Carbon capture is having a moment.
Companies such as Chevron Corp are building technology to capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks while others such as Microsoft Corp are investing in startups working to yank the greenhouse gas out of the air directly.
Governments and climate activists are pressing companies to eliminate their emissions, but there is doubt whether solar, wind and batteries could do so alone. The US, in particular, has focused on boosting carbon capture thanks to the Energy Department investing billions of dollars in the technology and attractive tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act for project developers. A growing array of science also shows the world would need to capture carbon on a fairly vast scale in the coming decades to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
Illustration: Yusha
Yet for all the momentum and growing need to decarbonize, the technology has drawn mounting opposition. The fossil fuel industry’s involvement, in particular, has raised the specter that carbon capture could be used to prolong oil and gas extraction, endangering the climate rather than helping protect it. Costs, too, could limit its utility, and there are questions about whether the technology could even be scaled up in the first place.
These tensions were front and center at last year’s COP28 climate talks held in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, where the technology was a central pillar of the summit’s agreement. In the coming years, the world would have to decide whether carbon capture could be deployed responsibly — and what to do with the Carbon dioxide.
When should carbon capture be used?
There are two main ways machines are used to capture carbon. So-called point source carbon capture and storage (CCS) grabs Carbon dioxide at the smokestack of sites such as industrial plants. Other technologies pull already-emitted Carbon dioxide out of the ambient air, a process called direct air capture (DAC).
Point source could be deployed at oil, gas and heavy industry facilities. Yet research shows that the use cases where that would be beneficial to the climate are fairly narrow.
“The real utility of carbon capture is addressing the hard-to-abate emissions that can’t be dealt with,” said Ben Grove, carbon storage manager at the Clean Air Task Force, a climate research nonprofit.
One of those hard-to-abate sectors is cement, which accounts for about 8 percent of global emissions. While parts of the cement-making process could be electrified, some of the Carbon dioxide emissions from production are “fundamental to the process,” said Emily Grubert, an associate professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame.
Startups like Brimstone are working on cement decarbonization, but most of the techniques to clean up cement are far from ready for mass commercialization.
“Unless you come up with a replacement for cement or a vastly different formulation, there’s not a way around those emissions without using something like CCS,” Grubert said.
Steelmaking is another industrial process with few immediate decarbonization pathways. While startups and incumbents are looking at ways to produce the world’s most used metal without the emissions, the costs are great and the industry needs to cut emissions rapidly.
In some cases, it might make more sense to retrofit a new steel plant with carbon capture technology rather than pursuing other avenues such as electrification, analysis from BloombergNEF showed, which found that doing so could abate as much as 600 million tonnes of Carbon dioxide per year by mid-century.
Science shows that CCS largely should not be used when alternatives such as renewable energy are readily available. The oil and gas industry, however, is among the biggest backers of CCS, with companies looking to retrofit power plants and refineries with the technology. Doing so has proven challenging for the industry to date, but IRA tax incentives have created renewed interest. The industry sees it as a way to potentially continue pumping more oil and gas.
“Carbon capture will play a key part in helping all sectors of the global economy decarbonize, particularly those hard-to-abate areas where there are no easy routes available through electrification,” said Michael Tholen, sustainability and policy director at Offshore Energies UK, which represents energy companies. “Here in the UK we are committed to accelerating its development across our closely integrated energy mix in support of the energy transition.”
There are cases where CCS could be used on existing fossil fuel plants responsibly, said Jennifer Wilcox, principal deputy assistant secretary in the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. She gave the example of new natural gas-fired power plants, through which nearly 5.7GW of new capacity were added in the US in 2022, BloombergNEF data show. The fuel overtook coal as the US’ top source of electricity in 2016 and made up nearly 44 percent of the country’s power production.
“They’re providing stability [and] reliability to communities,” Wilcox said. “What you wouldn’t want to do is pull that reliability out when it’s actually not ready to retire.”
However, multiple lines of research suggest that might not make economic sense. A 2020 study by Grubert found that three-quarters of US power plants would be ready for retirement by 2035. A March report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a non-profit that advocates for a transition away from fossil fuels, found that power generation with CCS could make electricity more expensive compared to alternatives, including renewable energy plus storage. A 2019 study in Nature Energy shows that renewables outcompete carbon capture on cost as well.
Scientists estimate that by mid-century, the world would need to remove billions of tonnes of Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually to limit warming to the relatively safe level of 1.5°C. Current capacity globally is measured in thousands of tonnes per year, so there is a large scale-up that needs to happen. However, deploying the technology needs to be done in tandem with decarbonizing the economy.
“Emissions reduction is priority number one,” said Vanessa Suarez, managing environmental justice adviser at Carbon180, an organization focused on carbon removal policy. “I think it’s also true that there’s two centuries worth of legacy emissions that we do have to clean up.”
What should be done with captured Carbon dioxide?
A common concern about carbon capture is that the Carbon dioxide would go toward perpetuating business as usual, rather than contributing to meaningful emissions drawdowns or addressing stubborn sources of greenhouse gas pollution.
While the majority of announced direct air capture projects plan to store Carbon dioxide underground, 19 percent would be utilized as a feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel, BloombergNEF research shows. Aviation is responsible for around 2 percent of global emissions, which is about on par with the emissions of Japan or Germany. Decarbonization options are few and far between and utilizing captured Carbon dioxide for fuel could make sense.
Turning Carbon dioxide into a feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel could help achieve “a double dividend” compared to just storing that Carbon dioxide underground, said nonprofit Project Drawdown executive director Jonathan Foley. He emphasized that even then, carbon capture should still only be applied on a small scale.
The fossil fuel industry has different designs for Carbon dioxide. Rather than using it to create synthetic fuels, it wants to inject it into aging oil and gas fields to dislodge remaining oil, a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The technique has been in use since the 1970s, but a number of oil companies want to scale it up. One of the biggest backers of DAC — Occidental Petroleum Corp — has made it clear that some of its projects would use the Carbon dioxide to produce more oil. About 8 percent of Carbon dioxide captured would be used for enhanced oil recovery, the BloombergNEF analysis showed.
Some DAC startups have drawn a line in the sand, refusing to allow the Carbon dioxide they capture to be used for procuring more fossil fuels. Climeworks cofounder and chief executive officer Christoph Gebald has said the company is only interested in “permanent underground storage, period,” and startup Heirloom has said that no Carbon dioxide removed by its technology would be used for EOR.
“I think that there should be guardrails for responsible carbon management for the broader industry as it develops,” said Vikrum Aiyer, Heirloom’s head of climate policy and external affairs.
Those guardrails are going to be necessary as the industry scales and more companies enter the Carbon dioxide cleanup business, spurred on by tax incentives and growing government investment.
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