A climate mitigation professor says Aotearoa "should be looking" at carbon capture if we want to reduce emissions significantly.
It comes as the energy industry wants to suck carbon back out of the atmosphere to help stop climate change, but says law changes are needed to help clear the air.
The latest IPCC report on climate change recommended carbon capture to help achieve net zero emissions, and Massey University's sustainable energy and climate mitigation professor Ralph Sims agrees.
"We should be looking at it for sure. The IPCC put out a special report 20 years ago on carbon capture and storage, and it appears in all the scenarios, if we are going to reduce emissions significantly enough, then carbon capture and storage has to be a part of it."
Sims told AM carbon capture and storage doesn't make Co2 a neutral fuel, but instead reduces emissions.
He says there are other ways "to skin the cat" too, by carbon capture and neutralisation.
"That's being examined in great detail worldwide, not in New Zealand yet, except for Lanza Tech, a company that resourced the carbon dioxide from steel mills, used bacteria and turned it into biofuels. That company has gone offshore, it's now worth $2.2 billion, that's another way of dealing with carbon dioxide and using it for something useful, in this case, liquid biofuels."
Sims says we will continue to be dependent on gas for "some decades" but its use needs to be phased out "as quickly as possible".
"Natural gas is going to be phased out over the next decade or two, or three. And there's no point looking for anymore, and there's no point connecting a house, or a new building, or a factory to a natural gas source because it's got to be phased out," Sims said.
"That's not a regulation that's in place as of yet, but it might be in the natural gas transition plan that is coming through."
The energy industry is calling on the Government to "immediately begin" work around carbon capture technologies, with fears Aotearoa could miss its net zero emissions target.
Energy Resources Aotearoa chief executive John Carnegie says countries across the world are adopting carbon capture technologies and Aotearoa is "being left behind".
"Carbon capture and storage provides an alternative to planting trees when it comes to balancing the emissions ledger and providing goods and services that are genuinely low or net zero emissions."
Watch the full interviews above.
