Marginal Abatement Cost Curves

Tom Connor

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10x Curiosity

4 min readFeb 26, 2022

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A tool to identify priority decarbonisation projects

This story is part of my short course on Carbon Literacy for Industrial leaders

Marginal abatement cost curves (MACC’s) are a tool that highlight the cost to offset or reduce a tonne of CO2. They are useful in normalising and ranking a series of projects, providing both the cost and scale of the carbon reduction opportunity for each initiative. By bringing each project back to common metrics of $/tCO2 and the tonnes of carbon abated, projects across a wide range of sectors can be compared.

ClimateWorks Aus provide the following summary:

Each box on the curve represents a different opportunity to reduce emissions. The width of each box represents the emissions reduction potential that opportunity can deliver in the chosen year, compared to business-as-usual. The height of each box represents the average net cost of abating one tonne of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) through that activity in that year. Capital costs are annualised to make all opportunities comparable.
The graph is ordered left to right from the lowest cost to the highest cost opportunities. Those opportunities that appear below the horizontal axis offer the potential for financial savings even after the upfront costs of capturing them have been factored in. Opportunities that appear above the horizontal axis are expected to come at a net cost.

City Switch provide a handy guide and template to get started with creating MACC’s for projects.

Planwashington.org writes:

MAC curves are useful …[to] allow measures from various sectors (e.g. transportation and power) to be compared on equivalent terms, serving as an initial lens of where abatement opportunities are potentially the largest and most cost effective... MAC curves provide a great conversation starter from which deeper discussion and analysis can evolve…

They further go on to highlight some additional caution not to exclusively rely on MACC analysis — it is only a starting point (Planwashington.org):

Embrace complexity (“the usefulness of simple summary presentations of complex issues is limited”);
Pay attention to the underlying assumptions (“keeping the assumptions and the MAC curve together can help ensure transparency, comprehensibility and accountability”);
Always look beyond the estimated technology cost (“Basing decisions on estimated technology costs alone may not only fail to produce the promised carbon savings but also result in unintended or perverse consequences”);
Understand path dependencies (“Abatement strategies are better presented and considered as scenarios or trajectories, in which decisions in one period influence the trajectory thereafter. Cumulative emissions are a more scientifically robust indicator of global warming commitment than abatement potentials in one or two horizon years.”)

References / Further Reading

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Marginal Abatement Cost Curves

References / Further Reading

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Written by Tom Connor