One of the aims of NEGEM is to develop a shared and comprehensive Vision for the medium-to-long-term sustainable deployment potentials of Negative Emission Technologies (NETPs) and their role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions both at the EU level and globally.
The NEGEM vision is followed by the formulation of pathways and storylines that are quantified to build scenarios to reach the climate goals of the Paris Agreement, designed with the use of global and European Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs).
This report by NEGEM partners at VTT describes the formulation and quantification of the storylines and provides the preliminary results for a series of global NETPs deployment scenarios. In the scenario modelling, BECCS, DACCS, PyCCS, ocean alkalinisation, afforestation and reforestation have been included as a mitigation options with different assumptions on their sustainable potentials in GHG mitigation.
Key results
Based on the preliminary NEGEM scenario running with TIMES-VTT Integrated Assessment Model, the deployment of NETPs will be certainly needed to reach global GHG mitigation with a 1.5-2°C target.
Moving from the 2°C target to the 1.5°C target requires much more rapid emissions reductions and leads to higher mitigation costs even with immediate climate actions.
In these scenarios, the investments in NETPs reach their peak after 2060. However, accelerated actions would be needed in case global GHG emissions would not show a rather immediate downturn trend. Robust support policies and measures would also be needed if we want NETP investments to take place earlier.
In total, all the NETPs considered in the report account for about 8-10 Gt(CO2) in 2050 up to 22 Gt/a in 2070 of negative emissions in the different scenarios.
Biomass-based technology options such as BECCS and PyCCS are competitive in all scenario cases, although the contribution of BECCS is much lower in these scenarios than the contribution reported by the IPCC AR6 WG3.
In our scenarios, we have assumed stricter environmental constraints for BECCS, PyCCS, afforestation and reforestation to lower the risks for overshooting the planetary boundary limits. Therefore, DACCS appears as the most significant option in the long-term.
PyCCS and reforestation in our scenarios are competitive and quite sustainable options in GHG mitigation, but under the assumed storylines their combined potential still seems far from sufficient for keeping the temperature change within 1.5-2.0 °C mitigation targets.
However, especially PyCCS seems to be a potential mitigation option due to its several co-benefits but more research is needed to better analyse its global and regional sustainable potentials.
The results show that we would need stricter policies and measures to phase out fossil fuels across all GHG mitigating sectors, while supporting policies are needed to ensure large-scale NETP investments by 2050.
