Jim Skea: Carbon capture is just one part of the solution

Oversight of the world’s most authoritative climate change reports — produced by the UN’s body of scientists, from almost 200 countries — is now in the assured hands of Dundee-born Jim Skea.

The 70-year-old London-based academic, whose background is in physics and energy, has been advising governments and institutions on what the science says since taking on the role as chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in July.

As well being the co-lead of the IPCC’s special report on global warming of 1.5C, and a co-author of the landmark 2023 sixth assessment report, Skea was previously chair of the IPCC Working Group III on mitigation: methods for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing atmospheric sinks.

The subject of carbon dioxide emissions removal from the atmosphere has now been elevated, ahead of the UN COP28 climate summit hosted at the end of this month by the United Arab Emirates. The oil and gas exporting country is pushing for a UN agreement that involves the capture of emissions when fossil fuels are burnt for energy, or abated, rather than cutting back fossil fuel production.

Skea explained what the IPCC says about this, and some of the choices the world has in tackling the emissions, in an interview with climate editor Emiliya Mychasuk and FT colleagues. This is an edited transcript.

FT: We hear a lot about carbon capture [and storage, CCS] playing a role that seems to have taken on an undue emphasis, and some of the rhetoric around it relies on the IPCC report.

Do you have any concerns that it will lead to an overreliance on CCS as a solution, when we know it will take time and money to develop [at scale] and, by the time it is developed, there will be a lot more emissions in the atmosphere for it to remove?

Jim Skea: Carbon capture featured in two bits of the last [IPCC] report because it was part of the long-term scenarios, and that’s where it popped up.

The [scientific] models assume there is a technology available that can remove 90 per cent of the carbon dioxide and the models use that up when they’re constrained to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees [since pre-industrial times].

It’s also dealt with in our energy and industry chapters, which is taking a much more bottom-up kind of perspective on CCS.

So, let me just say, it’s not a technology — it’s a technological system with different elements, and the capture bit is different from the transport bit and the storage bit. And they all have their own issues.

It is sometimes said that it’s an unproven technology, and it is not unproven. All of the elements of the technological system have been done somewhere in some part of the world and been technologically proved.

What we have less of is the big projects that join the bits together to create the whole technological system that delivers the results.

Frankly, it is sort of grinding incremental engineering, R&D [research and development] and demonstration that is needed to bring the technological system together.

The difficulties and the obstacles lie much more in the economics and the business models for carbon capture and storage than they actually do in any fundamental technical obstacle to bring it through.

Very obviously, the notion of unabated fossil fuels was key when we approved our Working Group III report on the unabated [emissions] — and the opposite, abated [emissions], refers very much to CCS. [The latter is based] on the assumption that you can get about 90 per cent of the carbon dioxide out [of the atmosphere].

But that needs to be proved on the ground, you know, by improving the whole technological system and doing it at scale.

It’s perhaps not unsurprising, given the importance of the policy in the business model framework, that the place where we are actually seeing the greatest number of projects emerging is probably in the Middle East, where you’ve got the right conditions for the technologies to emerge.

The difficulties and the obstacles lie much more in the economics and the business models for carbon capture and storage than in any fundamental technical obstacle

The COP is taking place in the Middle East, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that that’s getting some emphasis.

FT: But, if that gets baked into the policy statement of the UN negotiations or the final text, is there a worry that then that becomes seen as “the solution”?

JS: We will always give the message that there is no “the solution” to climate change. I mean, the ambitions for 1.5 or 2 degrees are so, so large that you can’t actually leave anything off the table.

And it’s very clear that in terms of electricity supply, that renewable energy — and, for those countries that choose to use it, nuclear power — will be a big, big part of the solution.

But you are going to see carbon capture and storage coming through as well. The question of the scale on which it happens, I think, depends on the demonstration.

It’s worthwhile saying that the emphasis on CCS in the past has been applying it to power stations. [There is] much more interest now in petrochemical, hydrogen economy and industrial applications, where it’s much more difficult to get the emissions down, and it may well be more cost-effective in industrial sectors.

The interesting thing is that the new business model that’s emerging is for carbon capture clusters, where you bring different projects — power, industry — together, so that you get the necessary scale for the transportation system and storage.

And it may well be, then, that “anchor” sources of CO₂, at very large scale — like you could get from a power station — may be the bit that holds it together and gets the economics going for the other sectors.

FT: So you think it’s just an economics problem?

JS: I think it’s economics, the policy framework, and the business models to make it happen. And it’s one of these large-scale technologies which probably will not happen unless you really get the right kind of policy framing to enable it to come forward.

It won’t happen just because the private sector chooses to do it.

And also because, if you put carbon dioxide in the ground, it frankly is of no value to any human on earth, sitting under the ground. So somebody has to pay to put it there.

So the question of carbon pricing, or proxies for carbon pricing, becomes really important.

FT: Do you think there is a muddle about the figures involved in the cost of trying to adapt [to climate change], and yet that’s not really put up against the cost [in mitigation] by continuing to produce oil and gas? And how could the IPCC be involved in communicating that?

JS: In actual fact, we did do that in the last report. And it’s a very clear message, that at, say, warming of 2 degrees, the benefits of the avoided impacts definitely exceed the costs of mitigation in the long term.

That was quite a delicate message to get across, but it’s absolutely in the last report.

Now, I think the challenge on the cost side is that many mitigation measures for climate are very capital-intensive.

So it involves putting money up front to make it happen. And there the question of who pays, and how it’s paid for, becomes the tricky issue — because not all policymakers may choose to take the 21st-century perspective.

They’re much more focused on the shorter, near-term costs associated, which are inevitable with capital-intensive responses.

FT: Do you agree that proponents of carbon capture are mischaracterising the message of the report?

JS: The problem is the interpretations that are put on [CCS in the report] are very, very absolute.

What the scenarios say is that, if you limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees, you will see a big rundown in the use of fossil fuels, on top of some carbon capture and storage on those fossil fuels that actually remain.

And so it’s not absolute, you know, it’s a mixture of the two. And that’s obviously starting to become a hot issue for debate.

We have this massive database, hosted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, which contains the results of every scenario.

The IPCC assessed all 1,200 of them [the scenarios]. That [assessment] is available for secondary analysis by researchers, and they can go into that and generate the numbers if they choose to do so.

FT: As the co-author of the 1.5-degree report, could you confirm whether we can actually limit temperatures to 1.5 degrees at this stage?

JS: It is still possible that warming will stay below 1.5 degrees. But with every year that we continue emitting the kind of levels that we are at the moment, that is becoming less and less likely.

Eventually, if you were to delay long enough, it would place it beyond reach. It’s still possible, but it is becoming less and less possible with every year that passes.

FT: Carbon removal is often conflated with CCS, does it seem worrying to you?

JS: Now, CCS and carbon dioxide removal are not the same thing, even though some of the many issues actually can be quite similar.

And we are not on track at the moment for carbon dioxide removal. There’s a box in the full [sixth] synthesis report that has kind of a map of all the available carbon dioxide removal techniques.

It’s very difficult to talk about carbon dioxide removal as a method, because they’re so varied. There are many different techniques out there — varying from the purely technological through to the biological, with mixtures in between.

The storage mediums are so different, with different levels of permanence. And what is very clear is that what is being recorded as carbon dioxide removal at the moment is very much forestry related.

If you were going to remove [large volumes], you would need to expand to a much, much wider range of techniques, including potentially things like direct air capture for carbon dioxide. And we are not there yet in terms of commercial volumes for that, [even though] it’s been demonstrated at a pilot scale.

So, a whole lot more work would be needed if you’re going to expand the techniques beyond the simple forestry-related measures that dominate the picture at the moment.

Many of the models don’t build in any allowance for other techniques that have more recently come into the inventories.

For example, peatland and wetlands restoration: many of the models are not dealing with that at all at the moment. There’s whole issues around agricultural techniques that might allow you to build up more soil carbon, [which are] not being treated in the big scenarios, but we can look at the bottom-up level.

So that’s why I say we need to do a lot more work. There needs to be improvement, an enhancement of these models to deal with [them] in a satisfactory way, with a wider range of techniques.

FT: Some of those are existing techniques, not new technologies.

JS: One of my last things in the Just Transition Commission, in Scotland, was to go and visit a peatland restoration project to see how it’s actually done.

I’d have to say the technology is very simple — it’s just a JCB [excavator] shifting stuff around. The innovation is the science that tells you which bits of stuff to move around where. So it’s got a big scientific contact, even if it’s very basic in technological terms.

FT: Are you feeling more or less optimistic after decades working in energy and across climate science?

JS: Look, let me say two things. One of the two messages we are trying to get across from the last report is the urgency — the risks are huge. And also, we have the agency, we’re not helpless, we can do things about this.

I guess I feel, given the climate extremes we’ve seen this summer, I think you’ve got to be increasingly worried about the consequences of climate change.

But if I compare it to where we were a decade or two ago, I think where we are on actual climate action, there are causes for optimism there.

There are things happening today — if you had told me 10, 20 years ago what would happen with renewable energy, I would have fallen off my chair. We have made enormous progress in some areas.

But it’s worthwhile saying that we still have the difficult bit to do.

In some way, these big renewable projects — you know, [for example] a gigawatt’s worth of offshore wind — it sounds incredibly difficult and it is difficult technically, so total respect for people who do it. A board of a big company can make a single decision that has that big impact.

If you had told me 10, 20 years ago what would happen with renewable energy, I would have fallen off my chair. We have made enormous progress in some areas

But a lot of the measures we need to take in the future are smaller scale that touch on people’s lives more directly. And I think this is going to be a big challenge.

We’ve almost done the easy bit, you know. We now move on to some of the more challenging issues. Difficult issues, like diet and mobility.

FT: What would you hope your legacy will be at the end of your term?

JS: Well, I hope [for] the continued policy relevance of the IPCC, that people and governments still do value it by the end of the [current assessment] cycle. That’s absolutely important. I’ve made a lot of commitments to improving inclusivity and diversity within the IPCC, more involvement of developing countries.

And it may sound quite boring, but we do need to pay some attention to [the way the IPCC operates and what its procedures are]. We can leave something behind for the people who come after.

FT: You will have a six or seven year-old grandchild by then [2028 to 2030] who will be asking questions.

JS: Yeah: “Grandad why didn’t you do anything about climate change?”