Critiques of Carbon Capture Technology

"The world has far fewer places to securely store carbon dioxide deep underground than previously thought, steeply lowering its potential to help stem global warming, according to a new study that challenges long-held industry claims about the practice. The study, published Wednesday (Sep 3) in the journal Nature, found that global carbon storage capacity was 10 times less than previous estimates after ruling out geological formations where the gas could leak, trigger earthquakes or contaminate groundwater, or had other limitations. That means carbon capture and storage would only have the potential to reduce human-caused warming by 0.7 degrees Celsius - far less than previous estimates of around 5-6 degrees Celsius, researchers said. “Carbon storage is often portrayed as a way out of the climate crisis. Our findings make clear that it is a limited tool” and reaffirms “the extreme importance of reducing emissions as fast and as soon as possible”, said lead author Matthew Gidden, a research professor at the University Maryland's Center for Global Sustainability. The study is the latest knock on a technology, for years promoted by oil and gas industry, that has often been touted as a climate solution. Today, carbon capture is far from being deployed at scale, despite billions of dollars in investments around the world, and the amount of carbon currently captured is just a tiny fraction of the billions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted every year." "That’s not to say that carbon capture and storage isn’t important to keep global temperatures in check - but countries must prioritise how they use the limited storage and do so in conjunction with fast and deep emissions reductions, researchers said. The technology ideally should be used for sectors that are difficult to decarbonise, such as cement production, aviation and agriculture, rather than to extend the life of polluting power plants or to prolong the use of oil and gas, Koberle said. Industry officials defended carbon capture and storage as having an inherently low risk and say emerging technologies, such as storing carbon dioxide in basalt formations where it becomes mineralised, could dramatically increase total storage volumes. What's more, its use is “not optional if we hope to address global warming”, said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, adding that it must be combined with other ways to reduce emissions and balanced with the need for reliable and affordable energy. Rob Jackson, head of the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who monitor greenhouse gas emissions, praised the study for its cautionary perspective. And though he’s optimistic that carbon capture technology itself will work, he believes very little will ever be stored “because I don’t think we’re willing to pay for it”." https://lnkd.in/gTtXXnpD

CCS is mostly an expensive failure designed to prolong the lifetime of the #oilandgas industry. Gorgon in Western Australia is the world's largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project. It was approved on the condition that it would capture 80% of the CO2 it removed from its reservoir on a 5-year rolling average from July 2016. How has it performed since then? ➡️ The project was delayed and operations only started in mid-2019 ➡️ To date it has only captured 44% of the CO2 removed between 2019 and 2024 ➡️ Far from performance improving, it is actually getting worse. In FY2023-24 it only captured 30% of the CO2 removed from the reservoir. And costs have increased, from an initial estimate of $70/tonne of CO2 captured, to over $200/tonne of CO2 captured. Looking at total emissions from the Gorgon project (including Scope 1, 2 and 3), Chevron estimated these at 50 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year. In the 5 years since Gorgon CCS started operating it has captured about 10 MtCO2 - reducing Gorgon's total emissions from 250 MtCO2 to 240 MtCO2. That's a mere 4% decrease. And Gorgon is not alone. A review of 13 flagship CCS projects found that only three met their targets. Two of these are in Norway - Sleipner and Snøvit. They have also encountered unexpected geological problems highlighting a key issue: putting something back in the ground is more difficult than extracting it. Ironically, the majority of the CO2 that is captured at CCS projects is used for Enhanced Oil Recovery, meaning it is injected into oil wells to extract more oil, which will lead to more emissions and defeats the object of capturing the CO2 in the first place. Don't be fooled: CCS is not the climate panacea the fossil fuel industry would have you believe. It's mostly a distraction from the climate solutions that actually work. #energy #sustainability #energytransition

15 years of carbon capture, utilization and storage assessments and publication distilled. tl'dr: Direct air capture is deeply stupid, ocean carbon schemes are deeply problematic and industrial CCS will have a small role for cement and oil refinery decarbonization. Nature based solutions won't help us with 2050 goals particularly, but will be necessary for 2100 and 2200 needs. All slides and write up: (warning: 6,500 word door stop): https://lnkd.in/gXSGVKa7 A few months ago, Sami Khan, PhD, P.Eng., a Simon Fraser University Professor and MIT engineering PhD, reached out to me. He’d read something I’d published on ocean geoengineering and wanted to know if I was interested in talking with his PhD, masters, and undergraduate students about the subject, and carbon capture, utilization and sequestration in general as a guest lecturer in a CCUS co-op course he was running. Khan helped set up the SFU Sustainable Engineering program as one of the initial hires a few years ago. Now he has a bevy of incredibly bright, talented engineers doing materials research and looking across the climate solution space. As I said to the students at the beginning and end of the three-hour session, they need to be careful about their choices of what they work on. It's easy for engineers to get sucked into doing work that doesn't move the needle because it's intellectually interesting or lucrative. They are in the program because they want to move the needle. To that end, in a program devoted to CCUS, I spent almost an hour going through the scale of the problem, what constitutes materiality in a solution and why no direct air capture solution is remotely material or ever will be. Then I dug through ocean geoengineering solutions and the problems with every one I'd looked at. Next I stepped through the shell games of the fossil fuel industry where they extract CO2 from underground in one place to put underground in another place for enhanced oil recovery or tax breaks. Finally, I looked at cement and hydrogen, two places where CCS will have a temporary play this century. About a dozen case studies of specific firms are used to draw out each of the technologies and chemistries involved and to explain why different approaches are so broken, despite often decades of bright people trying desperately to make them not broken. A couple of hours of broad ranging discussion followed. All in aid of helping this batch of engineers at the beginning of their careers choose wisely so that they can move the needle. If you are an engineer engaged in CCUS, hydrogen for energy, urban air mobility, hypersonic aviation, three-wheeled cars or anywhere in the fossil fuel industry, maybe you should rethink your career choices. #engineering #engineers #education #wisdom #climateaction #CCS #CCUS

CCS - an expensive way to avoid a problem we could prevent? I read an interesting CCS piece in today’s Energy Voice. (https://lnkd.in/eja86qz8) It’s a timely reminder that carbon capture and storage has no inherent commercial logic. However it’s framed, CCS doesn’t create a product or a revenue stream; it adds cost to dispose of a waste stream. Capture equipment consumes energy, compression and transport require new infrastructure, and storage brings decades of monitoring and liability. Whatever you’re producing - power, hydrogen, cement or steel - CCS makes it more expensive. Burning one tonne of natural gas produces roughly 2.8 tonnes of CO₂. Operators must move, compress and inject more mass than they extracted, and the capture systems themselves typically demand 10–30% more energy. I’m reminded of a basic truth in energy policy: the greenest energy is the energy we don’t use. CCS does the opposite — it forces you to use more energy to clean up the consequences of using energy in the first place. CCS isn’t like LNG or renewables, which sell something customers want. It is like wastewater treatment or landfill: a compliance service that only exists because regulation forces someone to pay. When CCS developers talk about “commercial validation”, they really mean bankability - proving that subsidies, mandates and long‑term contracts can underwrite financing. My question is simple: how much of the extra CCS cost ends up with consumers, through higher power bills, fuel prices and industrial goods, and is CCS really the least‑cost way to deliver the same climate outcome? Terra Nova CCS.

The crux of the issue with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) isn't just economics or scalability, it's systemic enablement that extends the age of fossil fuels. Here's how: over 80% of captured CO₂ is pumped back underground to… produce more oil. In at least one major project, up to 95% of captured carbon has gone to oil extraction. Through Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), operators can extract 30–60% more from existing reservoirs. This represents a profound shift in the supply economics of fossil fuels. According to the IEA, between 2025 and 2040, total EOR production will grow from 2.7 million barrels per day (mb/d) to more than 4.5 mb/d, accounting for around 4% of global oil production by 2040. Huge sums of money are flowing into this tech because it directly boosts the fossil fuel industry. This is being subsidized by public funds. This recent reporting is illustrative: 👉 https://lnkd.in/g7SE9SHA These stats are deeply disconcerting: - https://lnkd.in/gWRMTpqs - https://lnkd.in/gcVPQQNh - https://lnkd.in/gWRMTpqs