Incentivising and Accounting for Negative Emission Technologies

Abstract

Unlike conventional greenhouse gas abatement technologies, which generally only eliminate or reduce emissions towards zero, negative emission technologies are able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. One such technology is the application of carbon capture and storage (CCS) to biogenic CO2 sources (bio-CCS), such as those arising from biomass combustion (e.g. heat and electricity generation) or biomass decay (e.g. during fermentation processes in the production of bioethanol). This paper considers various greenhouse gas emission accounting frameworks as to how they record negative emissions, and whether this creates an incentive for their use.