Miocic, J.; Gilfillan, S.; Frank, N.; Schroeder-Ritzrau, A.; Burnside, N.; Haszeldine, S. (2019): 420,000 year assessment of fault leakage rates shows geological carbon storage is secure. In: Scientific reports 9 (1), S. 769. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-36974-0.

"Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is routinely cited as a cost effective tool for climate change mitigation. CCS can directly reduce industrial CO₂ emissions and is essential for the retention of CO₂ extracted from the atmosphere. To be effective as a climate change mitigation tool, CO₂ must be securely retained for 10,000 years (10 ka) with a leakage rate of below 0.01% per year of the total amount of CO₂ injected. Migration of CO₂ back to the atmosphere via leakage through geological faults is a potential high impact risk to CO₂ storage integrity."

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Green, J.; Seneviratne, S.; Berg, A.; Findell, K.; Hagemann, S.; Lawrence, D..; Gentine, P. (2019): Large influence of soil moisture on long-term terrestrial carbon uptake. In: Nature 565 (7740), S. 476–479. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0848-x.

"Although the terrestrial biosphere absorbs about 25 per cent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, the rate of land carbon uptake remains highly uncertain, leading to uncertainties in climate projections^1,2. Understanding the factors that limit or drive land carbon storage is therefore important for improving climate predictions. [...] Our results emphasize that the capacity of continents to act as a future carbon sink critically depends on the nonlinear response of carbon fluxes to soil moisture and on land–atmosphere interactions. This suggests that the increasing trend in carbon uptake rate may not be sustained past the middle of the century and could result in accelerated atmospheric CO₂ growth."

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Snyder, B. (2019): Costs of biomass pyrolysis as a negative emission technology: A case study. In: Int J Energy Res 40 (7), S. 940. DOI: 10.1002/er.4361.

"Biomass pyrolysis is a promising method for the creation of biochar, a potentially long‐lived carbon sink, and renewable fuels. While a number of studies of the costs of pyrolysis exist, many fail to value the carbon storage benefit associated with biochar. Here, we evaluate the costs of three types of small‐scale pyrolysis systems (slow and fast, compared with gasification) in Costa Rica. We find that under many combinations of model parameters, fast and slow pyrolysis models are cost‐effective."

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Rosenfeld, D.; Zhu, Y.; Wang, M.; Zheng, Y.; Goren, T.; Yu, S. (2019): Aerosol-driven droplet concentrations dominate coverage and water of oceanic low level clouds. In: Science (New York, N.Y.). DOI: 10.1126/science.aav0566.

"Lack of reliable estimates of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) aerosols over oceans has severely limited our ability to quantify their effects on cloud properties and extent of cooling by reflecting solar radiation – a key uncertainty in anthropogenic climate forcing. Here we introduce a methodology for ascribing cloud properties to CCN and isolating the aerosol effects from meteorological effects."

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