The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proposed a new technology which could be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fuel-generating plants.
The technology is called Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). It is a new technology that achieves negative emissions by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This process is far from the traditional techniques currently used to ease climate change such as using renewable energy sources.
"BECCS forms an essential component of the response strategy for climate change in the majority of scenarios in the literature" the report by IPCC stated as reported by Reuters.
Theoretically, the process can remove about three to ten billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. Furthermore, BECCS could be further appropriated for other purposes such as blocking sunlight or creating other machines to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Although the technology is promising, the implementation of BECCS as a tool of mitigating climate change is challenged by the fact that its development would be very costly.
"BECCS faces large challenges in financing and currently no such plants have been built and tested at scale," the IPCC report said as quoted by Reuters.
Aside from the high costs, expert at sustainable energy consultancy Ecofys from Netherlands, Joris Koornneef told Reuters that BECCS would require a very vast area. He theorized that for BECCS to efficiently extract 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it would need an area of about 350 million hectares. This space estimate is larger than India's land mass, and that the implementation of the project might take lands that are cultivated for food.
Reports made by the IPCC serve as the main literature of climate change. It shows the trends, possible impacts, and techniques that can be done to mitigate the effects of this phenomenon. The IPCC's report will also serve as the main resource for 200 governments that agreed to draw up a plan to combat climate change.
