As Climeworks yesterday announced the debut of the world’s largest carbon-capture system in Iceland, Bloomberg says the United States is experiencing a “climate capture goldrush.” Incentivized by the $12 billion pledged for carbon-capture efforts in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and $369 billion in energy and climate funding in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), numerous US companies are exploring using climate capture and storage (CCS) as a way to offset their CO2 emissions. Tax credits and subsidies proferred by the IRA are enticing them to invest in CCS.
One company, Lehigh Hanson, is investing $4.8 million to capture and sequester 95% of the emissions from their new cement facility, representing nearly two million metric tons of CO2 per year.
Scientists say that the cement industry will need to decrease its annual emissions by at least 16 percent by 2030 to be in line with the Paris Agreement. But between 2002 and 2021, the industry’s global emissions doubled from 1.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide to nearly 2.9 billion tons, according to data from the CICERO Center for International Climate Research and the Global Carbon Project that was shared with the Associated Press. Inside Climate News
“We believe that carbon capture technology will play a significant role in achieving carbon neutrality and we are very excited to take the next steps in this journey at our Mitchell cement plant,” Chris Ward, CEO of Lehigh Hanson Inc., said.
The chemical firm Bridgeport Ethanol has commited to developing a CCS project at a Nebraska ethanol company. They will be working with Carbon America, a carbon capture and storage solutions firm. Nearly 175,000 tons of CO2 will be captured by using carbon capture equipment during the fermentation process. The resulting gas will pass through a pipeline for storage underground. The amount of CO2 that will be removed from the environment equals removing 38,043 vehicles from the road.
The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion. Reuters.
In the world of sports, the NFLs Houston Texans have reached an agreement with 1PointFive’s Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant to purchase CO2 removal credits when the plant becomes operational next year. The Texas team has purchased credits to offset its air travel for three seasons. The CO2 will be stored in saline reservoirs which are not connected with the fossil fuel industry.
The storage part of CCS involves injection of carbon dioxide, captured from large stationary sources, into deep geological formations. Deep saline aquifers have the largest identified storage potential, with estimated storage capacity sufficient to store emissions from large stationary sources for at least a century. AGU
What is CCS
Carbon capture and storage is an attempt to remove carbon dioxide after burning gas, oil, coal or biomass before it enters the atmosphere, and to store it. The technology has a success rate of between 50-68% of captured carbon, while aspirations of a 90% or 100% capture rate have not been achieved. Wikipedia
Not so Fast …
While proponents of carbon capture believe putting the brakes on runaway climate change is no longer possible solely by cutting emissions or using natural solutions to store carbon, (a position which is upheld by an IPCC recent report), opponents cite numerous reasons why we need to be leery about this solution.
Treehugger reports on some of the cons:
1. High cost
The costs of CCS have been prohibitively high; however, the incentivization provided by the IRA has opened up possibilities for many companies.
2. CCS is being used to recover oil from old oil wells.
One current use of the CO2 captured during the CCS process is enhanced oil recovery. In this process, oil companies purchase the captured CO2 and inject it into depleted oil wells in order to free up otherwise unreachable oil. When that oil is eventually burned, it will release more CO2 into the atmosphere. Unless the amount of CO2 captured during CCS also accounts for the CO2 released by the oil that was made available, CCS will simply be contributing to a larger amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
3. Long-Term Storage Capacity for CO2 Is Uncertain
There is uncertainty about how much storage space exists in sites around the globe. MIT scientists report that there is enough storage capacity in the US for 100 years.
4. CO2 Transport and Storage Sites Could Be Dangerous
There is potential for dangerous leaks.
Human life would be threatened by a pipeline leak with a concentration of between 7 and 10%.
Leakage at the site of underground storage is also a possibility. If a sudden leak of CO2 were to happen at an injection site, it could put the health of surrounding people and animals at risk.10 A gradual leak from fractures in the rock layers or from injection wells has the potential to contaminate both the soil and groundwater in the area surrounding the storage site. And seismic events triggered by CO2 injection could also disrupt the areas near the storage site.
5. NIMBY
Where to store the carbon is a problem because the public would generally be opposed to storage near their homes.
Food and Water Watch provides a detailed analysis of why CCS should not be part of our solution. They describe CCS as “mitigation deterrence.”
The reason that the oil and gas industry loves carbon capture is simple: It extends the fossil fuel era instead of ending it. Already, dirty energy companies are pitching the construction of new pipelines and fracked gas power plants and making totally empty promises about their ability to install capture technology to make them ‘clean.’ If carbon capture continues to fail to work, it doesn’t matter much to the company running the dirty power plant; they will just continue on with business as usual.
So long as fossil fuel companies, government officials, and even some progressive advocates are being fooled by carbon capture, there will be less pressure to actually stop climate pollution by putting an end to drilling and fracking and creating the political will needed for a rapid and just transition to 100% renewable energy.
The Guardian yesterday reported on a paper that suggests that Fossil fuel producers must be forced to ‘take back’ carbon.
Under a “carbon takeback obligation”, all fossil fuels extracted or imported into a nation or group of nations would be offset by storing underground an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that generated by that fuel. Phased in over time, it could be used to store 100% of emissions by 2050, to help the world reach net zero.
Unlike a carbon tax, which discourages the use of fossil fuels by making them more expensive, the authors of the paper argued that such a system would ensure the effect on the climate was neutralised, and the cost of doing so would be part of the cost of fossil fuel production.
Although carbon capture and storage technology is expensive at present, within a few decades it is likely to come down sharply in price, according to the paper.
"There is a limited amount of money," said Shannon Fisk, managing attorney of the coal program at Earthjustice. Spending several billion on pilot projects to capture carbon emissions means not spending that money on building out solar and wind farms and power transmission lines, he said.
"If we're serious about climate change, we need to double down … build a grid that's 100% clean, rather than keeping fossil plants alive on this, to date, elusive promise that someday they will be carbon-free," he said.