13 Carbon Capture Projects Total 55% Of World Capacity; 7 Underperformed, 2 Failed, 1 Mothballed

[hatrack]

Carbon capture and storage schemes, a key plank of many governments’ net zero plans, “is not a climate solution”, the author of a major new report on the technology has said. Researchers for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found underperforming carbon capture projects considerably outnumbered successful ones by large margins.

Of the 13 projects examined for the study – accounting for about 55% of the world’s current operational capacity – seven underperformed, two failed and one was mothballed, the report found. “Many international bodies and national government are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to net zero, and it simply won’t work,” Bruce Robertson, the author of the IEEFA report, said.

Despite being a technology still in development, carbon capture and storage has been put forward as a key element in the UK’s plans to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Proposals put forward by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) suggest that up to 30m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions will need to be captured and sequestered every year in the UK alone by the mid-2030s, if targets are to be met. Internationally, to align with goals to reach net zero by 2050, annual CCS capacity will need to reach 1.6bn tonnes of CO2 every year by 2030, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.

IEEFA’s report said that although carbon capture and storage is a 50-year-old technology, its results have been varied. Most CCS projects have since reused captured gas by pumping it into dwindling oil fields to help squeeze out the last drops, it pointed out. This “enhanced oil recovery” (EOS) accounts for about 73% of the CO2 captured globally each year, in recent years, according to the report. Roughly 28m tonnes out of the 39m tonnes captured globally, according to its estimates, is reinjected and sequestered in oil fields to push more oil out of the ground. “EOR itself leads to CO2 emissions both directly and indirectly,” the report said. “The direct impact is the emissions from the fuel used to compress and pump CO2 deep into the ground. The indirect impact is the emissions from burning the hydrocarbons that could now have come out without EOR.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/01/carbon-capture-is-not-a-solution-to-net-zero-emissions-plans-report-says

[NNadir]

1. Nevertheless, the technology is useful if a change of purpose is recognized.

I personally regard all of the thermal solar high temperature schemes as useless, and frankly, destructive.

Nevertheless, I eagerly read many papers connected with the technology because the core is a high temperature system and both reactions that take place at these temperatures, and the materials utilized in making them have value in realistic systems that will not destroy large areas of deserts, specifically very high temperature nuclear reactors.

I suspect that the authors of these papers know very well that solar thermal energy is a useless unworkable enterprise, not that this has prevented people from "investing" in disasters like Ivanpah.

Waste biomass is carbon dioxide captured either from the sea or water. In either the case of wet reforming or dry reforming, the adjustment of hydrogen/carbon ratios can utilize the technology developed for the lipstick on a pig proposals for carbon dioxide dumps.

It is possible, both by chemical means or by electrochemical means, to reduce carbon dioxide to elemental carbon for the purpose of making materials.

Personally, I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Carbon dioxide dumps are not a good idea, but carbon utilization will enable a post fossil fuel world, at least in a world featuring clean energy.