Emergency deployment of direct air capture as a response to the climate crisis

Ryan Hanna; Ahmed Abdulla; Yangyang Xu; David G Victor

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-20437-0

Emergency deployment of direct air capture as a response to the climate crisis

Nat Commun. 2021 Jan 14;12(1):368. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-20437-0.

Authors

Ryan Hanna^{1

2}, Ahmed Abdulla^{3

4}, Yangyang Xu⁵, David G Victor^{3

6

7

8}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Energy Research, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA. rehanna@ucsd.edu.
² Deep Decarbonization Initiative, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA. rehanna@ucsd.edu.
³ Deep Decarbonization Initiative, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
⁴ Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6, Canada.
⁵ Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA.
⁶ School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
⁷ Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
⁸ The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 20036, USA.

Abstract

Though highly motivated to slow the climate crisis, governments may struggle to impose costly polices on entrenched interest groups, resulting in a greater need for negative emissions. Here, we model wartime-like crash deployment of direct air capture (DAC) as a policy response to the climate crisis, calculating funding, net CO₂ removal, and climate impacts. An emergency DAC program, with investment of 1.2-1.9% of global GDP annually, removes 2.2-2.3 GtCO₂ yr^-1 in 2050, 13-20 GtCO₂ yr^-1 in 2075, and 570-840 GtCO₂ cumulatively over 2025-2100. Compared to a future in which policy efforts to control emissions follow current trends (SSP2-4.5), DAC substantially hastens the onset of net-zero CO₂ emissions (to 2085-2095) and peak warming (to 2090-2095); yet warming still reaches 2.4-2.5 °C in 2100. Such massive CO₂ removals hinge on near-term investment to boost the future capacity for upscaling. DAC is most cost-effective when using electricity sources already available today: hydropower and natural gas with renewables; fully renewable systems are more expensive because their low load factors do not allow efficient amortization of capital-intensive DAC plants.

Publication types

Evaluation Study
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Carbon Dioxide / analysis
Climate Change*
Electricity
Energy-Generating Resources
Environmental Monitoring / economics
Environmental Monitoring / methods*
Global Warming

Substances

Carbon Dioxide