In 2020, the head of Google said that the company has been carbon-neutral for 13 years. The trend toward carbon neutrality is supported by other companies. Will it really help overcome the climate crisis?
Carbon neutrality is a term that means that a company has reduced to zero emissions of carbon dioxide and its counterparts in the course of its production activities or has offset those emissions with carbon-negative projects.
Scientists divide company emissions into three scopes. The first scope (Scope 1) is the direct emissions of the company during production. The second scope (Scope 2) is energy consumption. It is important to understand from which sources the company receives energy: coal plants, nuclear power plants, hydroelectric power plants and others. The third scope (Scope 3) includes the whole chain of the product life cycle: purchase of raw materials, delivery, sale, use, disposal and other, i.e. emissions not directly related to the producer.
The three main ways to achieve carbon neutrality are:
Reducing direct emissions and switching to renewable energy sources – hydro, solar, wind power (Scope 1 and 2);
Direct capture of CO2 from the air;
offsetting through investment in projects that reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Reducing direct emissions.
This method is considered the most effective because the company eliminates directly the source of CO2 emissions. The good thing about this method is that it is easy to identify the steps to reduce emissions, since they are direct and not indirect. The latter are embedded in a long product lifecycle chain, so it is quite difficult to calculate the offsetting carbon dioxide emissions and determine the ultimate culprit.
The problem is that this way is associated with economic constraints – the reduction of direct emissions is often associated with a decrease in production, and therefore with a fall in revenues of the company. If production is not reduced, financial investments will be required for technologies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Often companies simply do not do this because it is not economically feasible.
Direct capture of CO2 from the air
Direct CO2 capture is essentially “sucking” carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It can be buried underground for long-term storage or used in chemical processes to make fuel, plastics and other materials.
The most common method of capture is to pass air over a special liquid. The CO2 sticks to the mixture, but the rest of the air does not. The mixture is then recirculated, releasing carbon dioxide using heat.
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture (BECCS) is a technology that can be referred to as direct emission capture, but the capture comes not from the atmosphere, but from burning biomass. Biomass includes plants and crops.
The plus side of this technology is that it has negative emissions. Plants absorb CO2 through photosynthesis, and when they are burned, they give carbon back, with instant sequestration, and no carbon is released into the atmosphere. In this way plants absorb carbon dioxide, but then do not release it back into the atmosphere – this is how negative emissions occur, i.e. the actual reduction of carbon dioxide in the total volume.
Compensation through investment in carbon-negative projects
There are a lot of carbon offset projects. These can range from supporting natural natural processes to helping other companies and the non-profit sector reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Supporting natural sequestration includes one of the most popular ways to offset – reforestation. But there are other lesser-known ones, such as restoring the “blue carbon” environment.
“Blue carbon” is carbon stored in coastal or marine ecosystems. Mangroves, swamps, and algae thickets are essentially a defense against climate change because they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. This process happens even faster than with forests. Today there are already examples of companies investing money in restoring mangroves in Southeast Asia.
Another way is to increase the productivity of the ocean. Most of this is still just theoretical research. One idea is to add nutrient iron to parts of the ocean that lack it. This should cause microscopic plants (phytoplankton), which capture carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, to bloom more quickly.
