Why Not Carbon Capture?
The fossil fuel industry propagating climate change disinformation is not a new phenomenon. Historically, big oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, have utilized sophisticated PR campaigns to skirt the responsibility and blame for climate change away from themselves and onto consumers. Their efforts to make climate change a personal issue were executed with one goal in mind: to protect themselves, their companies, and their investments — the same is happening with their support and promotion of budding clean technologies such as carbon capture and storage. For more than a decade, fossil fuel giants have promoted carbon capture and storage (CCS) with little results to show for it. Politicians are also buying into it, allocating more than $12 billion to carbon capture technologies in last year’s infrastructure bill. Their promise and reliance on technologies like CCS perpetuate a continued reliance on fossil fuels as the future promise of negative emissions disincentivizes society from the urgent need to reduce emissions now.
Carbon capture and storage/utilization (CCS/U) is the process of capturing carbon dioxide formed during industrial processes, straight from the source, in order to re-classify the process as ‘clean’. In CCS, the removed carbon dioxide is then stored in deep geologic formations to prevent leakage into the atmosphere. In CCU, the carbon is then converted into other products, such as fuels and chemicals. The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declares that all emissions pathways that adhere to keep global warming below 1.5C “rely on the assumption of large-scale atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (CDR).” However, our faith in CCS/U technology may be misplaced.
A report commissioned by two groups of researchers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research analyzed the role of CCS technology in relation to 2030 energy targets. The report concluded that relying on CCS is a dangerous distraction — CCS technology is not as efficient as once thought. Research shows that in the initial stages of deployment of CCS, capture rates of carbon dioxide often hovers around 65% for several years, whereas researchers have historically assumed that CCS can capture 85–90% of carbon emissions. A different study by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, co-founder of the Solutions Project, quantified and analyzed the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions from the Petra Nova project, a coal power plant that was retrofitted with $1 billion worth of carbon capture equipment. When using natural gas to power the CC technology, the study found that the Petra Nova plant only reduced CO2e emissions by 11.8–20% over 20–100 years. However, doing so fails to mitigate the other costs incurred by society, as the CC technology does not remove air pollution as a result of coal combustion and the cost of retrofitting plants with CC technology is incredibly expensive. On the other hand, using wind energy to power the CC technology increases the overall emissions reduced, 34–44%, due to the reduction in emissions from powering the CC technology, but also fails to mitigate air pollution or the incurred costs of CC equipment. However, if we were to completely replace the coal plant with wind energy, it would completely eliminate the carbon emissions, air pollution, and cost of CC equipment.
A second reason CCS is a dangerous distraction is that CCS technology is unlikely to be deployable at the scale required in time. Currently, only 26 CCS/U plants are operational globally, and they only capture 0.1% of global annual emissions from fossil fuels, which is approximately 0.039GT CO2. However, a study conducted on the negative emissions required to keep global warming below 2°C found that in the best-case scenario, CCS will need to remove 0.5 to 3GT CO2 a year, and in worst-case scenarios, CCS will need to remove 7–11GT CO2 per year. This is of a much higher magnitude than the current CCS technology capability. Given that the IPCC has even acknowledged that the “political, economic, social and technical feasibility of solar energy, wind energy and electricity storage technologies has improved dramatically over the past few years, while that of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) in the electricity sector have not shown similar improvements” despite the years and billions of dollars of investment, it does not seem sensible to continue betting our future on the development of CCS/U technology.
With the drastic improvements in other forms of renewable energy, such as wind and solar energy, it seems counterintuitive to continue funding research and development for CCS technology when a much better alternative is available. The Stanford Solutions Project, recognizing the uncertain trajectory of CCS technology and the risk of reliance, has created roadmaps for all 50 US states and numerous other countries to transition to 100% renewable energy using only wind, water, and solar (WWS) energy. Society, and the global energy transition, will greatly benefit from further development of WWS technologies as opposed to CCS/U technologies: using only WWS technology will allow us to reduce carbon emissions, decrease air pollution, and increase energy security. In comparison, as long as fossil fuels are in use, carbon capture, based on today’s capabilities, will mostly increase air pollution while only narrowly reducing carbon emissions. Thus, it seems prudent for society to divert our attention away from carbon capture and towards wind, water, and solar energy.
