Emergency deployment of direct air capture as a response to the climate crisis. Academic Article uri icon

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 2.4-2.5C 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.

published proceedings

  • Nat Commun

altmetric score

  • 526.928

author list (cited authors)

  • Hanna, R., Abdulla, A., Xu, Y., & Victor, D. G.

citation count

  • 109

complete list of authors

  • Hanna, Ryan||Abdulla, Ahmed||Xu, Yangyang||Victor, David G

publication date

  • January 2021