IPCC Special report confirms CCS essential to mitigate climate change

A United Nations report released in October 2018 confirms that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is essential to mitigating climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.

In early October 2018, the IPCC released a special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

Welcoming the release of the IPCC’s Special Report of 1.5 Degrees, the world authority on CCS, the Global CCS Institute, said 2 degrees, let alone 1.5 degrees, cannot be met without CCS and the best climate science available was continuing to support that fact.

A media release issued by the CCS Institute stated the following:

Global CCS Institute CEO, Brad Page, said as the world veered off-track in meeting international climate change commitments, it was pressingly apparent that CCS was an essential part of the arsenal of clean technologies needed to combat climate change.

“The IPCC’s report reconfirms the role which carbon capture and technology must play in beating climate change, and the fact that all technologies are necessary.

“As the IPCC has acknowledged, the extreme weather events witnessed around the world over the past few months are evidence enough of the catastrophe that climate change poses.

We need to take heed and take action to what is happening. The IPCC’s report is yet another call to arms.”

Mr Page said the IPCC, as well as the International Energy Agency (IEA), confirmed that CCS was the only technology capable of decarbonizing major industry, particularly the high emitting cement, steel and petrochemical sectors.

“These are sectors that cannot be turned off at the flick of a switch. They need a technology that can mitigate their emissions at the same time as safeguarding the jobs and economies they support.

“We have a technology that can bridge the gap between our current fossil fuel dependence and a future which is emission free.”

Mr Page said the Report has reinforced the fact that a 1.5 degree world cannot be reached without deployment of all clean technologies and carbon capture and storage is most definitively one.

“CCS must remain at the forefront of national, regional and international policy discussions and, as the IPCC said today, governments must act on this evidence.”

There are now 18 large-scale CCS facilities in commercial operation around the world, with five in construction and more 20 in various stages of development.