IST’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the IN+ Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research will hold on September 26, from 1p.m. to 3p.m., the seminar “Opportunities and limitations of integrated bioenergy and carbon capture and storage systems to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement”.
Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) are critical to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, carbon removal technologies are in the early stages of development. In the current context of geopolitics, there is limited evidence on the ability to mobilize resources and implement the necessary scale. Critical voices warn of technical and economic constraints, regulatory inefficiencies and potential conflicts between the United Nations 2030 Agenda’s sustainable development objectives stemming from the massive implementation of BECCS to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
In this context, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is developing two Special Reports on trajectories to stabilize global mean temperature below 1.5°C and potential interactions between climate and land use. This seminar aims to explore preliminary conclusions from these reports and to present developed models of the opportunities, constraints and risks associated with the implementation of BECCS on a global scale. Three key issues will be discussed: (i) what BECCS technologies and what scale of implementation is required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement?; (ii) what are the implications for land use and other ecosystem services?; (iii) what are the technological, regulatory and social barriers for BECCS to be available on a commercial scale?
About the speaker:
Joana Portugal Pereira is a researcher at the Working Group III on Climate Change Mitigation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based at the Center of Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.
Her research interests lie in the modeling of energy systems and the environmental assessment of low-carbon innovations for the development of climate change mitigation and energy efficiency policies. Throughout her professional career, he has been developing environmental modeling tools to assess the economic and environmental co-benefits of low carbon energy portfolios.
As a climate change expert, she acted as consultant to a number of international projects in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean region that resulted in the national targets strategies (NDC’s) of the Paris Agreement. Before starting activities at Imperial College London, Dr. Portugal Pereira was an Invited Professor and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (COPPE-UFRJ), Brazil, in the Energy Planning Program (PPE) (2013-16) and developed work on energy and climate policies for the United Nations Institute for Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS, Japan) (2012) and the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBi, Japan) (2010-12).
Dr. Portugal Pereira is graduated from IST (2006) and PhD from the University of Tokyo (2011) in Environmental Engineering, with emphasis on bioenergy and life cycle analysis of alternative fuels.
