Yes, don't get me wrong, I too think that CCS for FF's is a con/scam. What I meant was that the target temp max's that we hear about for this century, aren't just based on getting to zero CO2 emissions, but also rely heavily on carbon removal. The hope being that large scale carbon capture will be viable after 2050, to prevent temps from rising too much more. If anything, that's what I find scariest - even if the World can get off its FF addiction, that still won't be enough to 'save' us, without also finding a way to remove CO2 from the environment. We are in a really bad situation.Stinsy wrote: ↑Mon May 19, 2025 4:30 pmWe also have to bare in mind that China generates something like 60% of their electricity from Coal. Them shifting a few percentage points to renewables will have a vastly bigger impact than the UK shifting our last few percentage points.Mart wrote: ↑Mon May 19, 2025 3:47 pm Interesting point Stinsy. I'm very interested in carbon removal, but crucially at the moment, it's far cheaper to reduce CO2 by displacing FF's with RE. But there has to come a tipping point where the economics shift in favour of some sort of carbon capture and storage.
The global temp targets (like the 1.5C that's next to impossible now) are based on reaching net zero emissions, and then preventing the continued temp rise, due to the lag behind CO2 levels, of 20 or so years. But carbon removal is very expensive, with suggestions that this is something that will be deployed in the second half of this century ...... once we work out how to do it more efficiently and cheaper.
For now, I'd go with the general definition of net zero leccy as being 95% low carbon, and then just keep moving more and more energy demand over to leccy, with the 'true' decarbonisation being the move away from FF's for transport, space heating etc etc.
Maybe while this is all happening CAES will become economically viable at TWh scale, displacing much of that hard to beat last 5%?
I'm not in favour of "carbon capture" as I believe that to be fraud. However once the grid is 98% renewable we'll get a better return by looking at aviation, or other sectors before we decarbonise the last bit.
We need a pragmatic, not dogmatic, approach.
Regarding China and coal, there is some good news. Following the news that Q1 saw a ~5% reduction in coal generation in China, despite a ~1% rise in leccy demand (v's Q1 2024), it also looks like coal consumption fell over the last rolling 1yr, for the first time. So China may well have peaked on leccy emissions earlier than the 2030 target. They also appear to have peaked on oil consumption last year (due to BEV rollouts). They are now rolling out RE generation much faster than leccy demand is rising, so the decline should (hopefully) accelerate. Effectively, China is starting to use coal (as we use gas) to balance out an ever larger RE generation fleet.
