The Irrational Exuberance Of Carbon Capture: Another Pilot Plant Shuts Off Because Of Low Oil Price
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Carbon capture—which is an umbrella term for many different technologies—can broadly be divided into two categories: carbon captured directly from the air, and carbon captured from power plants and industrial processes. In theory, the carbon can simply be sequestered in rock formations. Often, though, that captured carbon is transported via pipeline to be injected into oil wells in order to dig up more fossil fuels, in a process known as enhanced oil recovery. Direct air capture uses contraptions that look like air conditioners to draw carbon down from the air, usually funneling it into novel uses like carbonating soft drinks.
This is all well and good; it will be a great development if and when these technologies become commercially viable. For now, that seems a long way off. And the gap between wish and reality is becoming increasingly worrisome as everyone from fossil fuel executives to establishment politicians to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change invests an uncomfortable amount of faith in technologies that are still operating on a remarkably small scale. Many national and international targets for emissions reductions, at present, assume that transitioning to renewables and various economic changes can get us part of the way there and that new carbon capture technologies will emerge to cover the gap by 2050. If a government, politician, or corporation calls to achieve “net-zero” emissions by some date, that’s most likely what they mean.
The carbon capture project that shut down last month—Petra Nova, capturing carbon from one coal-burning unit of a power plant near Houston—wasn’t switched off because it couldn’t capture carbon. It seems to have been pretty good at that, though exact amounts remain the subject of some debate. The coal whose fumes Petra Nova was designed to capture, however, is rapidly becoming more expensive than other forms of fuel, including renewables. And the business model for keeping Petra Nova going simply didn’t work without being able to funnel lots of the carbon dioxide captured into digging up oil; current low oil prices, in turn, meant fewer customers willing to buy up excess carbon to inject into active wells. Petra Nova’s closure, a recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis finds, comes after it received a $190 million investment from the DOE. Another carbon capture project that received generous investments from the DOE during the Obama administration, known as the Kemper Project, also failed after years of cost overruns and mismanagement, racking up $6.4 billion in losses. Ongoing carbon capture proposals for coal-fired power plants in New Mexico and North Dakota are now on shaky ground as well.
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Yet virtually every fossil fuel company in the world right now is enthusiastically leaning into largely unproven, prohibitively expensive new technologies so as to extend the life of its core business model indefinitely. Token or even earnest investments in carbon capture by fossil fuel producers let them pretend to care about the climate while in reality giving themselves a loophole for keeping expensive, polluting coal plants (for instance) operating and more or less unregulated. Whether they actually reach net zero doesn’t really matter, so long as they can keep up business as usual for a couple more years by, say, slapping a costly government-sponsored doodad onto the top of their coal plant. Bullishness about capturing carbon has been a way, as well, for governments friendly to coal, oil, and gas companies—most recently, Scott Morrison’s Australia—to pay some nominal lip service to climate campaigners’ demands while keeping their favorite companies sated and secure.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/159473/corporate-america-irrationally-enthusiastic-carbon-capture
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