The best possible analogous application of carbon capture is akin to rags soaking up an oil spill.
It does not stop the spill nor does it prevent a spill from occurring. Both of which we are in dire need of, so to speak.
This piece is just propaganda. One wonders what would be expected:
To date, it has received $281 million in taxpayer dollars via Department of Energy grants. According to the Department of Energy, it has stored more than 2.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide since 2011.
This would place the cost of sequestration at… $100 tonne, which is pretty much the price that everyone else has estimated for carbon capture and sequestration, as discussed in articles like this. How much was sequestration of 2.8 million tonnes of CO2 supposed to cost?
“Carbon capture project captures almost no carbon”. Really? Because 2.8 megatonnes doesn’t seem like “no carbon” to me. Was it that “it only caught 10% of the carbon produced on the site”? Well then, maybe it should have been $2.8B of taxpayer dollars to capture 28 MTCO₂. What would the headline have been then? “Carbon capture project costs taxpayer $2.8B for almost no carbon”?
I want the cost of sequestration to be lower just like anyone else, but doing nothing is a terrible strategy to learn how to reduce costs.
If you don’t want taxpayers to pay for it, change the laws and make the price of carbon emissions >$100 tonne. Then ADM will have to pay their own sequestration costs. If you don’t like sequestration because it’s expensive, then what’s the plan for decarbonizing the atmosphere and reducing global temperatures after emissions are zeroed out? If your plan for a carbon neutral world is “endure global warming for thousands of years until the carbon gets sequestered in soil”, that’s fine, but you can’t blame people for wanting to see things get cleared up on the order of decades.
This project was a success, insofar as it accomplished what it set out to accomplish as a publicly funded demonstration of the technology. The fact that the site emitted other carbon that wasn’t captured is irrelevant.
This would place the cost of sequestration at… $100 tonne
I did some quick back-of-the-envelope math, and unless I’m mistaken that’s equivalent to about $1 per gallon of gasoline… which is a lot lower than I had expected, honestly.
If that’s all it costs, we should be sinking billions in public funds into this, especially if there’s an R&D component that’s seeking to drive down costs/increase efficiency.
The magnitude of the problem can be challenging to comprehend. There is about 1 Ttonne CO₂ to mitigate, which, at $100 per tonne, would cost $100 trillion USD to fully sequester. Throwing billions of dollars at it would not even start to make the smallest measurable dent in the problem at any scale whatsoever.
However, if the current rate of annual solar panel adoption continues at 26% for the next 18 years, then the global production of energy will be sufficient to pretty rapidly decarbonize the atmosphere at low cost, as the amount of solar energy will be triple that being produced globally from all sources at present.
Now, if that doesn’t happen, then another way to pay for decarbonizing is to bring about world peace and disarmament. The US annual defense budget is ~$800B. If the dividend from world peace was directed to climate mitigation, we could get rapid, dramatic reductions in CO₂ over the course of a century. And we would no longer have the threat of nuclear war looming over human civilization. I find that this idea is generally met with scepticism, but, unlike other government expenditures like healthcare and welfare, war is a highly discretionary expenditure that can be rendered unnecessary by some important people signing some papers.
This is a serious, expensive problem and the solutions, unfortunately, are going to need to be proportionally serious and expensive.
This is sadly not a surprise. Any carbon capture project that doesn’t involve trees is guaranteed to be a money sink and little else. Any process that pulls carbon out of the air is going to be an energy intensive one. Which means that many carbon capture projects are carbon positive. Often by a significant margin. Most of them are pushed by the oil companies since it’s something they can point to as helping the environment but it increases power usage and their profits. So it’s the option they want everyone to go with. And they’d prefer if we ignore the option that uses self replicating structures with built in solar panels that have spent the last billion years becoming hyper efficient at this exact task.
In this case, the carbon is being captured is a concentrated stream resulting from ethanol fermentation (point source capture). It’s more efficient than capturing carbon from the air (direct air capture) due to the much higher initial concentration.
Yeah just building solar to replace a fossil fuel plant is a way better means of preventing CO2 from entering the atmosphere in the first place, but that’s not sexy so fuck it, let’s burn a gigajoule of energy to absorb a tonne of CO2
Yep, some carbon capture tech is even used to extract more oil. They push CO2 down a well to push out more oil, then they get carbon credits for that. Does the carbon stay in the well after it runs dry? Who knows, it’s not the oil company’s problem any more.
From what I know, the co2 is pumped under immense pressure, to the point of solidifying into dry ice. At that depth where this is done once the well is sealed up, it is relatively stable.
Not exactly dry ice, it is supercritically pressured carbon dioxide so it has the density of a liquid but defuses like a gas. CO2 plumes are stable at depths where injection occurs because they are maintained in a pressure and temperature environment where the CO2 stays in a liquid stage, so it will never rise to the surface like a conventional lighter-than-air gas. In-situ mineral carbonation can also occur where the CO2 is injected into silicate rock formations to promote carbonate mineral formation, locking the CO2 for thousands (millions maybe) years.
Planting more trees and making more solar panels won’t fix the issue of rapidly increasing CO2 emissions around the world. Making solar panels is not a green industry and the ability to build them locally is not really an option for a lot of countries, which will need petroleum fuel to ship panels and mine the materials. CCS is the only technology we have available that can actually prevent CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere from sites that are CO2-heavy, with direct air capture showing we can remove carbon from the air (though it is not inefficient). Yes, that CO2 is instead going into the deep subsurface (mineralized or as a supercritical plume) but it can be managed with robust regulations and scientific monitoring. Petroleum based combustion is not going away and especially in an incoming Trump administration I see any option on the table as a good one when it comes to carbon wrangling. I’m happy to debate this because as a society we need to have dialogue about how to mitigate climate change.
Regarding this Illinois project, this project began 10 years ago as a proof of concept, of course target sequestration rates will be lower than desired. DOE regularly invests huge sums of money to develop technology for industry using research scale pilots. This plant was never meant to be a proof of what large-scale CCS can do.
Tree planting is not a viable strategy for decarbonizing the atmosphere on human time scales.
“Planting a billion hectares of trees won’t be easy,” he said. “It would require a massive undertaking. If we follow the paper’s recommendations, reforesting an area the size of the United States and Canada combined (1 to 2 billion hectares) could take between one and two thousand years, assuming we plant a million hectares a year and that each hectare contains at least 50 to 100 trees to create an appropriate treetop canopy cover.” (NASA)
This is not to say that we shouldn’t plant trees. We should, but the idea that tree planting will result in reductions of greenhouse gases over the course of a single human life time on the order of the ~teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ is fantasy. If we want to re-establish a stable climate sooner than 1,000 years, we will have to pump the carbon back to the place where it came from: underground. Thus, CCS.
As someone who plants a lot of trees, the main benefit in my view is the huge protective effect they’ll have on extreme heat in urban areas. They’re an essential climate adaptation strategy but not a very good preventative one.
Carbon capture is technobabble that’s being used to justify continued fossil fuel usage.
This is just simply not true . There is robust science that shows the technology can work, it is not a comprehensive solution, but one of many that can reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions. You can read my post where I cite some literature if you’re interested.
There may eventually be some carbon capture technologies that can help but, the TL;DR, is that it is always more expensive to capture carbon than not release it in the future.
I have no objection to researching carbon capture and sequestration but it is far too late for that to be a focus of attention.
We must reduce. And while carbon capture may end up being a powerful tool there are a lot of dishonest actors touting it as a cure all right now to dodge any accountability for ruining the environment.
I completely understand. On a personal level I worked for years on lobbying to get a carbon fee and dividend system passed at state and federal levels because I felt that taxing companies for their carbon emissions was a smart and tangible way of dealing with the problem. As I’ve grown cynical with CF&D never catching on politically, I sniffed out different technocratic solutions. I agree the companies researching and implementing CCS are the same oil companies that got us into this mess so how much can we take from their advocacy with CCS as being a good thing? As a professional geologist I have a love-hate relationship with O&G industry but they are so powerful I don’t know how to work against them but instead with them (I don’t work for an oil company, I work in publicly funded CCS research)
Really, we need both. If we don’t capture, we’re fucked even if we reduce.
There is however a world where we capture so much, we can pump out as much as we want, and sadly it sounds more easy to achieve in the current hypercapitalistic environment.
And if we get rid of the hypercapitalism this conversation is moot anyway.Sorry I just want to reiterate something.
It will never be efficient to capture carbon when measured against not polluting it in the first place.
The math simply doesn’t math - carbon capture at best will be an emergency action where we divert energy from other needs to desperately try and lower CO2 - we’ll never be able to not care about emissions because we can just capture it.
Right now the carbon is captured in an extremely efficient dense manner - we’re expending energy to dig it up, to harness that energy… it will never make sense to use the energy from that process to recapture the emissions.
It only makes sense to look at carbon capture if we have an entirely green grid and loads of excess energy to throw around. That is a highly unlikely scenario.
What’s interesting about the facility in the article is that it’s not capturing carbon from fossil fuels: it’s capturing CO2 generated from the fermentation of ethanol. That means the CO2 came from plants (corn), which is known as biogenic CO2. If low carbon electricity is used to capture biogenic CO2, the net result is a lowering of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s in addition to the energy content of the ethanol, which could displace fossil fuels.
Carbon capture isn’t the sole solution, but could be part of it.
It’s okay that you’re blatantly wrong.
