Slimming the fossil mammoth: financing defossilisation, from supply chains to end uses (Fossil Carbon Notebooks, Notebook 9)

Slimming the fossil mammoth: financing defossilisation, from supply chains to end uses. Fossil Carbon Notebooks, Notebook 9. Working version 0.9 This notebook quantifies, item by item, what defossilising the economy requires, and shows how to finance it within the Geological Net Zero Pact. The pact aims to return to the subsurface, step by step, as much fossil carbon as is extracted. Producers and sellers of fossil carbon would be responsible for the carbon they extract and place on the market, including what they consume themselves. The notebook starts from 36.15 GtCO₂ of fossil emissions in 2024 (EDGAR) and divides them into five intervention families: distributed generation; transport; peaking plants; internal operations of the fossil fuel industries; power, heat and industry. For each item, a simple model separates the emissions that can be avoided from those that can be captured on the remaining flows. Across three scenarios, avoidance ranges from 8.9 to 20.8 GtCO₂ a year and the capture potential from 11.5 to 14.2 Gt. The central “balanced combination” scenario avoids 14.3 Gt and captures 14.2 Gt. The engine of the system: every tonne avoided at the customer’s site is carbon not extracted, for which the producer is no longer answerable and which it does not have to return to the subsurface. Within an appropriate framework, producers will therefore have an interest in co-financing any adaptation that avoids a tonne for less than the cost of a return, around $60–150 per tonne on the first capture and storage chains. The pact leads to three business models, aligned with the three carbon accounts of the founding article: Common infrastructure. A geological atlas, the characterisation of sequestration units and shared networks, financed by the Pact Fund: 110-115 billion dollars a year for an indicative levy of 3$/tCO₂ . The fossil obligation. It rises on a fixed timetable and is met by geological return or by co-financing customers’ energy transition. Removals. Durable storage of biogenic and atmospheric CO₂ in the same infrastructure, under separate accounting. Scaling up is the main challenge. Capture and storage capacity in operation today is 50–64 MtCO₂ a year, more than two hundred times below the central capture potential. The atlas and the characterisation of storage sites must therefore be financed early. Contents of this record: full and condensed versions, in French and English. Status: Working version 0.9, subject to revision; version 1.0 expected in December 2026. The document sets out a proposal and orders of magnitude, with no deployment timetable; it does not constitute investment advice. Related: GNZ Pact founding article, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24024055 · geologicalnetzero.org