Beijing, September 4 (China News Service) – A new climate research paper published in the internationally renowned academic journal Nature suggests that the Earth's practical upper limit for storing carbon emissions in rock formations is estimated to be 1.46 trillion tons.
Researchers say that under current warming mitigation scenarios, this limit could be reached by 2200, prompting countries to reconsider the role of carbon sequestration in their emissions reduction plans.
The paper explains that to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, carbon dioxide sources must match carbon removal by sinks. One way to achieve this is to use capture and storage technologies to store carbon emissions in geological formations for hundreds or thousands of years. While previous suggestions suggest this storage capacity is surprisingly large, further research is needed to clarify its upper limit.
In this study, Matthew J. Gidden of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, the paper's lead and corresponding author, along with colleagues and collaborators in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, analyzed stable geological formations while accounting for risk factors such as environmentally sensitive locations, distance from population centers, and lack of government support, to quantify the amount of geological carbon storage the Earth can actually support. Their study found that this more cautious estimate yields a potential geologic carbon dioxide storage capacity of 1.46 trillion tons, a potential that could be exhausted by 2200.
Based on this upper limit, the authors suggest that geologic carbon storage could reverse up to 0.7°C of future global warming. Furthermore, approximately 70% of these reserves are on land, with countries with high storage potential including Russia, the United States, China, Brazil, and Australia-most of which are major fossil fuel producers.
The authors caution that a major limitation of this analysis is that it does not account for barriers to scaling up carbon capture and storage technology or for other technologies that may be developed in the future. Therefore, policymakers should clearly estimate the amount of carbon storage needed and plan strategies to mitigate carbon emissions.
