credits a forest gets issued, based on robust science. They would also determine the rules for, say, a geothermal power station pumping down excess carbon. We want this regulation to be science based and to the highest standards.

That means that even if our power station believes it can pump 250,000 tonnes of carbon per year, then only achieves 100,000 in the first year, the system will only reward the owners with 100,000 credits. The company is hit with the under-delivery, not the environment.

We argue 100,000 tonnes of carbon underground rather than in the air is still great news for the planet.

Mostly cheaper to ditch fossil fuels

We also believe this system alleviates the concern that polluters will use this tech to avoid transitioning. While the technologies we’re working on are in their infancy and we can’t know for certain how much these will cost per tonne, we know they won’t be free.

We estimate that using geothermal power plants to capture and pump down carbon could cost between $45 and $122 per tonne. A bunch of carbon-cutting options cost less than that.

Replacing fossil-fuelled baseload power generation with wind and solar is one example. A company would be burning money by opting for carbon removal in this instance.

It typically saves money in the long run to introduce energy efficiency measures or purchase EVs rather than petrol cars. So companies familiar with the economics aren’t going to rate carbon removal over these options either.

While we are still producing emissions, especially from the thorny problems mentioned earlier, carbon removal can balance these out.

Even with investment into hydrogen planes, there’s no sustainable option on the horizon if you want to cross continents. (Of course, choosing not to fly is the greenest choice, though we’re sceptical that pressing people to shun flights en masse is likely to shift the aviation dial or win hearts and minds.)

We think it’s better to have tightly regulated, high-integrity carbon removal offsetting the pollution from this flight than the status quo.

The industry can scale up and as affordable green replacements for aviation, steel and concrete arrive, we hope this technology will achieve its potential: producing net-negative emissions. Because we’re going to overshoot that aforementioned carbon budget – and carbon removal is our children’s only option to repair the delay under our watch.

They’ll be in a better position if we get started today.