U.S. adviser urges businesses to invest in carbon capture

A top U.S. adviser on clean energy and climate change policy said that governments need to make it worth it for private industry to invest large amounts into carbon dioxide removal technologies.

Tax incentives can be used to do this, and governments can do this through public procurement. As part of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, there are a number of ways to make it worth private industries while said Varun Sivaram, senior director for clean energy and innovation for the U.S. department of state.

Carbon capture, nuclear and hydrogen are featured in most net-zero emissions plans and need more investment: report:

The United Nations'Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the deployment of carbon capture technologies is far behind what is needed to meet international warming targets.

We need a scale up of a factor of 1 million to get to where we need to go. By the year 2050, this carbon dioxide removal technology needs to be the size of the oil and gas industry, said Christian Mumenthaler, group chief executive officer of Swiss Re.

Nili Gilbert, the vice chair of Carbon Direct Investments, said the enormous scale of the opportunity captures the imagination of finance and encourages participation from the financial industry.

The head of the International Energy Agency is urging countries and investors not to use Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a reason to increase fossil fuel investments.

Fatih Birol spoke at a Davos energy panel and said that the immediate response to energy shocks from the war should be an increase in oil and gas on the market. That did not mean large and sustained investments in fossil fuels.

He says efficiencies, such as reducing leaked methane and even lowering thermostats by a few degrees this winter in Europe, would help ensure adequate energy supply.

Russia is a major supplier of oil BRN 00 and natural gas NG 00, with the invasion sending European countries scrambling to reduce their reliance on Moscow.

Oil and gas industries have a central role in the transition to renewable energy, according to Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum. She believes that the focus should be on making fossil fuels cleaner by reducing emissions.

Hollub said Occidental had heavily invested in wind and solar energy and planned to build the world's largest direct air capture facility in the Permian Basin, spanning parts of Texas and New Mexico. Direct air capture is a process that pulls carbon dioxide out of the air and sequesters it.