The carbon capture crux: Lessons learned
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Sure, that means it hasn't yet been used to sequester carbon in other contexts, but there's no reason it can't be.
It's like trying to discredit nuclear fission in 1950 by saying that it's a poor source of energy because all existing users of fission tech are weapons designers.
> Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a climate solution.
> Using carbon capture as a greenlight to extend the life of fossil fuels power plants is a significant financial and technical risk: history confirms this.
Also from OP
> Some applications of CCS in industries where emissions are hard to abate (such as cement) could be studied as an interim partial solution with careful consideration.
Unlike nuclear fission in 1950, we don't have twenty years to continue extracting oil and gas. Most oil and gas extraction should have been hard stopped twenty years ago.
You don't need to capture carbon to pump out the oil and gas, and you don't need to pump oil and gas to capture and sequester the carbon. Just because that's what oil companies are doing at the moment, doesnt mean that that's the best way to use carbon capture tech.
Let's keep doing the carbon capture and stop burning the oil and gas.
In this case, carbon capture is being used to enhance oil production, i.e. doing more net harm to our world.
The second-order analysis here is that unless one has a credible way, that has been demonstrated to work in real life, of stopping oil/gas companies from greenwashing, there is little point in supporting carbon capture technology.
Or to make a general point, a technology is worth supporting that when deployed in the real world results in almost immediate and permanent reduction in climate-change effects. If not, don't let the fossil fuel/capitalism lobbies distract you.
> Just because the things don't need to happen in an ideal world, doesn't discredit the fact that in our complex econo-political system
Truth be told, first order analysis (and even second) often gives naive or harmful solutions. Complex problems are complex because they require high order solutions and principle components have relatively low contributions to problems as compared to less complex problems. If you're thinking of complex topics like climate through low order lenses, you're going to get bad results. It is a topic that heavily requires reliance through expert consensus as it is not a topic that even a singular expert cannot fully capture. There is a reason why we call this (one of if not) the largest crisis humanity has ever faced.
Therefore the choice of extraction technology makes little difference to how much oil we get. It just affects which marginal wells are worthwhile, and the likelihood of other kinds of environmental damage.
Therefore if you inject biofuel instead of water, you really have altered the net result. Not enough to encourage extracting fuel just to store biofuel, but enough to be better than a kick in the teeth.
Ideally we'll get to injecting fuel into stopped wells and start undoing damage. And in the meantime, current efforts mean that we'll have the technology when that point comes. And so this activity is on a path towards what we want.
(There are similar arguments for natural gas. Natural gas is a natural complement to highly variable renewable energy. So you want to add renewables, add natural gas plans, and use the natural gas to balance the grid. In the long run you replace natural gas with storage such as batteries. But in the short term, natural gas is on a path towards a sustainable future.)
Personally, I don't see a major issue with EOR. If they make the technology, they make the technology. Ultimately it will come down to government regulations and through mechanisms such as: carbon taxes, emission/pollution taxes, investments, and subsidies. Energy isn't a free market right now and free markets aren't going to solve this because Climate Change is a tragedy of the commons. Our current economic models do not price in ToC and we only do so through government action. So I rather see the EOR discussion as often tangential to the actual broader discussion of sequestration (natural or artificial)
This invariably would have meant increased energy prices and more funds for foreign dictatorships, at least until a full transition can be done (ETA: min. 20 years).
Define.
There have been way too many climate-induced doomsday predictions with such imminence as to force hysteria to take you at face value. There were also about 145 billion predictions that the world would be out of oil by now.
Both are dubious claims to start with, and totally neglected how the technologies changed over time to reduce emissions, which is just good for everyone regardless of whether it is contributing to climate change.
I'm counting down the seconds until someone writes back "climate denier!!" despite the fact that I'm not.
Unfortunately fossil fuel companies and politicians are throwing around the term "carbon capture and storage" as if it will solve everything and allow fossil fuel power plants and fossil fuel extraction to keep running. All the evidence is that it can't.
But it doesn't matter if no one buys the carbon we capture. Sequestering it underground is a good outcome.
And yes, it's not currently profitable for anyone to capture carbon and send it underground, but it is a positive externality and that's where government needs to step in. The government pays companies to do all sorts of things, and CCS should be one of them
This is the great irony of the CCS discussion.
Plenty of carbon has already been sequestered underground.
The general idea is to extract carbon from underground, then pump it into the atmosphere, and then extract it from the atmosphere and pump it back into the ground.
Yikes. We live in a pretty screwed up world to make that even seem like a necessary option.
If we can make oil carbon neutral or even slightly carbon negative.. why not?
Unless you grow trees. They are - by far away - the most efficient and effective CC device that exists.
We need to sequester large amounts of carbon in the next two decades to avoid falling off the cliff of greater than 2 or 2.5 degree warming.
Ergo, planting well-thought out forests in large quantities, which has no known downsides, and large upsides is one of the actions we must do.
Not to mention that trees have excellent effects on local climate, on local pollution, on local human health, which are all great reasons besides carbon capture for planting more trees.
We don't care if carbon capture stops at midnight or doesn't run on a still day. As long as the average yearly carbon capture is slightly greater than carbon production.
Millions of vehicles could still be used and not replaced. We still have real and meaningful issues with electric vehicles that may not be resolvable. Battery chemistry is extremely reliant on very gnarly chemicals with their own environment issues.
The thing we want to fix is global warming.
About 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) are produced from burning a gallon of gasoline that does not contain ethanol. About 22.38 pounds of CO2 are produced by burning a gallon of diesel fuel.
Just think of the numbers involved to scale this to the planetary usage of fossil fuels.
1. CO2 is ONLY useful if the CO2's next use is profitably useful - the fossil fuel industry is the only economically viable user of CO2 that can "make it disappear because they inject it into wells. Any others will always re-release it (e.g. make sodas, triple-point extraction, etc).
2. CO2 extraction is probably marginal economically because you are already starting from the disadvantage of having to extract it from the air - where you first must "pay" in energy for the entropy which is always going to be costly and unavoidable.
It'll cost money, obviously - but more than the current method?
https://www.saskpower.com/our-power-future/infrastructure-pr...
Also the use of gas in oil extraction also means a sizeable amount of that CO2 you just paid for in energy to capture goes back into the atmosphere anyway.
It can help on the margins -- in terms of perhaps airplanes and other weight bearing users of fossil fuel that are not super well addressed with electrification -- but otherwise is a distraction from real solutions.