What if we could turn back the clock on climate change by simply
capturing all the excess greenhouse gases we have emitted since the
industrial revolution? It may sound too good to be true, but that
technology already exists. It is called carbon capture and storage
(CCS) — or carbon capture and sequestration — and has been under
development since the 1990s.
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PLANTS[1]
Over the course of the years, scientists have figured out
different ways of capturing and storing CO2 in the ground, under
the sea, and even by using it as an input into different industrial
processes. But despite decades of research and development
(R&D), CCS remains too expensive to be deployed on a large
scale in industry.
Part of the problem has been the fact that, until recently,
neither governments nor private companies have been keen to invest
the exorbitant amounts of money it takes to develop the technology
to the point where it becomes commercially feasible.
On top of that, the large-scale deployment of CCS requires the
construction of infrastructure to capture, transport, and store the
greenhouse gas; this would have to be similar in scale to the
existing oil and gas infrastructure, which took decades to erect
and was expensive to build. In other words, the investment required
is enormous.
That is to say nothing of the fact that CCS fails to address the
root cause of climate change, which is that we produce and consume
too much and are overstretching our planetary boundaries. In short,
CCS is an end-of-pipe solution that environmentalists detest and
that everyone else dislikes because it is costly and its use means
that we have failed to mitigate climate change with preventative
measures.
A future after all?
But a few recent developments point to the fact that CCS may
have a future in the climate change mitigation efforts after all.
One year ago, in October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) — operating under the UN, this is the most
authoritative scientific body on climate change in the world —
published a landmark report[2] in which it
concluded that CCS needed to be part of the solution to avoiding
catastrophic levels of climate change (warming of 2C or higher). By
2100, the IPCC found, the world would need to remove at least
3.3 billion tons of CO2 per year from the
atmosphere using CCS.
The report was followed by encouraging policy incentives. In
November 2018, the European Commission published its
roadmap[3] to carbon
neutrality by 2050, which includes CCS alongside six other steps.
According to this strategy, CCS is to “compensate for the remaining
[after preventative measures are exhausted] greenhouse gas
emissions in our economy and create negative emissions.”
Across the Atlantic, the U.S. Congress in 2018 increased both
the R&D funding for CCS and the tax incentives for the capture
and utilization of CO2, according to this August 2018 Congressional
report[4].
Northern Lights
More importantly, industrial giants have started to throw their
weight behind CCS in earnest. Despite the fact that the technology
is by now mature, only 18 CCS projects were operating as of
December 2018. However, in January 2019, a promising new project
dubbed Northern Lights received its license to operate. Located off
the western coast of Norway, the ambitious initiative seeks to
build an open-access transport and storage infrastructure for
CO2.
Operated by Norway’s Equinor (former Statoil), the project also
counts oil majors Shell and Total among its partners. And, as of
September 2019, it has the participation of seven other industrial
giants[5]
from different industries, which have committed to creating value
chains in CCS in their respective sectors.
Once completed, Northern Lights will be by far the largest such
project in the world, being able to capture five million
tons of CO2 per year. This is the equivalent of the
greenhouse gases emitted by five million passenger vehicles in a
year or by six average-sized coal-fired power plants.
Northern LIghts will work as follows. The CO2 captured from
different sources will be transported by ship to the Norwegian port
of Bergen, where it will be stored in pressurized tanks. The gas
will then be pumped offshore through a pipeline into one or several
injection wells.
The process won’t require an offshore platform, because the
wells will be controlled using existing offshore oil and gas
infrastructure. The design and management of these facilities will
be quite similar to those required for liquid petroleum gas (LPG)
sans the fire hazard associated with the latter, according to
Equinor.
Why so pricey?
Oil and gas companies have been injecting naturally occurring
CO2 in oil wells for decades in order to enhance the energy
recovery rates at their wells. However, capturing industrial CO2
emissions is much more complicated and costly.
CCS can be undertaken in virtually every type of facility that
emits CO2, but is particularly relevant for highly polluting
industries like power generation, cement, chemicals, and
petrochemicals.
Regardless of its use case, the technology comprises three main
steps: (1) the capture of CO2, followed by (2) its compression and
purification, and then by (3) its injection into different types of
rock formations.
The first step — capturing CO2 — accounts for the high costs of
the technology. That is because CCS involves the addition of
several steps to industrial combustion in order to remove CO2 from
flue gases.
For coal-based power plants, for instance, the cost of capturing
CO2 can be as high as $109 per ton, which is
estimated to increase the price of the electricity generated by up
to 80%.
What about negative emissions?
While CCS is interesting in and of itself, some of its
applications stand out even more because of how impactful they
could be if deployed on a large scale. One such application is
bioenergy crops with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which
consists of the conversion of biomass into energy with the capture
and permanent storage of the resulting CO2 emissions.
There are two main ways in which this can be accomplished. The
first is the direct combustion of biomass and the capture of the
resulting CO2 emissions. The second — which is more commonly
used nowadays — way consists in the fermentation of biomass,
which results in bioethanol. In the latter case, CO2 emissions need
not be captured, but rather can be directly compressed.
BECCS promises not only to reduce our reliance on hydrocarbons
by offering an alternative fuel for the generation of electricity,
but also to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in the process, thus
helping to mitigate climate change. That said, the technology is
not without its critics[6], who have pointed[7] out that using
land in order to plant crops for BECCS will put further pressure on
biodiversity and crowd out the food crops necessary to feed the
growing world population.
At the end of the day, the most effective (and cheapest) way to
sequester CO2 is to plant forests and avoid emitting too much of it
in the first place. For, while some industrial giants would like to
have us believe that “industry can do what plants do” (i.e. capture
CO2), the reality is that we as a society will have to pay a hefty
price in order to make that happen. And the reason we need industry
to do what plants do in the first place is because we weren’t
capable of curbing our greenhouse gas emissions when we should
have.