Could fossil fuel companies be forced to remove planet-heating carbon pollution from the atmosphere? Researchers argue in a new paper that would be a cheaper, fairer solution to the climate crisis. They suggest, in the research published Thursday, that the principle of extended producer responsibility (EPR) — a policy tool often used to deal with waste — should be extended to the oil, gas and coal industries.
The study said impelling fossil fuel firms to use technologies to suck carbon from the air and bury it back in the ground would be a cost-effective decarbonisation strategy.
“It would also mean that the principal beneficiary of high fossil fuel prices, the fossil fuel industry itself, plays its part in addressing the climate challenge,” said the paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Photo: Reuters
The invasion of Ukraine by key oil and gas producer Russia has sent shockwaves through energy markets, resulting in prices surging and shining a spotlight on bumper fossil fuel industry profits.
The study’s authors, including scientists and experts in Britain and the Netherlands as well as a former ExxonMobil manager, said the paper was a response to the energy crisis and potential lessons for the challenge of getting to net zero emissions.
‘GEOLOGICAL NET ZERO’
“We need to start a conversation on how we redirect this colossal amount of money that currently is simply injected into fossil fuel rents to addressing the climate problem,” co-author Myles Allen, a professor at Oxford University, told journalists.
“We are going to have to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming before the world stops using fossil fuels.”
To do that, he said, requires “geological net zero” — for every tonne of CO2 emitted by a fossil fuel, one tonne of the greenhouse gas would need to be sucked out of the atmosphere and permanently put back in the ground.
The authors propose that all extractors and importers of oil, gas and coal be required to dispose of an increasing proportion of the CO2 generated by their activities and products — up to 100 percent by 2050. This would require increasing use of technologies to extract carbon dioxide at the emission source or directly from the air and store it permanently in the ground.
While there are projects doing just this already, these are not at anything like the scale needed. The largest direct air capture facility in the world, run by Swiss-based Climeworks, removes in a year what humanity emits in a few seconds.
LACKING ‘MOTIVATION’
But the economics would change if the fossil fuel sector were forced to rely on technology, the authors argue.
Hugh Helferty, co-author of the study and a former employee of oil giant ExxonMobil, said the industry is “capable” of removing CO2.
“What it lacks today is the business case, the motivation for executing it,” he told reporters at a press briefing, calling for regulation, like the rules banning lead in petrol.
Hannah Chalmers, Reader in Sustainable Energy Systems at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the research, said that EPR would be a “gamechanger” in delivering affordable low-carbon energy.
US oil and gas major Occidental last year announced plans to build by next year what the company says will be a bigger direct air capture project in the US Permian basin in oil field in Texas, with a one-million-tonne annual carbon dioxide removal capacity.
The Paris Agreement calls for capping global warming below two degrees Celsius, and most countries have signed on for a more ambitious limit of 1.5C. To meet that challenge, UN climate experts said in a landmark report last year that even under the most aggressive carbon-cutting scenarios, several billion tonnes of CO2 will need to be extracted each year from the atmosphere by 2050.
This month the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) announced a new policy ostensibly aimed at influencing the upcoming presidential election. A top-notch Voice of America (VOA) report observed “China launched a series of influence campaigns against Taiwan last week, unveiling a plan to promote integrated development across the Taiwan Strait.” The plan, a “demonstration zone,” offers incentives for Taiwanese to live, work and invest in Fujian Province, across the Strait from Taiwan, along with supplies of water, electricity and gas. Using cooperative zones to poach technology and influence Taiwanese is an old plan that has appeared in various
At the Brics summit in South Africa in August, Xi Jinping (習近平) made headlines when he failed to appear at a leaders’ meeting to deliver a scheduled speech. Another scene also did the rounds: a Chinese aide hurrying to catch up with Xi, only to be body slammed by security guards and held back, flailing, as the president cruised on through the closing doors, not bothered by the chaos behind him. The first incident prompted rampant speculation about Xi’s health, a political crisis or conspiracy. The second, mostly memes. But it perhaps served as a metaphor. Xi has had a rough few
While participating in outrigger canoe activities in Hawaii, Yvonne Jiann (江伊茉) often heard indigenous locals say that their ancestors came from Taiwan. “I didn’t really understand why,” the long-time US resident tells the Taipei Times. Growing up in Taipei, she knew little about indigenous culture. “Only when I returned to Taiwan did I learn about our shared Austronesian cultural background and saw the similarities.” Jiann visited Taiwan just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down international travel. Unable to leave and missing her canoe family across the Pacific Ocean, she started the Taiwan Outrigger Canoe Club (TOCC) and began researching how
As Vladimir Nabokov revised his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he found himself in a strange psychological state. He had first written the book in English, published in 1951. A few years later, a New York publisher asked him to translate it back into Russian for the emigre community. The use of his mother tongue brought back a flood of new details from his childhood, which he converted into his adopted language for a final edition, published in 1966. “This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a