CCS, the failure bomb: the current state of COP28’s poison pill

December 17, 2023December 19, 2023 by Ketan Joshi In Uncategorized 2 Comments

If it sounds too good to be true, people will believe it anyway. The proponents of fossil fuel carbon capture and storage learnt this lesson a few decades ago, and have used the combination of its dazzling promise and reliable failure to prolong the sale and usage of planet-heating products for decades.

As I wrote here last year, and in my essay contribution to Greta Thunberg’s Climate Book, carbon capture is (in its current primary use case) not really a technology.

It is an incantation: a combination of keywords that soothes the dissonance of policymakers, investors, corporates and technocrats. It is an empty promise loosley stapled to planned or existing fossil fuel projects, to ease their approval or delay their demise.

Unsurprisingly, the capture of carbon made it into the final text of COP28’s ‘Global Stocktake’ agreement. It includes “abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilisation and storage” among the list shopping list of options countries can use to help achieve climate targets.

Carbon capture’s value as a powerful climate delay spell has rattled again into the foreground. Its explicit inclusion in the COP28 text provides a reference point for the proponents of new and existing fossil fuel projects. It injects a new and terrible energy into this pre-existing system of climate delay.

It is worth revisiting the current states of CCS, in the context of the role it has played as a false promise used specifically to enhance the prospects of climate damaging projects. Just before and during COP, a slew of big new reports came out, and I want to take you through them (in addition to a few projects I dug into out of curiosity).

When you step back from these pixels, the big picture is simple: CCS isn’t a failure. It succeeds brilliantly at its job, which is to shimmer tantalisingly on the horizon, but never get so close that fossil fuel companies might be compelled or regulated into actually using it at any significant scale. It’s a failure bomb, and it’s devastating.

The wave that rises, but never crashes

There was a wave of planned CCS projects early last decade, and only a tiny fraction of them turned into real, operational capture capacity. I think it’s nicely shown in this chart from the 2023 edition of the Global CCS Institute’s annual update:

While the GSCCi sold a rosy picture of a massive new pipeline of projects (‘this time it’s different’, was the vibe), digging into the data they provide reveals a bunch of worrying things.

The amount of operational CCS capacity in the world has not increased significantly from 2022 to 2023, despite optimistic projections. The installed capacity has gone from 43 to 49 megatonnes per annum. Annual global carbon emissions in 2023 will be around 37,000 megatonnes, or around 765 times the installed capture capacity.

What little increase there was between 2022 and 2023 comes from – naturally – projects that use the captured carbon to help extract more fossil fuels (“enhanced oil recovery”). There was no increase in operational CCS for “hard to abate” sectors, such as heavy industry.

Most of the planned new projects will be used on fossil-fuelled power plants, or fossil fuel extraction projects, a fact which isn’t really highlighted when the huge new pipeline of projects is talked up as a good thing.

The GCCSi promoted a “dramatic 48% increase in carbon capture capacity of all CCS facilities, which has jumped to 361 million metric tons of CO2 per year”. This is sneaky: these are not real capacity, they are planned projects (in an industry with a vanishing project problem).

Similarly, they promote “198 new facilities” added to their list, but this is mostly because they started counting pipelines and storage sites for the first time. Most of these planned projects are in the US, most again for fossil fuel projects.

Part of Joe Biden’s huge ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ policy is an incentive for CCS on power stations, something which policy experts Emily Grubert and Frances Sawyer argue could very well end up actively incentivising an increase in emissions, because the tax credit “incentivizes facilities to run more, with attendant increases in fuel extraction and related impacts that CCS does not mitigate”, it’ll incentivise coal to over-generate much more than gas, and it’ll encourage fossil power plant owners to extend the lifespans of those power stations instead of shutting them down. What a mess.

Here’s the kicker: going by their project start dates, the global capacity of CCS in operation is meant to triple in the next two years. That’s after the operational capacity increased from 30 megatonnes a year in 2010 to 50 in 2023. What is different now, compared to the past few decades of near-zero growth? Is the US IRA enough to cause this absurd right-angle?

The International Agency’s World Energy Outlook is published annually, and this year’s edition dramatically scaled down the viability of CCS in its scenarios. Still: in 2030, their ‘net zero by 2050’ model involves more than 1,000 megatonnes of annual capture – which is a lot (and it’s even less than the IPCC’s chosen scenarios generally rely on). This is how the IEA’s model looks, compared to the current pipeline:

CCS is a failure bomb. Those proposing it have the greatest incentive to ensure it never really goes into operation, unless it somehow serves the ends of profits made by worsening climate change (such as enhanced oil recovery). It keeps not existing because it doesn’t need to exist to prolong fossil fuel usage: in fact it ‘works’ better if it never ends up fulfilling its promises.

It’s one thing to put all your eggs in one basket. It’s something else entirely to put your eggs into a basket that doesn’t – and won’t – exist. All you can reliably predict there is a whole bunch of broken eggs.

Just before and during COP, a whole stack of reports and analyses were released that have a common theme: a global approach to climate action that leans heavily on CCS comes with failure baked in.

• The International Energy Agency released a report showing that if we were to rely on CCS to capture emissions instead of reducing them, it would require electricity consumption equivalent to 2022 total global demand. It’d cost $3.5 trillion USD from now to 2050. “To say that the carbon capture technology would allow the oil and gas industry to continue with the current oil and gas production trends is a pure fantasy”.
• The Centre for International Environmental Law published a report highlighting the incredible and varied new risks of capturing ,transporting and storing carbon underground when just leaving it there is an option.
• A very good study from Oxford University looked at how much heavy reliance on CCS would cost us, as energy users. It’s way, way more than if we rely on clean energy instead.
• Climate Analytics released a clever analysis that shows what happens when you assume a real ‘capture rate’ for CCS of about 50% based on real performance, rather than the idealistic assumption of 95%. Rely as heavily on CCS as the IPCC’s scenarios suggest, and we could end up with an extra 86 gigatonnes thanks to bad capture rates.
• The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) shared this fantastic related graphic they put together based off a bunch of their analyses – it shows the actual capture rates for a bunch of CCS technologies. DeSmog’s analysis of individual sites is great, too.

At COP28, members of the “Carbon management challenge” (an absurd euphemism that has become very popular) announced an ‘aspirational’ target of 1 gigatonne a year of carbon capture and atmospheric removals by 2030 – roughly in line with the IEA’s net zero scenario. As Climate Action Tracker point out, reaching this target will require “the pipeline to more than double, and the success rate to reach 100%. Given the lead-times in developing CCS projects can often be more than seven years, this doubling in announced capacity would have to happen now”.

Of all the climate pledges and plans launched at COP28, Climate Action Tracker’s analysis shows that the carbon capture and storage one is the most piddly:

The US has played a major role in this global resurgence of interest in CCS; in this case encompassing both point-source carbon capture and also removing it from the ambient atmosphere (“carbon removal”). COP28 was a terrifying reminder of something very significant: the empty promise of CCS still has incredible power in facilitating the approval of new fossil fuel infrastructure, or delaying the shutdown of existing. In its current state, it remains a threat. That it fails so persistently doesn’t cause it to be rejected: in fact, that is the thing that makes it so intensely useful for those trying to damage our safety with their favourite fossil products.

A case study in bad CCS: Australia’s power and gas

As an extra: I’m going to take you on a journey into a CCS project that, weirdly, I only found about a few weeks ago. Feel a bit ashamed about being so out of the loop on this one, but on the upside, you get to experience a very fun emotional rollercoaster first hand.

Let me introduce you to the Millmerran coal-fired power station in Queensland, Australia. It emits ~5.5 megatonnes of greenhouse gases annually, just under 12% of Queensland’s total power sector emissions. Australia’s power emissions are uniquely concentrated in a few massive coal plants; Millmerran demonstrates this nicely.

14 years ago, “Carbon Transport and Storage company”, or CTSCo, owned by coal giant Glencore, began preliminary work on a vague plan to store carbon dioxide in the Surat Basin, in Queensland. By 2017, there would be almost no progress, but in that year they’d promise that by 2021, they’d have a functional carbon capture system up and running on the Millmerran power station, along with carbon being stored in the Surat basin.

Since 2009, Australia’s coal extraction has doubled and gas extraction has increased fourfold. In that same period, the amount of carbon captured at this project and stored permanently has increased from 0 to 0. No capture on the coal plant, no operational storage in the basin. Getting carbon out of the ground is extremely urgent. Putting it back in is a luxurious, multi-decade slow-walk.

Local farmers are opposing the storage field, on the grounds of real and significant environmental risks, the Guardian reported a few days ago (which is how I found out about this project). So, I decided on reading it to prod the numbers a bit.

One number caught my eye: the capture facility on the coal plant intends to capture 110,000 tonnes of the plant’s emissions annually. That is a whopping two percent of its total emissions:

Here’s the fun part: this is a huge exaggeration of the capability of the CCS facility.

The hard-to-find Environmental Impact Statement calculates the volume of emissions that’ll occur during the three year lifespan of the project: running CCS is extremely energy hungry and, naturally, it runs on fossil fuels. Most of the emissions from running this CCS process come from electricity and steam to capture the carbon from the power plant, to transport it to the storage site and a huge variety of nasty leaks along the way.

That means, of the ~330,000 tonnes the plant is meant to capture over three years, it releases 250,000 just to run the damn thing.

The 330,000 tonnes that get captured over three years looks like this, when you compare it to the emissions from running the machines that capture, transport and store carbon (most of the CCS project’s emissions come from the electricity and steam required to run the post-combustion capture thing on the coal plant):

This CCS project only really captures a bit over 15% of what it’s advertised to. And that means, of Millmerran’s total greenhouse gas emissions, only 0.3% will be avoided, not 2%. Which looks like this:

For years now, Glencore has been soaking up government subsidies to get this project up and running. The Morrison government’s dying act was hurling $35 million to the company to pay for the costs of pretending to try doing this for another few years. Earlier this year it was revealed by the ABC that Glencore had been lobbying the state government to avoid legal challenges to the storage site around groundwater contamination impacts.

Australia is a hotbed for the worst carbon capture ideas you can imagine. Glencore is proposing producing hydrogen using its coal, and burying it in the same Queensland basin, when there are clean power alternatives. The “Hydrogen energy Supply Chain” or HESC project burns chokingly polluting coal, justified with the blatantly false promise of carbon capture and storage. The associated “CarbonNet” storage project is also decades old, and has also not progressed past environmental studies.

Australia’s current government is leaning into “carbon management”, just like the US – except, the whole plan is to punt the physical volumes of carbon dioxide over to neighbouring countries like Timor Leste. This burdens those countries with the multi-millenia responsibility of ensuring what’s pumped underground stays underground – Australia does white climate colonialism like few others. The only good thing about this is that for some reason, the legislation the government pushed through is perfectly named the “sea dumping” bill. It was stated with total pride and zero hesitation that this CCS project was vital to ensuring the opening of a massive new carbon bomb gas field. Ditto for the “Middle Arm” project in the Northern Territory: the recipient of massive government subsidies, and also using CCS to justify a huge increase in fossil gas extraction.

Among the worst in an already-extremely-bad-bunch is the Moomba CCS project, which Santos very explicitly stated is required to facilitate their ongoing expansion efforts. Santos famously featured a huge diorama of this project at the Australia pavilion at COP26. It’s bad enough that this project is being slapped onto gas expansion to justify it, but Santos will also earn Australian carbon credits (ACCUs) for burying every tonne of carbon dioxide they were going to capture anyway. Those credits will get purchased by other massive polluters and applied to their emissions accounts to fake climate action instead of actually reducing their own emissions (such as Energy Australia selling gas with the label “carbon neutral”). It is a stunningly smooth ecosystem of fraud, profiteering and real-world damage.

The only “successful” applications of carbon capture and storage to date has been in the fossil methane extraction process. Methane comes out of the ground mixed up with carbon dioxide: companies need to separate it anyway, but in some cases, they have promised to bury it instead of just dumping it into the air. Here’s how that has gone at one of the world’s largest projects in Western Australia, the Gorgon CCS plant, against the site’s targets and Chevron’s total emissions:

Along with the US, Australia is a key global offender when it comes to CCS prolonging fossil fuel projects. If nothing changes, that’s set to get worse.