Secretary of Energy Advisory Board

SEAB has approved the report of the Task Force on CO2 Utilization at its public meeting of December 12, 2016 and is hereby transmitting it to you. Your charge to the Task Force was to describe a framework for a DOE RD&D program on CO2 utilization technologies that has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions and/or introduce negative emissions at the gigatonne scale. The Task Force, under the leadership of SEAB Vice Chairman Arun Majumdar, has painted a scientifically interesting agenda for decarbonization that should be of interest to the scientific community writ large. You charged the SEAB CO2 Utilization Task Force (Appendix 1) to describe a framework for a Department of Energy (DOE) Research, Development and Demonstration (RD&D) program on CO2 utilization technologies that has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions and/or introduce negative emissions at the gigatonne (Gt) scale (Appendix 2). This letter report presents our findings based on Task Force deliberations and discussions with the relevant offices within the DOE. This is an Interim Report, which has been reviewed by a group of experts (Appendix 1) in this area who have offered suggestions that have improved the report. At the outset, it is important to define what negative emissions and CO2 utilization mean and imply. We first note that global warming is caused by radiative forcing that depends on the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) such as CO2 in the atmosphere. The concentration increases when the rate of GHG emissions from the earth is higher than the rate of GHG absorption by the earth, thus producing a net positive emission rate. In this report, we will focus on those technologies that have the potential to introduce ~1 GtCO2 per year of net decrease in global emissions to the atmosphere. Currently, the total global emissions are ~40 GtCO2/yr, and therefore 1 GtCO2/yr of reductions represent 2.5 percent. The net decrease in emissions must involve consideration of the whole global system, natural and engineered, which is highlighted in this report. Looking at the global energy system, it is increasingly clear that there are viable options to reduce emissions in the electricity sector, although their implementation would require serious combination of policy measures and technological advancements. However, given the distributed nature of the emissions, lack of viable alternatives at scale and a variety of other factors, it is more difficult to do the same for the transportation and the 2 …