Tackling the Carbon Dioxide Challenge for a Sustainable Future

Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage systems play a central role in political debates, technological efforts and scientific developments around climate change, as a consequence of two factors. First, with the Paris Agreement, countries have agreed to hold global mean warming well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. Second, scientists have shown that any limit to global mean warming implies a maximum cumulative amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the so called carbon budget. Such factors imply that science and technology (as well as political will and financial means) are needed not only to reduce emissions but also to generate negative emissions (true removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide), in case of carbon budget overshoot.

Are we - scientists and engineers - ready to deliver CCUS for large scale deployment? What are the challenges and hurdles towards implementation? What are the technical solutions and scientific breakthroughs emerged or about to emerge? We will discuss these questions and many more in an interdisciplinary framework at the 2019 Gordon Research Conference on CCUS (the third of a series), where participants junior and senior will be stimulated by the highly interactive atmosphere typical of the GRCs and inspired by the natural landscape surrounding the conference venue, for the first time in Europe.

Among the specific areas addressed by the conference there will be the scientific breakthroughs in CCUS, the role of CCUS in enabling negative emissions, the systemic aspects of CCUS, and its role in selected industrial sectors.

Among the specific areas addressed by the conference there will be:

• The scientific breakthroughs in CCUS: at this GRC cutting-edge research will be presented about carbon dioxide capture, transportation, and storage (geological, mineralization, etc.), about CO₂ utilization/conversion, as well as about policy and economical related issues.
• The role of CCUS in enabling negative emissions: current models predict that late in this century an amount of CO₂ in the order of gigatons per year will need to be removed, i.e. a rate of the same order of the material flows in the current coal, oil and gas sectors. These negative emissions aspects of CCUS research bring new technologies and systems into scientific investigations, and greatly broaden the scope of engineering challenges, while still incorporating the fundamental CCUS issues.
• The systemic aspects of CCUS: assessing the role and potential of CCUS systems requires considering them in the context of a holistic analysis of the energy and industrial systems. This needs system analysis tools, particularly Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) methodologies, and their application to a broad range of present and future scenarios, including those involving negative emissions technologies (for example Bio Energy with CCS, BECCS, and Direct Air Capture with CCS, DACCS).
• The role of CCUS in the heat and power sector and in industry: CCUS technologies are going to be key elements of industrial systems operating in a net-zero-carbon world, i.e. our world in 2050 according to many IPCC 2°C scenarios, where every carbon atom released to the atmosphere must be taken back, and every fossil carbon atom produced must be buried back.