Thirty years from now, a new technology has stabilised the climate and brought the planet's emissions to net-zero. How does it work?
Each of these climate-change articles is fiction, but grounded in historical fact and real science. The year, concentration of carbon dioxide and average temperature rise are shown for each one. The scenarios do not present a unified narrative but are set in different worlds, with a range of climate sensitivities, on different emissions pathwaysto envisage now, but the Permian basin in Texas and New Mexico used to be America’s biggest source of crude oil.
The trouble for Big Oil started in 2014, when booming American production helped spur a plunge in prices. The covid-19 pandemic of 2020 triggered a short, sharp contraction in demand. Longer-term decline was unavoidable. Internal combustion engines in road vehicles, which made up more than two-fifths of oil use in 2020, were starting to give way to electric motors.
Before it was brought into being, carbon-capture technology was assumed to be very expensive—one early study ofsuggested costs of $600 a tonne or more. When entrepreneurial start-ups tried it out in the early 2020s, though, it came in at about a third of that. The costs ofwere never as high, because capturing carbon dioxide from a power-station chimney, where the concentration is about 10%, is inherently more efficient that capturing it from ambient air, where the concentration is just 0.045%.
The astonishingly rapid scale-up in production—outpacing the construction of railways or power grids in previous eras—was due in part to smart industrial design. Equipment forwas tailored to existing industrial know-how: that used in car plants, gas-turbine factories, and mining and water-treatment. Theindustry, for its part, got a boost from genetic modification, in the form of new strains of trees and crops that absorb more carbon dioxide as they grow.
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