Carbon capture and storage (CCS) once again appears to be the wrong investment for the U.S. My friend and former colleague at CBS News, Irina Ivanova, dug deep into why the country is so willing to shell out billions on a technology that’s lacking at best. It turns out that profitability is the biggest thing stymying earnest carbon capture efforts. Carbon capture and storage is also a greenwashing/status quo option for polluters looking to keep business as usual but get concerned citizens off their backs. And, experts agree, it’s simply not enough to reach net zero. “If we're serious about climate change, we need to double down,” Shannon Fisk told Ivanova. “[We need to] build a grid that's 100% clean, rather than keeping fossil plants alive on this as-yet elusive promise that someday they will be carbon-free.”
Reducing and eliminating emissions isn’t necessarily a complicated issue, though the solutions presented are where things get tricky. Technologies like wind and solar as well as battery storage have been forecast to be a great way to transition the U.S. power grid away from more damaging energy sources. Though those options have certainly faced roadblocks, they’ve benefited from widespread research and development that has driven down costs as well as made necessary advancements to ensure that renewables are a key component of our future. Similar support for carbon capture has mostly sputtered. The promises of carbon capture and storage plants being used at coal plants will likely never be realized due to costs. CCS facilities in West Virginia, Texas, and Mississippi have all shuttered due to a combination of going over budget and companies deeming the technology essentially not worth it.
Despite carbon capture and storage’s diminishing returns, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law devoted $12 billion to the technology, building off of copious prior investments. Ivanova notes that $5 billion was earmarked for CCS as part of the Energy Act of 2020. And, from 2010 to 2019, Congress provided $7.3 billion in appropriation funds to the Department of Energy for carbon capture-related research and development. Old habits like relying on fossil fuels certainly die hard, and in politics and government especially there’s a pressure to stay the course even when all evidence points to the contrary. Ivanova points out other reasons why, above the financial cost, CCS simply isn’t worth the trouble. A lot of the emissions that are captured and stored are then used by oil companies. “The vast majority of [captured] carbon in this country, something like 96%, is sold back to oil companies to help them capture more oil,” Greenpeace’s John Noel told Ivanova.
Using captured carbon so frequently has incentivized oil companies to tout CCS as its latest greenwashed scheme while also profiting as they continue their damaging practices. Exxon has pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from tax credits while pushing back against accountability requirements like submitting monitoring plans to the EPA.
Noel, who’s been an outspoken critic about Exxon’s carbon capture practices, had this to say in 2020 when interviewed by Inside Climate News about what captured carbon is typically used for: “This is how the oil industry continues to win. They get in the weeds, they have access and influence that the normal public doesn’t, and they’re able to manipulate the tax process and the regulatory process and manipulate it in their favor. And that’s been happening since the first oil well.”
We shouldn’t let history repeat itself when it comes to combating climate change. CCS is not the answer and neither is any further development into prolonging the oil and gas industry’s life. It’s time to truly look toward the future and abandon something so antiquated—one that has never been worth it and never will be.