US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — Climatologists have found that pumping about 2.7 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into underground storage will help keep global warming at around 1.5 ° C and fulfill all the key points of the Paris climate agreement, the Imperial College press service reports with reference to an article in Energy & Environmental Science.
Climatologists from the University of Wisconsin in Madison found that humanity will be able to realize even the most ambitious scenarios to combat global warming by pumping 2.7 trillion tons of CO2 or even less of this gas into underground storage facilities, whose total volume is about 10 trillion tons. If the provisions of the Paris Agreements are not implemented by 2100, then this is unlikely to happen due to lack of space in underground storage facilities or insufficiently efficient extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Most researchers studying the Earth’s climate today have no doubt that global warming exists and that it will radically change the face of the planet if temperature growth cannot be kept at 1.5 ° C until the end of the century. The results of measurements from dozens of climate satellites, thousands of meteorological stations and buoys in the oceans and hundreds of computer models of the planet’s climate speak in favor of this.
Even before the United States withdrew from the agreement, many climatologists and economic experts were quite skeptical about the chances that the Paris agreements would be fulfilled and that the rate of increase in emissions would be reduced to zero. In particular, they associated this with the compromise nature of this document, in which there are many indulgences for third world countries or deliberately unfulfillable voluntary obligations on the part of some states, such as the United States.
Scientists have tested the viability of one of the most radical ways of implementing the Paris Agreements, available to mankind at the current time. It involves the capture of CO2 from the atmosphere and its burial in specialized underground storage in gaseous or liquid form.
Over the past ten years, engineers have developed several systems capable of realizing this task, but so far this technology for combating global warming has not been seriously considered due to the allegedly high cost of extracting CO2 from air or exhaust gases, as well as the dangers associated with the occurrence of leaks from such reservoirs.
Nevertheless, the growing volumes of emissions are forcing scientists and politicians to think more and more often about whether it is possible to implement such plans in principle. Using data on the capacity of karst caves and other underground voids suitable for the role of such repositories, as well as new climate models developed by UN experts, climatologists calculated how much CO2 needs to be pumped underground every year to keep global warming at 1. 5 and 2 ° С, fulfilling the main and expanded goal of the Paris Agreement. Scientists compared these values ​​with how quickly it is possible to increase the volume of carbon dioxide storage and their total capacity.
As it turned out, the implementation of these tasks will require the injection of significantly lower amounts of CO2 underground than scientists previously thought. In particular, global average temperatures will rise by 2 ° C if approximately 1.2 trillion tons of carbon dioxide are injected underground, and the injection of 2.7 trillion tons will stop global warming at around 1.5 ° C.
Both that, and another, according to researchers, it is quite achievable if the volume of downloads will grow by 10-12% annually, starting from 2030, and ending with the last decades of the current century. This figure, as scientists conclude, is quite achievable, since CO2 injection plants used by oil companies to accelerate the extraction of hydrocarbons from the bowels of the planet demonstrate similar growth rates.
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