Houston Chronicle

NET-ZERO CRUTCH

- Kate Mackenzie Kate Mackenzie advises organizati­ons working to limit climate change to the Paris Agreement goals.

Too many oil companies are using carbon capture as main tool to fight climate change.

As government­s and companies jostle to show how committed they are to fighting global warming, plans to take carbon dioxide out of the air are becoming a giant loophole — just as experts have warned for years.

Some 42 companies announced net-zero targets in 2019 and 2020, according to the U.N. More than half of those plan to plant trees, preserve forests or capture CO2 in order to get there, even as their own businesses continue to warm the atmosphere.

These measures, and other technologi­es to capture greenhouse gases, are collective­ly known as carbon dioxide removal. But CDR shouldn’t be a get-outof-jail-free card for polluters. There’s a limit to how much CO2 can plausibly be removed. There’s only so much land available to plant new trees, and most other methods are expensive and difficult.

As net-zero plans proliferat­e, some companies assume they can rely disproport­ionately on CDR to offset their own emissions. It’s not just about planting trees. There are even plans to create “negative emissions” by generating energy from burning biomass, then capturing the emissions produced, a littleused process that also requires large amounts of land.

Between 500 and 3,600 million metric tons of CO2 could be removed annually through planting new forests by 2050, according to a report in which Greenpeace UK cites Intergover­nmental Panel on Climate Change estimates. British Airways operator Internatio­nal Airlines Group and Italian oil company Eni each claim they’ll offset 30 million metric tons per year by then. That could be as much as 12 percent of the IPCC’s projection, Greenpeace warns.

The IPCC also estimates that there’s only about 500 million hectares of land left that can be dedicated to new forests for carbon capture. Royal Dutch Shell alone, Greenpeace says, has proposed planting a tenth of that amount to achieve its net-zero target.

Some company plans look even worse when you consider their industries. For example, power generation has long been considered so easy to decarboniz­e with wind and solar that the IPCC and the Internatio­nal Energy Agency

assume it can get to zero emissions without any CDR. That that hasn’t stopped U.S. electricit­y companies like Duke Energy Corp and Southern Co. from planning to offset the equivalent of 5 percent and 10 percent respective­ly of their current annual emissions with CDR.

In a way, this is a problem of the scientific community’s own making. CDR features in virtually every pathway laid out in IPCC reports to keeping global warming to well below 2 or 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Researcher­s have been critical of these pathways’ reliance on carbon capture for years now. A paper by Kevin Andrews and Glen Peters published in 2016 titled “The Trouble with Negative Emissions” has had almost 500 citations, according to Google Scholar. The same year, climate scientist James Hansen warned that negative emissions had “spread like a cancer” in the climate scenarios.

Few dispute that negative emissions will be needed, and not all plans that include negative emissions look irresponsi­ble. Some emissions will be so difficult to cut that researcher­s and policymake­rs believe they should get priority in using CDR to mitigate their

climate impact. And not all companies with net zero plans are grasping for more than their share.

Others maintain they’ll lean on CDR, but will avoid forest-based measures because it’s so hard to tell if they’re genuinely making a difference. Occidental Petroleum Corp hopes to make a profitable business out of direct air carbon capture, a technicall­y

challengin­g propositio­n.

Growing demand is set to boost the market for offsets. The simplicity of planting trees is appealing and the pressure to set net-zero targets will mean more companies turn to using large swaths of land to bolster their climate credibilit­y. Charlie Kronick, who leads finance work at Greenpeace UK, said the risk comes from

“trumpeting headline pledges” of net zero without reading the fine print. The onus is on regulators, investors, consumers and the media to remember that net-zero climate targets are only as good as the “net.”

 ?? Carbon Engineerin­g / Carbon Engineerin­g ?? This rendering shows a first look at Oxy’s proposed direct-air capture plant in the Permian Basin, currently being engineered by Carbon Engineerin­g and 1PointFive.
Carbon Engineerin­g / Carbon Engineerin­g This rendering shows a first look at Oxy’s proposed direct-air capture plant in the Permian Basin, currently being engineered by Carbon Engineerin­g and 1PointFive.

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