Turns out, Carbon Capture Is Even An More Moronic Idea Than We Thought It Was

We are only just figuring out the limits of this "revolutionary" technology.

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is our climate silver bullet. Or at least, that is how it is marketed. Even the IPCC (The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) estimates that by 2050, we can use this technology to bury 30 gigatons of our carbon-based climate sins underground annually. For some context, the entire fossil fuel industry currently emits 34 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year. No wonder, many see CCS as our one-way ticket to net-zero. But, a new study has shown that this idea is, sadly, utterly ridiculous.

Many have suspected CCS to be a misleading scapegoat for a while now. Take oil giant Occidental. They plan to use CCS to “preserve our industry”, give it and other oil producers “a licence to continue to operate for 60, 70, 80 years”, and even increase its oil extraction. But a carbon storage facility that can capture the vast emissions of the oil industry would cover a landmass 3 times larger than Greece and would cost tens, possibly hundreds of trillions of dollars to build. Not only that, but the planet’s fossil fuel reserves are set to run dry in 50 years anyway.

These facts alone suggest that the IPCC’s prediction of a global CCS capacity of 30 gigatons by 2050 is highly optimistic.

Well, this new study from Imperial College London has all but proven this. They found that by 2050, the global CCS capacity will be just 5–6 gigatons at most.

Why? The study found that the IPCC estimates are simply unfeasible and that its projections were inflated. For one, the most common way to store carbon dioxide is to inject it into the ground, turning it into carbonate minerals. Still, around 40% of the carbon dioxide leaks back into the atmosphere. What’s more, this method is incredibly expensive and, as such, requires vast amounts of public funds to build, as presently, there is no incentive to do so.

The study concludes that these factors, combined with other industry and engineering challenges, mean that pretty much all CCS projects overpromise and underdeliver, and the IPCC isn’t considering this discrepancy.

Now, CCS has its place in the future. Even this study’s prediction of 5–6 gigatons per year would massively help us take the final, extremely difficult steps towards net-zero. But studies like this show that this technology can’t take us the whole way. Instead, we need to focus on properly decarbonising our society. Hopefully, institutions like the IPCC will recognise this and change their policies accordingly.

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Sources: Mongabay, World-Nuclear, Will Lockett