By Karen Ellas, Climate Reality Project, Susquehanna Valley PA Chapter

This guest essay first appeared in the Lock Haven Express September 13, 2021--

The technology known as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is currently being discussed in Congress as part of President Biden’s infrastructure bill.

It was also mentioned recently by Senator Casey, who proposed that natural gas — fitted with CCS technologies — be used, along with renewables, to increase clean electricity.

Both Republicans and Democrats are touting natural gas with CCS as the next clean energy solution, and significant funding has been earmarked for its research and development — at the expense of renewable energy projects that have proven to be cheaper and to produce fewer carbon emissions.

CCS would seem to be an easy fix for our carbon woes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just told us we need to reach net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050 to forestall the worst effects of climate change.

So, what could be wrong with a technology that promises to capture carbon dioxide and remove it from the atmosphere as a way to bring those emissions under control?

Plenty.

We need to be clear, first of all, about the technology itself. When we hear the term “carbon capture,” many of us imagine an enormous vacuum cleaner — sort of like an industrial-sized Mary Poppins — that goes about cheerily extracting carbon directly from the atmosphere.

The realities of what is being called Direct Air Capture (DAC), however, are far from simple and are proving difficult to realize. At this time, developing DAC quickly and on the large scale needed to effectively impact emissions levels within the next decade is not economically feasible due to its high costs.

The authors of a book on DAC conclude: “Deployment of direct air capture on any significant scale . . . requires significant infrastructure, energy and land.” Total investments in large-scale removal would range between $100 billion per year and $500 billion per year.

The authors go on to say, “Achieving this rate and scale of CO2 removal will require substantial investments in fundamental research, demonstration, and deployment.”

In addition, recent studies conducted at Stanford University have found that DAC technology does not meet expectations.

A plant operating on natural gas that was built to capture CO2 directly from the air was found to capture “the equivalent of only 10-11 percent of the emissions produced, averaged over 20 years.”

To calculate its total carbon output, a plant’s upstream fugitive emissions must also be taken into consideration. These include the leaks that come from transporting and storing natural gas.

Once those calculations are included, it becomes clear that the enormous sums needed to develop DAC begin to seem like an unwise investment.

The CCS technology that’s most often discussed would operate on a smaller scale as an adjunct to individual facilities with major CO2 emissions, such as industrial manufacturing and natural gas processing plants.

This equipment is designed to capture these emissions on site from flue stacks and then either use them to enhance further gas production or transport them for storage underground. Attaching CCS technology to an existing facility makes the running of that facility both more energy intensive and more expensive.

The world has been experimenting with CCS technology for several decades. During that time, 68 projects have been terminated because they were found to be prohibitively expensive.

At this time, only 28 CCS plants are in operation across the world, capturing only 0.1 percent annually of total global fossil fuel emissions.

The technology is not only proving to be inefficient at carbon reduction, but it is also technically difficult, less economical than renewables, and possibly risky over the long term.

A case in point is the Kemper Project in Mississippi. Designed originally as a model for proving the possibility of “clean coal,” the power plant was to make use of carbon capture technologies to eliminate most of the emissions of a traditional coal plant. The project was hailed by many as paving the way for coal-based power generation of the future.

If successful, this technology would – it was hoped – be used world-wide. Construction of the plant began in 2010; by 2017, the plant was still not in service and the costs had risen to $7.6 billion.

In June of 2017, facing cost overruns, missed targets, legal entanglements and failed technology, the company announced that the project would abandon its plans to run on “clean coal” and burn only natural gas.

Any plant with adjunct CCS technology requires extra energy to capture its carbon emissions; at a gas-fired power plant, for example, these requirements can increase anywhere between 11 percent and 22 percent.

This means the plant will require more fuel to operate and will ultimately create more environmental problems resulting, for example, from increased methane emissions.

The Stanford studies mentioned above found that – because carbon capture facilities are designed to run on natural gas — these too, like DAC, end up capturing just a small fragment of the carbon emissions they were designed to eliminate.

The best solution, these studies conclude, is to use renewables like wind or solar to produce electricity. Renewables eliminate pollution and health problems, and significantly reduce climate impact.

“Not only does carbon capture hardly work at existing plants, but there’s no way it can actually improve to be better than replacing goal or gas with wind or solar directly,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, Senior Fellow at Stanford and author of the study.

Problems also arise once the emissions have been captured. While the technology was developed to render greenhouse gases harmless by storing them underground, in fact a majority (81 percent) of captured carbon is being pumped into existing wells to extract more oil, in a process some call “energy laundering.”

If the intent is to reduce our carbon emissions, using captured carbon to produce more fossil fuels is simply not a reasonable solution.

Transporting carbon to storage facilities, such as underground rock formations or saline caverns, will necessitate further build-up of our pipeline infrastructure, a project that, in addition to requiring huge financial investment, can produce its own problems.

Pipelines transporting CO2 under high pressure may corrode and leak or rupture, as happened in Mississippi in 2020, presenting asphyxiation hazards to nearby human and animal populations.

In addition, since the technology is so new, few long-term studies have been done to assess the impact that large-scale carbon storage might have on the environment. Problems could include leakage, underground spread, contamination of drinking water, and tectonic activity.

Researchers point out that current low-impact earthquake events associated with fracking’s underground injection operations could be replaced by more destructive earthquakes as we attempt to store enormous amounts of carbon underground for thousands of years.

The researchers state that “Even a fault slip of a few centimeters could allow stored CO2 to reach the surface – a serious concern, since … carbon repositories need a leak rate of less than 1 percent every thousand years to be effective.”

Questions raised around Carbon Capture and Storage have now come closer to home. In assessing workable technologies for the gas-fired power plant proposed for Renovo, the Pennsylvania DEP rejected CCS.

The DEP report states that several factors potentially make this technology unavailable at the present time: “CCS is not commercially available in the United States and there is no known application of this technology. Other factors also included the availability and technical complexity of reservoirs for sequestering the captured carbon dioxide which is beyond the scope of the proposed project. Therefore, CCS technology is currently technically infeasible.”

Carbon capture and storage is not right for our area. It is not right for the planet.

Just last month, we learned that the largest carbon sequestration facility in the world — the Gorgon gas facility in Australia developed by Chevron — has declared its failure to capture its promised emissions of four million tonnes of CO2 per year. (In the metric system, a tonne is equal to 1000 kg. A ton, on the other hand, translates to 910 kg.)

Calling CCS “an expensive failure,” Climate Council Senior Researcher Tim Baxter said, “This result is no surprise. After decades of CCS research and billions of dollars of investment, there is little to show for it. Over the past decade, the costs of renewable energy like wind and solar have plummeted. Over the same period, CCS has remained extremely expensive. There are still no projects operating anywhere in the world that have delivered CCS on time, on budget, or in the quantities promised.”

The conclusion is unmistakable. Though CCS technologies might be used to offset the most intractable emissions, in the production for example of cement or steel, our main focus must be on aggressive reductions of fossil fuels.

In the face of increasingly dire climate warnings, these reductions are the only way to achieve the pathways recommended by the IPCC. Far from being energy panaceas, Direct Air Capture and Carbon Capture and Storage are efforts to distract from renewables and extend the life of fossil fuels indefinitely.

In the words of Tim Baxter, “CCS is simply an attempt to prolong the life of polluting fossil fuels which are driving climate change. We need to transition away from burning coal, oil and gas and instead power our economy with renewables and storage.”

Karen Ellas, Climate Reality Project, Susquehanna Valley PA Chapter.  She can be contacted by sending email to: susquehannavalleyCRP@gmail.com.

(Reprinted from the Lock Haven Express.)

NewsClip:

-- PPL Utilities: Subsidiaries Louisville Gas & Electric, Kentucky Utility Company And University Of Kentucky Form Partnership To Study Capture Of CO2 Emissions From Natural Gas Combined Cycle Power Plants

Related Articles:

-- Chesapeake Bay Journal: As Federal Support Emerges, PA Wants To Be A Carbon Capture Hub

-- Senate Environmental Committee Hears About Using Carbon Capture Technology To Reduce PA’s Carbon Footprint

-- Wolf Administration Joins 6 States In Commitment To Develop Regional Carbon Dioxide Transport Infrastructure Plan To Promote Carbon Capture

-- Sen. Street Announces Bill Package To Transition From AEPS To New Clean Energy Standard With Carbon Capture

-- PA Environmental Council: Carbon Capture, Utilization, Storage In PA: A Story Map

[Posted: September 14, 2021]

9/20/2021