Incentivising negative emission technologies

Carbon Counts completed its work with the IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme investigating the scope for negative emission technologies (NETs) - those suite of abatement measures which can remove CO2 from the atmopshere - to be incentivised under climate policy frameworks. We found that whilst some recognition of the benefits exists in polcy frameworks today, it is not always passed on to private operators to incentivise deployment. Moreover, we found that in many cases, NETSs would compete on a tCO2 per tCO2 cost-base with other abatement technologies, meaning that the negative emission benefit is not readily recognised and rewarded.

We recommend that further consideration is made of the scope to additionally incentivise NETs ahead of some other emission reduction measures given their potentially important role in meeting a future near-zero level of emissions.