Earth Science & Climate Change

Biography

Biography: Kwok L. Shum

Abstract

Geo-engineering is the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change. Foremost technologies are: carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management (Royal Society 2009). Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) from fossil fuels refers to sequestering of large quantities of CO2 from point sources of GHG emissions, mainly fossil fuel combustion. CCS would therefore reduce the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere while allowing fossil fuel use to continue and migitaging anthropogenic climate changes. This paper presents several pre-requsites for the large scale deployment of CCS. We reviewed several technologies analogous to CCS such as Flue Gas Desulpurization FGD and hypothesized the notion of Community of Practice as an enabler of deployment. Several types of member in the COP are critical; they are the technology suppliers, the end users and the government authority. Due to the emerging nature of CCS, technology suppliers need continuinal dialogues and inputs from the users sides. In addition, due to the lack of a regulatory structure (Bracmort et al. 2013) of the implementation of CCS such as identifying who owns the sequestered CO2, where to sequester the CO2, defining what constitutes leakage, identifying who will be held liable if the sequestered CO2 leaks, government authority’s participation in the COP is critical. COP is however only one side of the deployment equation; we also proposed an architectural view of CCS technology and recommended a modular-based development strategy which could faciliate interaction in the COP. Such a modular- based strategy could also render economical customization of CCS technology and minimize disruption in implementation.