Professor Wei Yiming and his research team from the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research of Beijing Institute of Technology, has made important progress in carbon capture and storage and utilization project layout. In the early morning of January 5, 2021, the research achievement "a proposed global layout of carbon capture and storage in line with a 2 ° C climate target" was published online in nature climate change in the form of research article. This paper proposes a global CCUs layout scheme to achieve the goal of two-degree temperature control for the first time in the world, which breaks through the point-to-point source sink matching mode of existing research, and proposes a global source sink optimization matching scheme based on carbon cluster, which is of great significance for the global deep collaborative emission reduction and the realization of China's carbon neutral target in 2060.

This achievement is supported by national scientific and technological tasks such as the National Key R&D Program "Research on Comprehensive Assessment Model of Economic Impact of Climate Change (2016YFA0602600)" and "Innovative Research Group Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71521002)" led by Professor Wei Yiming of Beijing Institute of Technology. Professor Wei Yiming is the first author and corresponding author of the paper. Professor Liu Lancui and Professor Yu Biying participated in the research work throughout the process. Beijing Institute of Technology is the first organization to complete the thesis. Cooperative units include Beijing Normal University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is an essential climate project to achieve the end of this century to control the global temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius before industrialization (hereinafter referred to as the "2-degree temperature control target"), and it is also a climate project that includes China. An important technology for countries around the world to achieve carbon neutrality goals. Prior to this, there was no global CCUS deployment plan for achieving the 2-degree temperature control target in the world. In this context, researching and proposing specific plans for countries to cooperate and share CCUS under the temperature control target will help substantially promote the large-scale emission reduction of CCUS and promote the global climate governance process.

In order to propose a low-cost global CCUS deployment plan to achieve the goal of 2 degrees temperature control, this work focuses on the identification of carbon sources that meet the requirements of CCUS implementation on a global scale, consistent and comparable storage potential evaluation, and overall optimization and planning of large-scale CCUS implementation. Based on geographic information data, industry data, land use data, etc., a global carbon emission grid database with a scale of 1km×1km was constructed, 4220 CCUS carbon clusters were defined and identified, and the CO2 storage potential of 794 onshore basins around the world was calculated. Established a global CCUS source-sink matching optimization model (C3IAM/GCOP) based on carbon clusters, and found that 85 countries or regions need to participate in low-cost deployment of global CCUS, and 80% of source-sink matching occurs within 300 kilometers of economically reasonable transportation distance.

Figure 1 | CO2 transportation volume and transportation distance of global CCUs low cost layout scheme

The study also found that the global CCUS low-cost layout is mainly distributed in 8 countries or regions. These include China, the United States, the European Union, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Mexico. In order to achieve temperature control goals, these 8 countries or regions need to achieve 1.86Gt–26.68Gt CO2 emission reductions through large-scale deployment of CCUS. The cost of achieving CCUS technology emission reduction is relatively high. By 2050, even if technological progress is taken into account, the total cost of global CCUS deployment will be approximately US$5.76 trillion, which is approximately equivalent to 0.12% of the global cumulative GDP by 2050, and the average cost is approximately US$62.7 per ton of carbon dioxide. The article pointed out that the development of CCUS should adhere to the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, build a fair and reasonable international climate governance system, accelerate the establishment of a global carbon market, reduce costs, and quickly promote the large-scale development of technology.

Figure 2 | CCUS layout action plan of major countries or regions under the 2nd degree target

This work is one of the series of results of climate engineering management research carried out by Professor Wei Yiming's team. Prior to this, the team of Professor Yiming Wei published 5 long research articles in Nature Energy, Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, Nature Sustainability and other sub-journals of Nature.

Paper download address: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00960-0

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