Wazzup Pilipinas!?
Asia stands at a perilous junction, and the path it chooses for its energy future will decide the fate of the Paris Agreement's 1.5 ∘C warming limit. A new report by Climate Analytics delivers a stark warning: the region's expansive plans for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), far from being a climate solution, represent a "considerable and unnecessary risk" that could lead to an extra 25 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The High-Risk CCS Pipeline
While Asia's economies generate more than half the world's fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emissions, its current deployment of CCS is small. However, regional interest and support are spiking, led by countries like China, Australia, and Japan. The region's total identified CCS capacity is 171 MtCO2/year across 156 projects.
Crucially, this pipeline is highly uncertain:
Status: A staggering 128 projects (82% of the total) are in the planning stage, with maximum capacity of 150 MtCO2/year, meaning they might never be built. Only 14 projects are currently operational (7.5 MtCO2/year).
Dominance of Fossil Fuel Interests: The project landscape overwhelmingly favors fossil fuel sustainment rather than last-resort mitigation in hard-to-abate sectors.
Transport & Storage projects, often promoted by Australia and Japan, account for 110 MtCO2/year capacity and are easily attributable to fossil fuel interests.
Facility-specific plans disproportionately target sectors where zero-emission alternatives are already competitive, such as Power & heat (21 projects, 13.04 MtCO2/year) and Fossil gas & LNG (16 projects, 19.95 MtCO2/year).
In contrast, hard-to-abate industrial sectors like cement (6 projects, 0.5 MtCO2/year) and steel (6 projects, 2.1 MtCO2/year) receive comparatively minimal capacity.
Destination: Fueling Further Extraction: The planned fate of captured CO2 is deeply concerning.
Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), a process that injects CO2 to boost oil extraction and sustains fossil fuel use, accounts for 30 projects with a combined capacity of 24.23 MtCO2/year. Combustion of the extracted oil creates far larger CO2 emissions than the CO2 sequestered.
Two Paths of Failure: The Climate and Economic Risks
The report identifies two primary, catastrophic climate risks associated with Asia's CCS trajectory:
1. Underperforming High-CCS Pathway
If Asia succeeds in achieving a high level of CCS deployment, but the technology continues to perform in line with historic observations—often capturing 50% of emissions at best—rather than the ambitious >95% required for 1.5 ∘C-aligned abatement, the climate consequences would be devastating.
Additional Emissions: This failure would generate an additional cumulative 24.9 GtCO2e in GHG emissions by 2050.
Scale of the Risk: This single emissions risk is greater than the total historical CO2 emissions from energy and industry individually generated by every Asian country except China, India, and Japan. It is comparable to the cumulative historical emissions of South Korea (20.1 GtCO2) and Australia (19.66 GtCO2). This single failure would "fatally undermine Asia's alignment with the Paris Agreement".
2. Unachieved High-CCS Pathway
If Asian countries continue to promote and pursue a high-CCS pathway but fail to build it at scale due to ongoing technical and economic hurdles, the climate risk could be comparable or even greater.
Carbon Lock-in and Opportunity Cost: This pathway risks diverting capital, time, and resources away from genuine zero-emission alternatives—like renewables and electrification—effectively locking in unabated fossil fuel use for longer than necessary.
Economic Disaster: High-CCS pathways are inherently expensive and pose huge economic risks. CCS in the power sector is estimated to double the cost of power compared to renewables backed by storage. Globally, a high-CCS net zero pathway could cost at least $30 trillion more than a low-CCS pathway by 2050.
The Low-CCS Alternative: The Sensible Path
Asia has an alternative that is both climate-aligned and economically superior: a deliberate low-CCS pathway.
Lower Emissions, Lower Costs: This path prioritizes a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels and the deployment of readily available, affordable zero-emission solutions.
Renewables are Already Winning: Power generated from unabated fossil fuels is already uncompetitive with renewable options in most Asian countries. The cost of solar and wind has plummeted, making renewable energy competitive with even unabated coal and gas in virtually every global market. China, India, and South Korea, for example, have seen the cost of new utility-scale solar fall below that of new fossil fuel capacity.
Hard-to-Abate Sectors are Changing: Even in so-called 'hard-to-abate' sectors like steel, cement, and fertiliser production, zero-emission technologies are rapidly progressing and are often a more cost-effective mitigation option than CCS. For example, a combination of four existing levers in the cement industry could deliver up to 70% of emissions savings at abatement costs of less than $20/tCO2, compared to an estimated $60-$120/tCO2 for cement-applied CCS.
The evidence is clear: for Asia to meet its own and global climate goals, CCS should be considered a last resort abatement technology. A deliberate pivot to a low-CCS pathway—centered on renewables, electrification, and demand reduction—is Asia's most effective and economically competitive option for aligning with the Paris Agreement. The time for this critical choice is now.
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Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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