Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Achieving climate neutrality in Europe requires rapid electrification alongside carbon management strategies for residual emissions. Existing analyses of the European energy system often focus on collocated carbon capture (CC) and geological sequestration, with limited attention to the interactions among CC and utilization, transport, sequestration, and diverse carbon dioxide removal (CDR) options. Moreover, existing literature focuses on discussing the optimal, neglecting that near-optimal solutions might provide very different system configurations at a marginal higher cost. Here, we integrate afforestation, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, and perennialization into a sector-coupled European energy system model (PyPSA-Eur) clustered to 39 nodes with 750 aggregated time steps. We explore their contributions using a modelling to generate alternatives (MGA) approach. Our method combines minimization, maximization, and random vectors to explore the near-optimal solution space. Our results show that, in a carbon-neutral system, multiple configurations of carbon management options can achieve net-zero emissions with only marginal cost increases. We find that a 5% total system cost increase is sufficient to accommodate the full spectrum from zero to full deployment of most individual CDR options, as well as a wide range of synthetic fuel use across different fuel types. Increased reliance on CDR options offers no clear cost advantage compared to greater utilization of synthetic fuels.
Source: Environmental Research Letters
Institutions: Novo Nordisk Foundation, Technical University of Denmark
Language: English
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,045
Funders: Villum Fonden, Novo Nordisk
Award: G6645219907
OpenAlex ID: W7164002209