14 October 2021. Carbon | Hedges
The great carbon capture and storage myth; the future of hedges
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. (For the next few weeks this might be four days a week while I do a course: we’ll see how it goes). Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: The great carbon capture and storage myth
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one of those technologies that, we’re told, is going to be one of the solutions to the climate emergency. You get to keep on using your carbon emitting fossil fuels, but you capture the carbon and you store it somewhere. Hence the name.
For some reason it’s the fossil fuel producers who talk most about the potential of this technology.
But the truth is that we’ve known about what it should do and how it’s supposed to work for a long time now, and yet there is hardly and capacity installed worldwide.
I’m writing about this today because I read a terrific Medium post at the weekend that captured in a single chart the illusions about CCS. (The piece, by the Australian blogger Ketan Joshi, is actually a few months old).
Two particular charts caught my eye. The first shows carbon emitted and carbon captured, globally, over the last 60 years.
(Via Ketan Joshi, Medium)
And OK, this may be a cheap shot, but if CCS had some real development potential as a technology, we’d have started to see a bit of an uptick in the last few years. The forecasting record isn’t great either:
Back in 2006, the Australian Coal Association suggested that by 2020, a ‘quarter’ of emissions from coal and gas could be captured. In 2020, 0.04 gigatonnes was captured, and approximately 20 gigatonnes were released. Pretty far from one quarter.
But maybe the second chart is more illuminating. It comes from the International Energy Agency’s recent scenario of how to stay within 1.5 degrees of warming by 2050.
Renewables play quite a big part in this, but so does carbon capture and storage:
But the IEA’s report also leans surprisingly heavily on carbon capture and storage, which means the fossil fuel industry lingers noticeably. The modelling allows for 663 terawatt hours of coal with CCS, and 669 TWh of gas with CCS, in 2050 (7% and 11% of 2020 levels respectively). And when it comes to steep inclines, CCS really takes the cake:
This kind of acceleration of a technology seems unlikely, to say the least, especially when there is very little operational CCS worldwide. (Technologies that accelerate need to have growing markets—generating cost gains driven by scale, and also cost gains driven by scope, meaning knowledge gains).
In the case of CCS, this just isn’t happening, as Ketan Joshi notes:
An excellent piece of recent research dug into the many reasons why proposed CCS projects frequently fall over — comfortably, the vast majority of projects. They’re expensive, the technology still isn’t ready for the prime time, and there’s no real financial rewards for doing this, even when you use the captured carbon to unlock more fossil fuels. Government regulation of carbon would help, but fossil fuels companies spend their effort killing this off. And a recent IEA report shows that fossil fuel companies spend very, very little on CCS.
And the difference in the rates of change needed for renewables to hit their contribution to the IEA scenario over the next decade, as against CCS, is something more than an order of magnitude. The IEA “assumes around a 3–4x scale up in the annual addition of renewables, by 2030, compared to 2020. But it assumes a 59x scale up in the annual additions of CCS capture capacity.”
That’s not going to happen. I’ve done some of this type of modelling in the past, and I suspect that one of two things is going on here, maybe both.
The first is that the IEA has close relations with fossil fuel producers through its national country members, and a forecast which pushed fossil fuels out of the equation would destroy the value of their reserves.
The second is that the IEA’s model may not get to 1.5 degrees—given their assumptions about global energy demand—without this proportion of fossil fuels in the mix, and the only way therefore to hit 1.5 degrees is with CCS added on.
But then again: the IEA has consistently under-estimated the growth of renewables. See one, above.
The revamped Inkcap newsletter has an interesting piece on the future of hedges—at least in the UK. It’s written by Ginger Rose Clark and Inkcap editor Sophie Yeo, and is prompted by Britain’s forthcoming National Hedgelaying Championships in Hampshire.
On the one hand we need hedges for environmental reasons:
Hedgerows act as green corridors running through often nature-depleted agricultural landscapes, providing food and habitats for creatures like dormice, hedgehogs, butterflies and birds; a recent study identified as many as 2,070 species in one hedge. The practice can be traced back to the Bronze Age...; today, these networks are helping to tackle the more modern problem of climate change by storing carbon and reducing the impacts of flooding.
On the other hand, the number of hedges has been falling. Farmers were incentivised to scale up field sizes, which meant that many hedges were pulled out. And they are more expensive to maintain than fences.
But the climate emergency means that they may be making a comeback:
The National Farmers Union, in a document on reducing agricultural emissions to net-zero by 2040, claimedthat better hedgerows could deliver carbon savings of up to 0.5 megatonnes of CO2e per year.
But the costs are still high, at £10-12 per metre, and generally they’re either subsidised by wealthy landowners or through environmental grants. A new government scheme will pay farmers £24 per year to maintain 100 metres of hedgerow. A (female) government minister recently described hedges as “sexy and important.”
But if we’re going to get the environmental benefits of hedges, we need to lay more of them. That might mean making the hedgelaying process a bit simpler, at least outside of competitions. And since some of the people who produce the wooden rods that hold a hedge together are dying off, there may also need to be some process innovation. It’s also summer work, so hedgelayers need to be able to do other things.
The conservation charity CPRE reckons that an increase of 40% in our hedge network by 2050 would support 25,000 jobs, or their full time equivalents.
But if the demand for hedges increases, there may not be enough people to lay them. Like many craft skills the age profile is lengthening. But the National Hedgelaying Society has just overhauled its accreditation scheme, and hedgelayers who run courses report brisk demand.
And you can see that hedgelaying might be one of those things that is on trend. It’s outdoor work, which ought to be good for one’s psychological health; the contribution to biodiversity makes it purposeful; and it comes with a visible sense of achievement.
j2t#187
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.