Jardin Tropical

Policy makers as well as many economists recognize geological Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) as a key option to avoid costly emission reduction. While an extreme perspective is to envision CCS as a magic bullet to solve the issue of climate change, the economics perspective is more balanced and see it as a part of a portfolio of mitigation actions. Besides, as any novel mitigation technology, CCS can be implemented with a twofold purpose; on one side it can substitute some other technological eorts to reach a given environmental target. On the other side, it oers the opportunity to go for additional emission reductions and reach a "safer " climate target. In order to balance these two possible utilizations of CCS and assess their respective eects on early policystrategies, we undertake a twofold numerical experiment. First, a cost-eciency analysis is undertaken where CCS sole eect is substitution of other eorts. This is followed by a cost-benet analysis where both purposes have to be balanced. We nd that future availability of CCS is less a reason to relax near-term abatement eorts than what could be inferred from previous analyses. Moreover, cost-benet analysis indicates that the environmental target should be more ambitious when CCS is included in the picture