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Fossil Fuels
Carbon Capture Takes Center Stage, But Is Its Promise
an Illusion?
The
oil industry, Biden administration and even some environmentalists see
sucking carbon dioxide from smokestacks and the atmosphere as critical
to solving the climate crisis. But the IPCC says relying on it
presents a “major risk.”
By Nicholas
Kusnetz
March 9, 2022
A
detail of the pilot carbon dioxide capture plant is pictured at Amager
Bakke waste incinerator in Copenhagen on June 24, 2021. Credit: Ida
Guldbaek Arentsen/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
Related
Fossil
Fuel Companies Stand to Make Billions From Tax Break in Democrats’
Build Back Better Bill
Biggest “Direct Air Capture” Plant Starts
Pulling in Carbon, But Involves a Fraction of the Gas in the
Atmosphere
Fossil Fuel Companies Are Quietly
Scoring Big Money for Their Preferred Climate Solution: Carbon Capture
and Storage
Pipe Dreams: First of a continuing series on whether
capturing carbon is a climate solution or a dangerous distraction.
With his climate agenda stalled in Congress, President
Joe Biden has managed to win billions in federal spending for one
pillar of his platform that is gaining increased attention globally:
carbon capture.
In a major win for oil, coal, utilities and other
industries, the federal government is poised to make its largest
investment ever—more than $12 billion from last year’s infrastructure
bill—in technologies that capture carbon dioxide from smokestack
emissions or straight from the air.
ExxonMobil, Southern Company and other oil fossil fuel
giants have
promoted carbon capture and storage as a tool for cutting
emissions for more than a decade, with little to show for it.
Still, carbon capture is gaining traction with
politicians in both parties, policy experts, scientists and even some
environmentalists who say that the threat of climate change is so dire
that it requires every possible solution.
Supporters including Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat
and one of the Senate’s most outspoken champions of climate action,
point to modeling by academics and others that
show the technologies could play a critical role in curbing emissions,
particularly from hard-to-tackle sectors like heavy industry and
shipping.
Their arguments have won unprecedented spending on carbon capture over
the past year, with governments in Europe, Canada and Australia also
committing billions in subsidies. Proponents say all this funding
could prove transformative and, within a decade, could help cut
hundreds of millions of metric tons of pollution annually.
But many progressive climate groups like Greenpeace and 350.org say
oil companies are promoting the technologies as a distraction to avoid
phasing out their products. At best, they argue, carbon capture and
removal will play a marginal role in limiting emissions. At worst,
they warn, subsidies for the technologies will prolong demand for
fossil fuels, squandering money that would be better spent on
replacing coal, oil and gas altogether.
While the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change said in 2018 that carbon capture
and removal technologies may be critical to limiting warming to 1.5
degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), it also said that carbon
removal in particular remains unproven and that relying on it posed “a
major risk” to meeting climate targets. Carbon capture prevents
emissions, by pulling them out of smokestacks, while carbon removal
refers to processes that suck the gas from the atmosphere.
In 2020, U.S. greenhouse
gas emissions totalled nearly 6 billion metric tons of
carbon dioxide equivalent, including other pollutants like methane.
Even optimistic projections say
that carbon capture and removal technologies will be able to cut only
about 250 million metric tons annually by 2035, or about 4 percent of
2020 emissions.
“The Biden administration is really doubling down on the fossil
economy and the false solutions that are entrenching that fossil
economy in the name of addressing the climate crisis,” said Carroll
Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental
Law, a nonprofit advocacy group. “I think that is a really significant
failure of vision and failure of leadership.”
The infrastructure bill, for example, will direct billions of dollars
to producing electricity and hydrogen from fossil fuels paired with
carbon capture and storage. Yet Muffett and others point out that wind
and solar are already cheaper sources of electricity than fossil
fuels, even without the added expense of operating carbon capture
equipment.
The White House declined to comment for this article, but a
spokesperson for its Council on Environmental Quality pointed to a report
it issued last year, which said that in order to reach
net-zero emissions by mid-century, “the United States will likely have
to capture, transport, and permanently sequester significant
quantities of carbon dioxide.”
Last month, the council attempted to square carbon capture with
another pillar of Biden’s climate plan, environmental justice, issuing
guidance that recommended including community input during
the planning and approval of all carbon capture projects.
Environmental justice advocates have been among the harshest critics
of carbon capture, saying it won’t address the many other forms of
toxic pollution from producing and burning fossil fuels. The White
House’s own Environmental Justice Advisory Council included
carbon capture and carbon removal in a list of the kinds of
projects that would not benefit communities at all.
With the first batches of federal spending set to start flowing this
year, these competing arguments are about to see their biggest tests
yet.
A Flood of
Investment
The last year has seen a wave of new carbon capture, storage and
removal projects announced, with at least 55 in the United States
alone since the beginning of 2021, according
to the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group. Some
are highly speculative, such as a proposal by Exxon
to build a $100 billion carbon capture “hub” in the Houston
area. Exxon announced the first proposed project for the hub on
Wednesday, a plan to attach
carbon capture to its refinery complex in Baytown, Texas,
to produce low-emissions hydrogen.
The company has said the hub can proceed only with substantial
government funding and tax incentives worth $100 per ton of carbon
dioxide removed, twice the current rate.
In North Dakota, an energy company bought a coal power plant slated
for closure and said it
would revive it by attaching carbon capture technology.
Other projects are further along, particularly in sectors including
ethanol and fertilizer production, where the costs of capturing carbon
dioxide are lower because of the emissions’ high concentrations of the
greenhouse gas.
In the Midwest, companies want to build a network
of carbon dioxide pipelines to connect corn ethanol plants
and distribute the gas for injection underground. These proposals are
being driven by a federal tax credit that was increased in 2018 and
gives companies up to $50 per metric ton for capturing and storing
carbon dioxide.
The Biden administration has promised its support. Its roadmap
for reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century, released
last year, included a significant role for carbon capture and storage.
It has also said it wants to further increase the value of the carbon
capture tax credit. The Build
Back Better legislation would have raised the value to up
to $85 per ton for carbon dioxide removed from smokestacks, and up to
$180 per ton when the gas is removed directly from the air.
While the bill failed, the expanded tax credit enjoys support from
lawmakers in both parties, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), the
powerful chairman of the Energy and Natural Resource Committee.
The promise of a bigger payout has helped spur a wave of
entrepreneurial activity and corporate investment in carbon removal.
Microsoft, Stripe, United Airlines and other companies have announced
millions of dollars in investments in carbon removal, and some have
even bought carbon offsets from the first commercial “direct air
capture” plant, which began operating last year in Iceland. Technology
giants—and billionaire executives including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos—have
been pouring money into start-ups. Elon Musk’s foundation is funding
a $100 million competition for efforts to pull carbon from
the atmosphere, including direct air capture, nature-based and other
approaches.
Occidental Petroleum has said it plans to begin
construction this year on a direct air capture plant in
Texas that will initially pull up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon
dioxide from the air. The company could then pump the gas into
depleted oil reservoirs to increase their production, a process that
can also store most of the carbon dioxide underground.
The International
Energy Agency last year said that the most “cost-effective
and economically productive pathway” to reaching net-zero emissions by
mid-century required not only the rapid phase-out of coal power plants
and an end to the sale of gas and diesel cars by 2035, but also
substantial amounts of carbon capture and storage, with a more than
40-fold increase in the technology’s capacity by 2030, to nearly 1.7
billion metric tons.
That tremendous leap would still represent less than 5 percent of
global carbon dioxide emissions in 2021. Direct air capture capacity,
it said, would need to reach 90 million metric tons by 2030 from
essentially zero today.
“We’re at a point when dealing with climate that we just have to look
at all the options now,” said Shannon Heyck-Williams, senior director
of climate and energy policy for the National Wildlife Federation. Her
organization is part of the Carbon Capture Coalition, which includes
fossil fuel producers, utilities and unions and has pressed for more
federal funding for the technologies.
John Thompson is the technology and markets director at the Clean Air
Task Force, which is also a member of the Carbon Capture Coalition,
and he said that while the United States may be closing most of its
coal plants, China is building more. Deploying the technology
domestically, he said, could help China adopt it on a larger scale.
“If our retrofits in the United States shave five, 10 years off the
time China takes to decarbonize, that’s globally significant,” he
said. “We can’t bet the planet that those coal plants are going to
close.”
Direct air capture is particularly alluring because it could draw
carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Such “negative emissions” will
be necessary to meet climate targets, scientists say. Restoring
natural habitats also pulls carbon from the air, is far cheaper, and
has many other benefits. But many scientists say the capacity of that
method is limited, and planting new forests will face competing
demands for land from agriculture. Storing carbon dioxide underground
could also be more durable than storing it in trees, which are
vulnerable to fires and droughts.
Supporters of pursuing direct air capture say that, by pulling carbon
dioxide from the air, the technology could achieve something that even
the most aggressive measures to avoid emissions could not.
“Carbon removal offers a way for those of us who have caused and
benefited the most from climate change to clean up our mess, and
that’s one of the things that to me makes it particularly attractive,”
said David Morrow, director of research at the Institute for Carbon
Removal Law and Policy at American University, though he added that
direct air capture is only one of several approaches to removing
carbon dioxide from the air. “Emissions abatement can’t do that. We
can get to zero and the mess is still there.”
Expensive and Energy-Intensive
If these arguments sound convincing—who wouldn’t want to lock away
emissions for good?—many environmental advocates say they gloss over
an important detail. Despite decades of research and development, and
billions of dollars spent, carbon capture and removal remain extremely
expensive and energy-intensive, even as the costs of alternatives have
plummeted.
Building new renewable energy projects is cheaper than building new
fossil fuel power plants in much of the world, and in some cases is
even cheaper than continuing to operate coal or natural gas plants.
Adding hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build and
operate a carbon capture system only worsens the math.
A December report by the Government Accountability Office said the
Department of Energy gave
nearly $684 million to six coal plants for carbon capture
projects from 2010 through 2017, but that only one of those projects
was built and it ceased operations in 2020, citing high costs.
In the industrial sector, critics say, other technologies such as
electrification or the use of hydrogen made with renewable electricity
may be more cost effective than carbon capture equipment.
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Direct air capture is even more expensive. The only commercial
operation captures 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, an
insignificant number when it comes to reducing greenhouse gases. It
was built in Iceland partly because of access to abundant geothermal,
emissions-free energy to run the project.
The technology generally requires large amounts of power, heat or
both, so scaling it would consume vast quantities of energy and money.
Skeptics argue that it would be cheaper and better to simply feed this
carbon-free energy into the grid to electrify the economy.
Large-scale carbon capture would require pipeline networks that would
rival the scale of existing oil pipelines. They would come with their
own set of safety risks associated with leaks and ruptures—in large
volumes, carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant.
Then there is all the other pollution associated with producing,
transporting and burning fossil fuels, much of which would remain
unaddressed by carbon capture equipment.
“That entire fossil fuel life-cycle pollution remains in place,” said
Basav Sen, climate justice project director at the Institute for
Policy Studies, a progressive think tank. “You are in a sense losing
an opportunity to deal with multiple environmental problems in the way
you tackle greenhouse gas emissions.”
Just a Down Payment?
Carbon capture has failed to catch on commercially—there are only a
few dozen plants operating globally, most of them in the United
States. But both supporters and critics say that might be changing,
thanks largely to government support.
The funding in the infrastructure bill was the culmination of years of
lobbying by industry and unions. One carbon capture bill, which was
later included in the infrastructure law, drew
lobbying from dozens of corporations and industry groups in
the coal, oil and power sectors, as well as from labor unions,
according to OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics. In Exxon’s
lobbying disclosures, carbon capture and storage was the only issue
tied to the infrastructure law it reported discussing. In fact, Exxon
reported lobbying on carbon capture more than on any other issue last
year, according to an Inside Climate News analysis.
The result was more than $12 billion dollars that will fund large
scale demonstration projects to capture and store carbon dioxide, as
well as funding for the pipelines and infrastructure that would tie it
all together. The Department of Energy, which will oversee most of the
money, is required to fund at least one demonstration project each for
coal and natural gas power plants and an industrial application. The
bill directed an additional $8 billion to “clean hydrogen” projects.
Some of that funding, too, is earmarked for using fossil fuels paired
with carbon capture to produce hydrogen. Today, hydrogen is commonly
produced from natural gas, but the process emits carbon dioxide.
Thompson, of the Clean Air Task Force, said the funding is important
to help demonstrate the technologies at commercial scale in different
applications. But he said carbon capture will need far more government
support in the form of tax incentives, or a price on carbon emissions,
to play a larger role.
“You could see enormous growth, something like 200 million tons of CO2
captured every year in the 2030s” if the tax incentives were increased
to the levels included in the Build Back Better Act, he said.
Put another way, $12 billion may be only a down payment.
Nicholas Kusnetz
Reporter, New York City
Nicholas Kusnetz is a reporter for Inside Climate News. Before joining
ICN, he worked at the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. His
work has won numerous awards, including from the American Association
for the Advancement of Science and the Society of American Business
Editors and Writers, and has appeared in more than a dozen
publications, including The Washington Post, Businessweek, The Nation,
Fast Company and The New York Times. You can reach Nicholas at nicholas.kusnetz@insideclimatenews.org and
securely at nicholas.kusnetz@protonmail.com.
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