Shell GO+, Offsetting and Sequestration¶

It’s better not to use the carbon. But, if you are going to use the carbon then it’s better to use as little as possible; and, offset what you do use. What Shell GO+ is giving us is thinking room and acting room, because sequestration gives us time to make changes.

Climate Change Offsetting Sequestration

Simon Harper

21 Jan 2020

4 min read

Shell GO+ is the energy distributors vehicle reward scheme, but recently it has had an update to include a Carbon Neutral component. You know what I’m now going to say… I joined just to participate in the offset scheme so that all of my fuel emissions are offset with reforestation projects across the world (I’ll still be including the miles in my carbon footprint though). But I hear you complain - offsetting doesn’t provide a solution! OK, let’s talk about offsetting…

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Quick Primer (to my simple understanding).

A long time ago plants and animals lived and died, they took part in the carbon cycle, new plants relied on nutrients from the old, new plants absorb CO2 for growth, dead plants released it in decay. But, at some point these decaying plants where buried by unstable geological forces and their carbon was trapped with them (an ancient worlds carbon cycle). Buried over a long time and under immense pressure they formed what we now term ‘fossil fuels’. That’s past-planet carbon.

Present day we have plants and animals doing the same; present-planet carbon. We now have two-planets worth of carbon, one trapped, one active but because one is trapped, our atmosphere works as it is supposed too. The cycle is balanced all is well.

However we discover fossil fuels (Oil, Coal, Gas, etc) and we start to release the past-planet carbon into the present planet atmosphere, now the atmosphere starts to become unbalanced. As this increases there are a number of balancing factors which may occur but the one we are all most concerned about is the extinction of our species. Make no mistake, “the Planet don’t care” it will become balanced.

There are some provisos… Firstly, in an ideal world there would not be an offset capability because the offsetting is typically about carbon sequestration by trees, and our forests would not have been impacted by our habitation. But the reality exists that the world is under forested - National Geographic tells us that

“Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 502,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) of forest, according to the World Bank—an area larger than South Africa. Since humans started cutting down forests, 46 percent of trees have been felled, according to a 2015 study in the journal Nature. About 17 percent of the Amazonian rainforest has been destroyed over the past 50 years, and losses recently have been on the rise.”.

Important

“Carbon sequestration or carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is the long-term removal, capture or sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to slow or reverse atmospheric CO2 pollution and to mitigate or reverse global warming.” - thanks wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

Second, pulling out fossil fuels to then temporarily store the carbon by-products in trees means you would need increasing surface area for the trees once we surpass 1900s levels of area forestation. For instance, if the world were forested (say to a 1900s level) then there would be nowhere to add more trees to sequestrate the carbon as we still have to farm arable land and house the population.

Finally, and most importantly, offsetting – by sequestration – is often not technically a solution because typically the carbon is stored in trees and is therefore reintroduced into the environment once the tree is burnt or decays. Sequestration is only a temporary measure (which, to be sure, will make our living environment better) as ‘long term’ here means maybe a hundred years. But, what it does give us is leeway to get our carbon consumption under control and significantly reduced.

We must also realise that the world’s governments are not coming to save us by reforestation on the public ‘dime’, so it seems at present if we want it we need to buy it. And at a 46% loss, there are a lot of trees to be bought.

What Shell GO+ is giving us is thinking room and acting room. Sequestration gives us time to make the change. And as we know change is hard because it grates against current ‘norms’ and expectations, the more generations we have to change these expectations means the easier it will be for these new generations to make even larger carbon emission cuts.

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