"Reversing Climate Change - the logistics or removing CO2 from the atmosphere" with Professor Alan MacKinnon, Professor of Logistics at Kuehne Logistics University: 9 March 2026

Since the 1970s the presence of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has risen from 1.5 to 3.5 parts per million, resulting in a seemingly inexorable global temperature rise - whose pace is actually increasing just as our ability to adjust diminishes. What feels like an inevitably apocalyptic outcome is upon us notwithstanding the efforts of the UN Conference of the Parties which has met thirty times, but the world has already overshot the target set at Paris in 2015 and now has to contend with a climate-denying regime in Washington, where Trump's Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin has declared that he is "driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion".

Logistics has multiple roles in the climate crisis - as cause, decarboniser, victim, adaptor, facilitator, rescuer and today's theme, remover which is the penultimate possibility before the final option of solar radiation management through the dispersal of reflective aerosols in the stratosphere.

The goal of Net Zero seeks to balance mitigation with carbon sequestration. It is important to distinguish the capture of CO2 before release, with scrubbing devices on chimneys, from its removal thereafter from the atmosphere. Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage which filters the atmosphere is one of many methods of carbon sequestration after release, but is a "thermodynamic slog" since filtration of 1600 tonnes of air may capture only 1 tonne of carbon dioxide. Nature-based methods include afforestation, ocean fertilisation to supercharge carbon-munching plankton, and, while mechanical-geochemical methods include enhanced rock weathering involving the spreading of mainly silica rocks on cropland and ocean alkalinity enhancement. Bio-energy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and the scattering of biochar (a charcoal-like substance produced by the pyrolysis of biomass) combine the nature-based and mechanical-geochemical approaches.

Given the extent of carbon budget overshoot, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2022 saw a need for BECCS and DACCS to remove 360 bn tonnes from the atmosphere by 2100. Logistical requirements as yet unquantified are likely to be very freight transport-intensive. Iceland has the world's largest CDR plant, but even it removes only a tiny fraction of its target capacity of 36,000 tonnes per annum. Metallic Organic Frameworks are now being hailed for their ability to mop up pollutants including CO2, turn toxic substances benign and make water from desert air.

Clustering of carbon capture and storage in coastal locations should reduce freight movements and share infrastructure, but to increase the geographical spread of CCS the UK Government is promoting non-pipeline transport. Paying others to cut carbon emissions on one's behalf is likely to become a major source of revenue for CDR operations but require detailed analysis of the logistics-related emissions across CDR supply-chains.

There are five reasons for investigating the logistics of Carbon Dioxide Removal:
* estimating the nature and amount of freight movement likely to be generated.
* assessing its logistical feasibility at the required scale to meet climate targets.
* measuring the logistics-related emissions from the end-to-end CDR supply chain.
* determining how supply chains can be optimised in terms of net removal, energy use and cost; and
* exploring the business opportunities for logistics services providers - to what extent would they need to diversify their service portfolios to exploit new commercial opportunities and build new skill-sets?

Vast amounts of CDR are now factored into climate models and government Net Zero policies, which would require massive scale-up of both conventional and novel methods. CDR at a planetary scale would be highly intensive in terms of both materials and logistics. Its logistics might prove to be existential in the longer term - meanwhile there is already a huge literature, though little of it adequately addresses the logistics and supply-chain challenges.

To view Professor MacKinnon's presentation, click on the Video Icon below.

You can find other publications by Professor Alan MacKinnon on his website at www.alanmckinnon.co.uk

Report by John Yellowlees.