Is CCS The Worst Case of Greenwashing In History?

Introduction

CCS or Carbon Capture Storage is the talk of the town after UN COP28 was held in Dubai, with over 85000 participants, and all countries agreeing to transition away from fossil fuels via use of CCS, among other measures. There’s just one problem. CCS doesn’t work. And quite frankly, the failure of CCS matters because far too many have decided to link the progress of their emissions reduction plans to this unproven technology.

Before we get into the problems with it, it’s important that we understand the workings of Carbon Capture Storage solutions and some of its advantages.

The CCU applications consist of 3 stages: Capture, Transport and storage/usage of CO2. The methods used for capturing CO2 are: post-combustion, pre-combustion and oxy-fuel combustion. The currently operational facilities fitted with CCUs can capture around 90% of the CO2 in say flue gas from thermal plants. CO2 can also be captured directly from the atmosphere by using fans and passing it through an environment consisting of solid sorbents or liquid solvents. However, this practice is extremely energy intensive.

Once the CO2 has been captured, it is compressed into a liquid state and transported by pipeline, ship, rail or road tanker. It’s then injected into deep, geological formations, usually at depths of 1km or more to be permanently stored in depleted oil or gas reservoirs, coalbeds or deep saline aquifers where the geology is suitable.

Advantages

Carbon capture is faster than trees at capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. Over the first 20 years of a tree’s life, it’ll absorb about 39kg of carbon dioxide. Compare that to Carbon Capture, which (in a vacuum not considering the power required to run it) can absorb carbon at the source, thus reducing CO2 emissions.

Now that we’ve gone over the workings and the singular advantage of carbon capture, let’s go over why it’s one of the worst cases of greenwashing to ever grace the Earth.

Money out of your pocket

It’s no secret that carbon capture is expensive. Depending on the type of facility, the cost of storage and transportation and other factors, CO2 capture costs estimates can range from 15-130 dollars per ton of CO2 for industrial carbon capture at the source and all the way up to 1200 dollars per metric ton of CO2 for direct capture from the air. For context, the United States alone produces 6000 million metric tons of CO2 every year. Assuming a cost of $1000 per ton, offsetting US emissions would cost about $6 trillion per year.

Capturing CO2 directly at the source can decrease power and industrial plants’ efficiencies and increase their water use, the additional costs of which can render a CCS project a financial dud.

Unlike renewable technologies that’d help us phase out fossil fuels, the costs of CCS in the oil and gas sector have been slow to fall. This is due to the high level of complexity and customization required, with each CCS unit being needed to be designed on a per-factory basis.

As for the transport part of the process that is CCS, significant energy is required to compress and chill CO2 and maintain high pressure and low temperatures throughout pipelines, which themselves are expensive to build, needing to be specially designed since preexisting oil and gas pipelines cannot be used. Imperfections in these may cause dangerous leaks and explosions as well. Considering the fact that CO2 has to be piped directly over to storage sites, the solution isn’t scalable at all.

Lining pockets, just not yours

CCS isn’t going to be used to phase out fossil fuels. In fact, the very processes used in Carbon Capture Storage are actively helping keep the fossil fuel industry alive. Let’s take a trip through history lane and understand how it started.

Going back to the 1970s, Carbon Capture didn’t have the “green” name it has now. Back then, it was called enhanced oil recovery, since the carbon dioxide recovered from oil and gas production was injected back into oil and gas reservoirs and used to repressurize them so that more hydrocarbons could be extracted.

As times changed and the climate change movement gained more steam, the fossil fuel industry rebranded enhanced oil recovery to a trendier name: Carbon Capture utilization and storage. As of 2024, 70% of carbon capture projects are enhanced oil recovery projects used to produce more oil and/or gas, furthering the lifespans of fossil fuel companies and leading to more greenhouse gas emissions.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has estimated that most of the total captured carbon throughout history found its use in enhanced oil recovery-approximately 80-90%. Less than a fifth of CCS projects have actually done the S i.e. actually stored carbon in dedicated geological structures.

Carbon Capture is a placebo, giving oil and gas companies a cover that they can point to whenever they’re questioned about their greenhouse gas emissions. The worst part is that they’re not even putting their own money into it, running carbon capture off of subsidies provided by the government. Subsidies that can only exist because of taxpayer money.

In Canada, CCS being enabled by massive public subsidies has led to higher electricity rates, triggered by the Boundary Dam carbon capture scheme. Despite pleas from over 400 scientists, a new proposal would put Canadian taxpayers on the hook for a new carbon capture tax credit.

With CCS, we are building “a taxpayer-financed sewer system for the fossil fuel industry,” says Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center.

Tellingly, the only people singing praises of CCS are those that stand to directly benefit from it. Bob Dudley, the ex-CEO of fossil fuel energy giant BP, is quoted as saying “And people say CCUS is only a tool for the oil and gas industry to perpetuate its life — that’s not true.”

Vicky Hollub, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum(received hundreds of millions from the government for carbon capture projects) is quoted as saying, “direct carbon capture technology is going to be the tech that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

The Biden administration has put big money behind the controversial technology as well, dedicating $12 billion to it in the 2021 infrastructure and jobs act, likely spurred on by the big oil lobby.

Negative press and failures

CCS seems to be universally seen as a bad idea by everyone except oil and gas companies.

The ETC, which includes environmental nonprofits and corporate leaders from the fields of finance, fossil fuels and clean energy has called carbon capture “a distraction from the necessary and difficult task of moving off fossil fuels.” Notably, the technology has never been used successfully at scale, is very expensive compared to other options and is often just a cover for fossil fuel companies to keep extracting and burning oil and gas.

A new IEEFA study reviewed the capacity and performance of 13 flagship projects and found that 10 of the 13 failed or underperformed against their designed capacities by large, inexcusable margins for how much money was put into them.

When it comes to public perception on Carbon Capture technology, one person called it “snake oil” while another said “it’s an excellent false narrative to try and convince people that climate change has been solved”.

According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least effective, most expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth. Scientists rank it close to the bottom of a long list of options, with solutions like wind and solar energy easily outranking it.

As for real world examples of failures to keep gas underground, one can look at the California Aliso Canyon gas leak in 2015, when 97000 metric tons of methane leaked into the atmosphere. While the leak was not carbon dioxide, the problems encountered at Aliso Canyon could also be encountered with carbon dioxide at a carbon capture project.

Speaking of CO2-based leakage issues, one needs to look no further than the town of Satartia Miss., where people collapsed in their homes and trucks, dazed and nauseous when a CO2 pipeline ruptured and the colourless and odourless gas displaced oxygen. Nearly 50 people had to be hospitalized.

As for money wasted, the Salah project in Algeria is a perfect example. The $2.7 billion project had to be suspended in 2011 due to concerns about the integrity of the seal and suspicious movements of carbon dioxide underground.

Speaking of carbon offsetting….

So sure, maybe it’s an expensive technology that doesn’t scale well and is highly situational to use, but at least it removes carbon. Right?

Not really.

Coming back to carbon removal techniques consuming large amounts of energy, the energy generally comes from fossil fuels currently. We’re burning fossil fuels to reduce pollution that wouldn’t have been caused if we hadn’t burnt them to begin with. Additionally, powering CCS solutions with renewable or nuclear energy sources would provide far less climate benefit than using that energy too directly displace fossil fuels.

If that wasn’t enough, sucking CO2 out of the air does nothing to reduce the health damage caused by fossil fuels which cause 8 million people to die prematurely each year.

All this is not even taking into account the aforementioned 70-80% of CC being used to simply extract more fossil fuels, which are then burnt and contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere.

Even if we ignore the previous issues with Carbon Capture, it still doesn’t excuse how little it does. Even after decades of investment, research and development, today’s largest carbon capture projects barely remove a few seconds’ worth of our yearly greenhouse gas emissions. Even the planned Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs supported by the Department of Energy will only be able to capture one million metric tons of CO2 every year. Last year, global emissions were 40.5 billion metric tons.

Conclusion

Considering the goal set by the UN to limit global warming to 1.5 C (set to be comprehensively missed, BTW), the production of oil and gas needs to decline by 65% by 2050. Keeping in mind that CCS doesn’t do much other than extend the lives of oil and gas companies, CCS more than likely is a detriment to the climate change movement.

As usual, personalities have had an outsized influence on the CCS conversation. A whole lot of the positive press that carbon capture gets is from Bill Gates. The man who takes on average more than 2 private flights a day spends his time hyping up and talking about how his carbon capture projects are the future, costing him “only” $600 per ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Mainstream news outlets are happy to eat up and publish videos on carbon capture technologies, completely ignoring the negatives of the technology. A concept is only as good as the spokesperson, and who better than the man behind Microsoft himself?

CCS serves as nothing but a hype machine, with investments from the likes of Bill Gates meaning it gets more coverage in the press. The technology is incredibly expensive, has a net negative impact on the environment at times and is heavily reliant on government subsidies. The sluggish rollout further underlines its inefficiency. Being nothing better than a green cover for oil and gas companies to hide behind does not do good for its image either. Heavy reliance on CCS in the energy sector is misguided at best and malicious at worst, as renewable energy like solar and wind continue to go down in cost. The entire debacle that is Carbon Capture and Storage really highlights how comically villainous the oil and gas companies tend to be.

By Yash Singh