Carbon capture would appear to be delusional just based on the scale, which most folks don’t appreciate. For the moment, Wyoming’s Governor seems to be placating enemies on the right as he pushes green energy, but holds up carbon capture as a sop to the powerful coal industry.
Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis:
“As our report shows, CCS has been around for decades, mostly serving the oil industry through enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Around 80–90% of all captured carbon in the gas sector is used for EOR, which itself leads to more CO2 emissions.”
About three-quarters of the CO2 captured annually by multi-billion-dollar CCUS facilities, roughly 28 million tonnes (MT) out of 39MT total capture capacity globally, is reinjected and sequestered in oil fields to push more oil out of the ground.
The International Energy Agency says annual carbon capture capacity needs to increase to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030 to align with a net zero by 2050 pathway.
“In addition to being wildly unrealistic as a climate solution, based on historical trajectories, much of this captured carbon will be used for enhanced oil recovery,” says Robertson.
History shows CCS projects have major financial and technological risks. Close to 90% of proposed CCS capacity in the power sector has failed at implementation stage or was suspended early — including Petra Nova and the Kemper coal gasification power plant in the U.S. Further, most projects have failed to operate at their theoretically designed capturing rates. As a result, the 90% emission reduction target generally claimed by the industry has been unreachable in practice.
Finding suitable storage sites and keeping it there is also a major challenge—the trapped CO2 underground needs monitoring for centuries to ensure it does not come back to the atmosphere.
The report identifies interim considerations for CCS projects if no alternative solutions to emissions reduction are found.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
All year, the zeitgeist has been building toward technologies that separate carbon dioxide from air, referred to as direct air capture (DAC). In September, the United States Department of Energy awarded Occidental Petroleum a $600million grant to build a DAC machine. As scientists and entrepreneurs who’ve dedicated our careers to help solve global warming, you might expect us to be happy.
We are not.
The reason is simple: Separating carbon dioxide from air, while technically straightforward, is outrageously expensive. In fighting climate change, the obvious question should always be: How can we avoid the most carbon dioxide per dollar invested?
Answering that question can be difficult: Should I buy an electric car or put solar panels on my roof or eat a plant-based diet? Should the government subsidize heat pumps or grid batteries or tree-planting? But, in this case, it’s easy: Air capture is among the most expensive of all climate mitigation options.
Oxy estimates that the project will separate 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and cost about $1 billion to build. Adding in operations and maintenance, we, and others, estimate the total costs will be more than $500 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide.
It is easy to see that $500 per ton is extremely expensive; it implies $6 per gallon to clean up the carbon dioxide put in the atmosphere from burning gasoline. Dealing with all US emissions would cost about $3 trillion per year, every year—about 4 times what we spend on the entire US military—and would require building both air-handling capacity larger than the combined capacity of every HVAC system in the entire country as well as new power plants (all from carbon-free sources!) equal to twice the total power generation capacity of the US today. If this is what’s required to avoid climate change, we’re in big trouble.
Fortunately, there are abundant carbon mitigation opportunities that costbelow $25, and even below $0, per ton of carbon dioxide avoided. So the same money we just gave to Oxy could easily have avoided well more than 20 times as much carbon.
Who could possibly have thought it was a good idea to spend so much taxpayer money on such an expensive approach?
Three groups: techno-optimists, who believe big investments will make air capture costs come down dramatically (they won’t); would-be climate central planners, who argue that we need air capture (if we ever do, it won’t be for 50 years, or more); and oil companies, who think they’re positioned to get fat subsidies (they’re right).
They talk about the CO2, but the longstanding problem with coal has been the other components of coal smoke damaging the lungs* of all animals and leaving soil downwind full of the heavier elements that were freed from the coal.
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*Including the radioactive elements brought into direct contact the with living tissue of the throat and lungs.