Envisioning our 2050 net-zero world, complete with carbon removal

Rebecca Peer will study potential uses for biogenic CO2, such as dry ice that keeps food fresh.

Rebecca Peer – a senior lecturer with the University of Canterbury’s Civil & Environmental Engineering department – is leading work to determine how carbon removal could help New Zealand achieve its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, by offsetting hard-to-abate emissions. Her role with the Carbon Removal Project is part of her wider research on renewable and sustainable energy systems.

What interests you when it comes to carbon removal?

It’s the inkling of hope. Carbon removal can help us course correct. It’s not going to undo all the damage and create utopia, of course – but it can put us on a better path.

As an engineer, I’m interested in assessing the options, some of which humanity has been using for hundreds of years, others which are new. Most are not wholly artificial, but take advantage of natural processes – essentially, giving Nature a little boost.

Some people have said the transition to renewable energy is now unstoppable. Do you agree? 

I would love that to be true. The reality is we’re not quite there yet. In a lot of situations, when you’re purely using economics to make decisions, then renewable energy is the best choice. 

But we don’t live in a vacuum, where people base their decisions solely on economics. Sometimes that happens. But often, decision makers or policymakers are weighing up a lot of other factors. Some of that is the economics, some of that is social acceptance, some of that is politics, such as whether this might impact re-election chances. Reality is still more nuanced than the transition being unstoppable.

What does history tell us about the consequences of a “bumpy” energy transition? 

The world has experienced a lot more bumpy energy transitions than smooth ones. Innovations such as the steam engine or the roll-out of electricity resulted in massive leaps. Bumpy transitions can be interpreted as negative, but that’s not always the case. We can have these really huge jumps because of a particular innovation or tool – then these long periods with stagnated progress. 

That’s the history of energy. We’re a very energy-hungry species. It does lots of great things: it gets us from A to B, it lets us explore the world, it keeps us warm, it powers sanitation. And now, we’ve got 10,000 photos stored on our phones. All these amazing things, thanks to access to energy.

Transitions are almost always going to be bumpy. There’s probably only a select few examples of smooth transitions: where there’s great social cohesion, and there’s trust in government, there’s innovative policy that’s backed by science. That’s a special scenario.

Rebecca and her colleagues are investigating the production of 'green' CO2, made from wood waste.

What are the factors New Zealand’s leaders and policymakers need to consider when deciding which carbon removal technologies to plan for and incentivise?

Based on my research with the Carbon Removal Project, there are three key big questions that are important to answer for each technology: How much energy is it going to require? How much carbon can we remove? And how long is it going to be stored for?

That would essentially provide a kind of cost-benefit analysis for each option.

My colleagues will be answering other important questions about funding, social acceptance, environmental impact, and risks. These issues are all going to be very important to the Government, as regulators, and to the public.

By the end of your career, what do you hope humanity might have achieved?

Personally, I would love to see everybody to have access to energy – and clean energy. We still have lots of people without access, particularly in the Global South. To get there, I think we need to start seeing energy as a public good: something that everyone deserves.

In addition, it would be a great win for us – as a population, as a species, as a world – to have meaningfully and purposefully shifted away from fossil fuels and into a new era of non-fossil-fuelled living. I hope that can be achieved.