UNH Today

The University of New Hampshire has contributed to a first-of-its-kind new report looking at carbon dioxide (CO₂) removal in the United States. Mark Ducey, 自然资源与环境教授, is one of the researchers from more than a dozen institutions involved in the high-resolution assessment, “Roads to Removal: Options for Carbon Dioxide Removal in the United States,” which charts a path to achieve a net-zero greenhouse gas economy by 2050.

The report, 由劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室的研究人员领导, focuses on steps that can be taken to ensure the nation’s climate security and resilience by cleaning up the Earth’s atmosphere and addressing the root cause of climate change. 它还包括对CO的综合分析₂ 当前可用的移除技术和资源, 以及在实现净零排放的道路上所产生的成本.

Ducey was part of the research team that focused on forests which are critical in absorbing CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it. Because of climate change, it is estimated that by the middle of the century the ability of the forests to capture CO₂ could decrease by a third. The researchers that focused on forests in the report looked at three different approaches which include increasing forests by planting trees, maintenance and management approaches and building resilience for forests against stressors from climate change, like drought, wildfire, extreme weather and pests.

“这三种方法都发挥着重要作用, but which is most important really depends on what forest we’re talking about and where we are in the country,” said Ducey. “我们仔细研究了美国的几个地区.S., like the Southeast where we examined expanding forests onto marginally used agriculture land. We also looked at the dry interior West and possible carbon storage benefits to trying to manage trees that are less susceptible to catastrophic fire. In the Northeast, 我们研究了更好的木材管理所面临的挑战, focusing on larger diameter, 长寿命的树木将提供更持久的碳储存, 无论是活树还是它们提供的产品.”

By using those case examples, 研究人员能够展示碳效益, the kind of changes that need to be made and how those depend on local conditions.

In 2022, the United States government established a 2050 goal to reach net-zero emissions by decarbonizing our economy, removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it at the gigaton scale (at least a billion tons per year). Roads to Removal lays out a road map to this goal and answers the question: How much CO2 is it possible to remove in the United States and at what cost? 报告的结论是，以今天的技术, removing 1 billion metric tons of CO2 per year will annually cost roughly $130 billion in 2050, or about 0.5% of current GDP.

The report says that this ensemble of lowest-cost approaches for CO2 removal would create more than 440,使用可再生能源可以实现这一目标, 利用目前可用的土地和地下地质储存.

The granular analysis provided in the Roads to Removal report gives decision makers across the United States a lens for location-specific opportunities, 使他们能够做出最适合他们称之为家的地方的决定. Unlike previous analyses, 哪一个使用了综合评估或自上而下的模型, the methods used in Roads to Removal rely on bottom-up calculations and use the most current estimates for resource demands, 各县潜在的二氧化碳去除方法的成本和影响.

这份报告是由联合国和联合国教科文组织联合委托编写的.S. Department of Energy (DOE), 能源效率和可再生能源办公室, Bioenergy Technologies (BETO), 美国能源部高级研究计划局(ARPA-E), 以及化石能源和碳管理办公室(FECM), 在气候工作基金会的额外支持下.