Clarify whether to include negative emissions from direct air capture in Emissions|CO2|Energy and Industrial Processes?

[korsbakken]

Hi. We are using part of the variable definitions in this repo as a starting point for a definitions package for the Horizon 2020 project IAM COMPACT (thanks for the impressive work here so far!). One question that has come up from modellers in that project is whether negative CO2 emissions from direct air capture should be included as part of Emissions|CO2|Energy and Industrial Processes. Apparently that has been the norm in previous projects that they have been involved in.

Looking at the descriptions, my feeling is that DACCS should be under Emissions|CO2|Other Capture, and not in Energy|CO2|Energy and Industrial Processes. Is that correct? The description of the latter only mentions carbon removals through BECCS, not DACCS, and in my mind DACCS does not belong naturally in energy or industry sectors.

Could guidance on this perhaps be added explicitly to the description of Emissions|CO2|Other Capture if that's where DACCS belongs, or under Emissions|CO2|Energy and Industrial Processes if it should be there?

To be clear, this question is only about how to treat direct air capture under Emissions|. I assume that the captured and stored CO2 additionally should be reported as a positive number under Carbon Capture|Direct Air Capture and Carbon Capture|Storage|Direct Air Capture.

[danielhuppmann]

Thanks for reaching out @korsbakken!

First, I suggest that you look at https://github.com/IAMconsortium/common-definitions instead of this repository. The openENTRANCE project ended last year, and we are not actively developing this repository any more.

However, we are currently working on bringing together (slightly divergent) variable lists from openENTRANCE; NAVIGATE, ENGAGE and other projects to have consistent list of variables going forward.

Second, you are correct that direct air capture and removal (which is not directly linked to an emitter) should not be included in Emissions|CO2|Energy and Industrial Processes, and I will raise the discussion in the common-definitions repository with the relevant sub-group.