Carbon Capture: Solution or Scam?

Carbon capture is touted as a climate change solution, but the reality is hazy.

It seems so simple: if there’s too much CO₂ in the atmosphere, let’s remove it. If excessive CO₂ is the primary cause of climate change, removing it would reverse the negative effects. We have the technology, so what’s the problem?

“Accounting for almost 80 percent of global human-caused emissions, carbon dioxide sticks around for quite a while” –Natural Resources Defense Council

The first carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant in the world was built in 1972. Building on a concept first proposed in 1938, the Sharon Ridge oilfield in Texas successfully removed CO₂ from its emissions. 45 similar projects are currently operating worldwide, capturing some 45 million tons of CO₂ annually. 100s more are in development, each of which uses one or a combination of various types of solvents, filters, membranes, cryogenic systems, etc. to scrub CO₂ from the air.

So is carbon capture the solution to climate change? No, not really. But it might help someday.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Life found a way because one or more asteroids—maybe a planetoid—containing volatile elements hit Earth 4 billion years ago. During a period called the Late Veneer (circa 4 billion years ago), Earth is thought to have accumulated large concentrations of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon. These elements easily form complex molecules in Earth’s temperatures. A few hundred million years later, these complex molecules led to the formation of amino acids, proteins, RNA, and DNA. Life as we know it is composed primarily of these four elements, with the human body being composed of 65% oxygen, 18.5% carbon, 9.5% hydrogen, and 3.3% nitrogen.

“Volatiles on Earth and the other terrestrial planets appear to have been heterogeneously sourced from different Solar System reservoirs” –(Broadley et al., 2022).

While carbon is considered the backbone of life, as it forms strong bonds with itself and other elements, it is also a major factor in climate. When bonded with oxygen to form CO₂, it’s a greenhouse gas, meaning it traps heat emitted from Earth’s surface in the form of infrared light. The more CO₂ in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped, further altering ocean temperatures, weather patterns, ecosystems, the carbon cycle, etc. The carbon cycle is the delicate balance between adding and removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, ocean, and land. Natural sources like volcanoes, decomposing organic matter, and wildfires put CO₂ in the atmosphere, while carbon sinks like the ocean, plant life, and soil remove it. The cycle is self-balancing over long periods of time, and life is able to adjust accordingly.

Humans have altered this cycle by burning fossil fuels and environmental degradation. The atmosphere has not exceeded 300 parts per million CO₂ for 800,000 years. Evidence comes from ice cores, fossils, and deep-sea sediment. However, this threshold was surpassed in the early 1900s, around the time of mass industrialization. Today, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere is around 420 parts per million. The effects of this are not only increased global temperatures but increased severe weather, ecosystem collapse, food insecurity, health risks, and forced displacement.

“The rate of change since the mid-20th century is unprecedented over millennia” –NASA

With this in mind, scientists have been pushing the world to adopt solutions. These include eating fewer animal products, transitioning the power grid to sustainable power sources, reducing consumption, and of course carbon capture.

While carbon capture seems feasible, there are three major problems.

Greenwashing

First, carbon capture bolsters the fossil fuel industry and creates more emissions.

The oil and gas industry has been touting carbon capture as the essential tool for making burning fossil fuels carbon neutral or even carbon negative for decades. Back in 2004, OPEC and the World Petroleum Congress met in Vienna, Austria to discuss how to navigate the changing market due to the carbon restrictions in the recently implemented UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. Among the many ways brainstormed to reduce carbon emissions and stay profitable, they concluded that carbon capture was the way forward.

“Big reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are possible with the continued use of petroleum, through the application of a technology that is being developed today, CO2 capture and sequestration” –OPEC

More recently, some energy companies have been greenwashing the same old products. For example, Royal Dutch Shell’s liquified gas is now labeled carbon neutral. Scandinavian Lundin Energy’s products are now described as “carbon neutrally produced.” ExxonMobile claims to be moving towards a carbon-neutral future, in which the oil and gas industry is still operating profitably. All of these claims are based on the use of carbon capture. ExxonMobile claims to be investing heavily in carbon capture, and by 2040 they hope to have a facility that can capture and store “100 million metric tons of CO2” annually.

“Capturing and then safely storing the world’s industrial CO₂ emissions is an ambitious endeavor, but it’s critical in helping to address the impact of climate change” –ExxonMobil

Here’s the problem: the vast majority of carbon capture projects are connected to the oil and gas industry because captured carbon is used to extract more fossil fuels. In enhanced oil recovery (EOR), they inject CO₂ into mature fields, dissolving and displacing oil residue, allowing them to recover substantially more oil. A similar process is used in gas fields to bump up the pressure, ensuring the gas flows.

“The crude oil mixes with the CO₂, decreases oil viscosity, pressurizes it, and mobilizes it, forming a concentrated oil bank that is swept to producing wells” –National Energy Technology Laboratory

EOR uses 82.5% of captured carbon and is responsible for more than 5% of US oil production, with enormous growth potential.

Furthermore, oil and gas companies receive tax breaks and government funds to invest in carbon capture. In the US, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $8.2 billion, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act forked up $3.4 billion for carbon capture projects. 45Q of the federal tax code allows companies to claim $85 per metric ton for geologically sequestered CO₂ and $60 per metric ton for CO₂ stored through EOR. The Congressional Budget Office says this will cost the federal government between $30 billion and over $100 billion by 2030.

“The adoption of CCS is stimulated by tax credits and the prospect of carbon taxes increasing significantly in decades to come” –Shell company documents

With the above in mind, it seems oil and gas companies may not be entirely honest when they say they’re interested in reducing CO₂ emissions. They say they’re investing in carbon capture for a greener future, but carbon capture is highly profitable and allows them to extract more fossil fuels. If the goal is to reduce emissions, the current state of carbon capture is not the answer, as it bolsters the most problematic industry.

The Allure of Blue Energy

Keeping It Down

Second, storing carbon dioxide underground requires resource-intensive site characterization.

Once the carbon dioxide is captured, the idea is to pump it underground. The problem is that finding sites that can contain it for long periods takes years or even decades. Geologists need to conduct numerous, time-intensive, expensive tests, including comprehensive seismic imagining. When the US government was looking for places to store nuclear waste, they spent 20 years and billions of dollars analyzing Yucca Mountain, only to have the idea abandoned. They couldn’t guarantee that the waste would stay where they put it.

CO₂ storage sites are also difficult to find. They need to be deep enough to allow for sufficiently high temperatures and pressures to keep the CO₂ in a supercritical state, in which the CO₂ exists in a liminal state between a gas and a liquid. This naturally occurs at depths below 800 meters. Such a state allows for more storage in a given site and reduces potential leakage.

“Supercritical CO₂ means that the CO₂ is at a temperature in excess of 31.1°C (88ºF) and a pressure in excess of 72.9 atm (about 1,057 psi); this temperature and pressure defines the critical point for CO₂” –National Energy Technology Laboratory

Also, these sites need to be leakproof. The National Energy Technology Laboratory identified four key trapping mechanisms.

1. Structural Trapping: geological storage sites must be composed of porous rock and covered by solid rock. Supercritical CO₂ tends to be more buoyant than other subterranean liquids, meaning it eventually migrates up. So sites need to have an impermeable capstone to seal it in.
2. Residual Trapping: the porous rock below the capstone functions like a sponge. As the CO₂ moves upwards, it displaces already present liquids and becomes trapped as tiny droplets in the microscopic pores.
3. Solubility Trapping: some porous rocks contain brine water, and the CO₂ can dissolve into it. When this happens it combines with available hydrogen atoms to form HCO₃, a bicarbonate that plays an important role in the carbon cycle.
4. Mineral Trapping: now in the form of HCO₃, it can react with the surrounding rock’s minerals to form solid carbonate minerals, permanently trapping the CO₂.

The five types of geological locations that might meet the above conditions are saline formations, oil and natural gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams, basalt formations, and organic-rich shales. While there’s a huge number of these, we unfortunately haven’t properly tested them. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, the availability of these storage sites is a major limiting factor in adopting carbon capture.

“In the area of carbon capture and storage, the emergence of a CCS value chain in the EU is currently being hampered by a lack of CO2 storage sites” –European Commission

So storing carbon is possible, but it takes specific locations, all of which take years or decades to analyze, as well as billions of dollars. If not properly analyzed, the captured carbon might just leak back into the atmosphere. Most of the captured carbon is stored in oil and gas fields via EOR, though many of these sites have not been properly tested.

Getting It There

Third, we don’t have the necessary infrastructure to transport enough captured carbon.

After the CO₂ is captured, it is compressed into a liquid form. It’s then transported via tanks, ships, or pipelines, the most common method. Of course, this costs time and money. And to meet climate goals, the world will need to invest vast amounts more to transport the necessary amount of CO₂. At the moment, the US operates 50 pipelines, totaling 8000 km that transports 70 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. To reach climate goals, another 200,000 km of pipeline would have to be built in the next 2 decades. This could be done, given that natural gas pipelines expanded about 8-9000 km per year in the last few decades.

The “hub and cluster” model makes this all a bit easier. Both small and large CO₂ providers sell it to a distributor, who then ships it to oil and gas fields or storage sites. This network drives down prices due to economies of scale and lowers the entry barriers for small carbon capture projects. Some current examples of this model are the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line in Canada, the Langskip project in Norway, and the Humber and Teesside cluster in the UK.

So the infrastructure to transfer captured carbon to storage sites exists and is being used. The problem is that there isn’t nearly enough of it to make any real difference in combating climate change. Building enough pipelines to make a difference would take decades and considerable resources.

Catching Sunlight in a Bottle, a Big Step for Renewables

Is Carbon Capture Worth It?

Yes and no.

Perhaps the greatest argument against carbon capture is the fact that it leads to more emissions. Oil and gas companies use it to produce more fossil fuels through EOR, and oil and gas fields being pumped full of CO₂ might leak it back into the atmosphere. Another argument against carbon capture is that the necessary infrastructure doesn’t exist. The amount of pipelines to transport it would have to be expanded substantially. We don’t even have enough carbon capture facilities to make a significant impact on climate change.

“Reaching climate targets will require 70-100 capture facilities to be built each year” –Global CSS Institute

The question, then, becomes is the cost justified when compared to other methods of fighting climate change? Probably not. Wouldn’t it be better to expand zero-emission energy sources like solar and wind? It seems silly to bolster an emission-heavy industry only to spend an alarming amount of time and resources to reverse it. It’s some strange Rube Goldberg type of logic.

Consider the absurdity of the following example. In January 2024, the UK government approved the construction of a new power plant in Yorkshire. It will burn wood pellets sourced from mature forests in Canada. It’s considered by some to be carbon neutral because it’ll burn biomass, which stores carbon. So it’s releasing carbon that would’ve otherwise been in the atmosphere had the trees not existed. The emissions will then be captured and stored under the North Sea. The company claims that this new $2.5 billion plant will save “4 million tons of carbon pollution a year from entering the atmosphere.” Why would we do this when so many other energy-creation options are available? It’s convoluted and wasteful.

On the other hand, carbon capture has a use. In industries like steel, cement, and chemicals, CO₂ is emitted from the production process, some of which can be captured. If stored properly, this will actually reduce CO₂ emissions.

“Process emissions, which result from chemical reactions and therefore cannot be avoided by switching to alternative fuels, account for one-quarter (almost 2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide [GtCO₂]) of industrial emissions” –International Energy Agency

Capturing process emissions is notoriously complex and uncertain, and few carbon capture projects focused on process emissions exist. According to an analysis by Zero Carbon Analytics, the steel sector is responsible for 7% of energy-related CO₂ emissions, and only one carbon capture facility exists. The Al Reyadah CCS project in the UAE has captured 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 per year since it began operation in 2016. No other known projects exist or are being built. When it comes to the cement sector, there are zero projects operational. However, one is being built in Norway to help make a dent in the industry’s 7-8% contribution to global emissions. For the chemicals industry, there are 6 carbon capture projects in China, collectively removing 1.75 million tonnes of CO₂ a year, a small fraction of the industry’s 5% of global emissions. Future projects include one in the US and another in the Netherlands.

So if we are going to invest in carbon capture, this is where it needs to be, not in bolstering the fossil fuel industry or building crazy amounts of infrastructure. And if we are serious about combating climate change, then resources might be better spent on expanding greener sources of energy, developing higher capacity and longer-lasting batteries, creating more sustainable production methods, etc. In the end, carbon capture has a legitimate future, but it’s a bit of a ruse to benefit oil and gas companies.