Many canonical integrated assessment models examining the relationship between energy, climate, economics, and public policy represent negative emissions interventions poorly and haphazardly, if these approaches to decarbonization are included at all in such models. This grant supports work by scholars at the Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy at American University to improve how negative emissions technologies are represented in two of the most often used integrated assessment models. One of these models, EnROADS, is a highly aggregated economy-climate-energy model. The other, the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM), is one of the most widely used open source energy and climate models in the field. Grant funds will support two postdoctoral researchers, who will work to develop extensions of these two models to better account for the potential emergence of negative emissions (decarbonization) technologies over the coming decades.

This grant provides partial support to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for the production and dissemination of an ambitious consensus study that will examine the technological, policy, and societal dimensions of deep decarbonization efforts in the United States across a range of sectors, including manufacturing, food and agriculture, transportation, electricity generation, and carbon dioxide removal. This consensus study will be conducted under the auspices of the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems (BEES) and led by Director and Scholar John Holmes. The plans for this consensus study were developed following an initial public workshop, and this process will bring together experts from multiple disciplines to assess the best way to scale up decarbonization developments across different sectors and offer a roadmap for how to move forward. The consensus study is also expected to lead to the formation of a longer-running Deep Decarbonization Forum, an ongoing dialogue effort that would involve developing a set of additional dissemination products. The Deep Decarbonization Forum will hold a series of workshops and briefings to continue the discussion of these critical, long-term topic areas for years to come.

Comparisons of the land use estimates of different electricity generation technologies often rely on poorly estimated, rule-of-thumb calculations, with little direct observation of how much land each of these components actually occupies in the real world. This grant supports a project by Sarah Jordaan, Vishal Patel, and Benjamin Hobbs to rigorously estimate the land use requirements for different electricity generation technologies and their associated fuel supplies. The team will conduct satellite imagery analysis that can more accurately account for the individual land footprint of different components of the energy system. The focus of this effort will be on the United States portion of what is known as the Western Interconnection, a region from the Rocky Mountains westward that includes almost every type of power generation facility (including natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, and, solar), elements of their supply chains (natural gas production facilities, coal mines, uranium mines, and pipelines), and transmission and distribution lines for connecting wind and solar sites to the grid. The team has access to high-resolution satellite data that not only allows them to accurately detect the land use implications of large-scale infrastructure like generation facilities, but also harder-to-determine infrastructure like pipes and transmission lines. This study will also provide the tools to better assess the power density and land use intensity of each generation technology.