The Changing Role of CO2 in the Transition to a Circular Economy: Review of Carbon Sequestration Projects

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Abstract

Despite the diversity of studies on global warming and climate change mitigation technologies, research on the changing role of CO2 in the industrial processes, which is connected with the introduction of circular economy principles, is still out of scope. The purpose of this review is to answer the following question: Is technogenic CO2 still an industrial waste or has it become a valuable resource? For this purpose, statistical information from the National Energy Technology Library and the Global CCS Institute databases were reviewed. All sequestration projects (199) were divided into three groups: carbon capture and storage (65); carbon capture, utilization, and storage (100); and carbon capture and utilization (34). It was found that: (1) total annual CO2 consumption of such projects was 50.1 Mtpa in 2018, with a possible increase to 326.7 Mtpa in the coming decade; (2) total amount of CO2 sequestered in such projects could be 2209 Mt in 2028; (3) the risk of such projects being cancelled or postponed is around 31.8%; (4) CO2 is a valuable and sought-after resource for various industries. It was concluded that further development of carbon capture and utilization technologies will invariably lead to a change in attitudes towards CO2, as well as the appearance of new CO2-based markets and industries.

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Carbon capture and storage (CCS): the way forward

Niall Mac Dowell, Berend Smit, J P Martin Trusler … (2018)

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is vital to climate change mitigation, and has application across the economy, in addition to facilitating atmospheric carbon dioxide removal resulting in emissions offsets and net negative emissions. This contribution reviews the state-of-the-art and identifies key challenges which must be overcome in order to pave the way for its large-scale deployment. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is broadly recognised as having the potential to play a key role in meeting climate change targets, delivering low carbon heat and power, decarbonising industry and, more recently, its ability to facilitate the net removal of CO 2 from the atmosphere. However, despite this broad consensus and its technical maturity, CCS has not yet been deployed on a scale commensurate with the ambitions articulated a decade ago. Thus, in this paper we review the current state-of-the-art of CO 2 capture, transport, utilisation and storage from a multi-scale perspective, moving from the global to molecular scales. In light of the COP21 commitments to limit warming to less than 2 °C, we extend the remit of this study to include the key negative emissions technologies (NETs) of bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), and direct air capture (DAC). Cognisant of the non-technical barriers to deploying CCS, we reflect on recent experience from the UK's CCS commercialisation programme and consider the commercial and political barriers to the large-scale deployment of CCS. In all areas, we focus on identifying and clearly articulating the key research challenges that could usefully be addressed in the coming decade.