Zukünftige Energie- und Industriesysteme
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CO2-capture and geological storage as a climate policy option : technologies, concepts, perspectives
(2007)
The idea of removing carbon dioxide from flue gas and industrial gas flows and putting it into suitable long-term storage sites is referred to as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This publication provides a close look at this new line of technologies, describing its current status and outlining the prospects for development. The approach is both diagnostic and analytical, identifying the questions a technology assessment poses and showing the steps that need to be taken to implement CCS.
CCS is currently moving to the centre of climate policy discussion. Nonetheless this line of technologies is still the subject of controversial discussion. On the one hand there is a clear hope that these technologies will open up opportunities to use fossil fuels without harming the climate and thus make it possible to continue using oil, natural gas and above all coal even under a stricter climate regime. Accordingly, numerous R&D projects have been initiated all over the world, and various demonstration projects are at the planning or implementation stage. On the other hand, CCS (especially the storage part) has given rise to considerable scepticism from an ecological point of view.
The paper reviews the current knowledge on the use of biomass for non-food purposes, critically discusses its environmental sustainability implications, and describes the needs for further research, thus enabling a more balanced policy approach. The life-cylce wide impacts of the use of biomass for energy and material purposes derived from either direct crop harvest or residuals indicate that biomass based substitutes have a different, not always superior environmental performance than comparable fossil based products. Cascading use, i.e. when biomass is used for material products first and the energy content is recovered from the end-of-life products, tends to provide a higher environmental benefit than primary use as fuel. Due to limited global land resources, non-food biomass may only substitute for a certain share of non-renewables. If the demand for non-food biomass, especially fuel crops and its derivates, continues to grow this will inevitably lead to an expansion of global arable land at the expense of natural ecosystems such as savannas and tropical rain forests. Whereas the current aspirations and incentives to increase the use of non-food biomass are intended to counteract climate change and environmental degradation, they are thus bound to a high risk of problem shifting and may even lead to a global deterioration of the environment. Although the "balanced approach" of the European Union's biomass strategy may be deemed a good principle, the concrete targets and implementation measures in the Union and countries like Germany should be revisited. Likewise, countries like Brazil and Indonesia may revisit their strategies to use their natural resources for export or domestic purposes. Further research is needed to optimize the use of biomass within and between regions.
The Russian natural gas industry is the world's largest producer and transporter of natural gas. This paper aims to characterize the methane emissions from Russian natural gas transmission operations, to explain projects to reduce these emissions, and to characterize the role of emissions reduction within the context of current GHG policy. It draws on the most recent independent measurements at all parts of the Russian long distance transport system made by the Wuppertal Institute in 2003 and combines these results with the findings from the US Natural Gas STAR Program on GHG mitigation options and economics.
With this background the paper concludes that the methane emissions from the Russian natural gas long distance network are approximately 0.6% of the natural gas delivered. Mitigating these emissions can create new revenue streams for the operator in the form of reduced costs, increased gas throughput and sales, and earned carbon credits. Specific emissions sources that have cost-effective mitigation solutions are also opportunities for outside investment for the Joint Implementation Kyoto Protocol flexibility mechanism or other carbon markets.