I agree that the purpose currently of CCS is just to help fossil fuel companies keep pumping, but “the first of a new thing has problems and is too expensive therefore it doesn’t work” is a terrible argument.
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While I get the skepticism about CCS because capitalists are idiots, I don’t know about “can’t work”
CCS is great if:
- We have a compact and stable form of storage (salt mines may be leaky or a seismic hazard on the very long term)
- We’re producing carbon-free energy in excess of what we need for everything else (i.e., China figures out fusion), or we have low-energy methods of extracting carbon from the atmosphere that don’t require substantial power draw from the grid and are easily scalable (certain kinds of catalytic conversion that haven’t made it off the lab bench could work, but the scaling question hasn’t been addressed yet)
- The captured carbon is not being used to extract more fossil fuels (strange how many people miss this step)
The elephant in the room here is time, because you can’t just hoover up gigatons of carbon overnight. So long as it doesn’t take resources away from more immediate forms of mitigation and adaptation, I think it’s research worth pursuing. But the IRA’s drafters didn’t get that memo.
The ideal carbon sequestration site is an olivine deposit, which readily uptakes it and mineralizes it. There hasn’t been any effort put into actually doing it because it doesn’t produce more oil.
There’s a contingent of people here on hexbear who will throw the baby out with the bath water and decree that we must live with a ruined atmosphere instead of doing anything about it, and that doing anything about it is being an oil company shill, but it’s fine because they’re not researchers and won’t have any impact on carbon capture and sequestration.
The current paradigm isn’t going to produce solutions because the current paradigm is the problem. But, that doesn’t mean that we should give up on fixing what’s been broken. After all, in these dark times, should the stars also go out?
No it’s really really bad it’s only included in the ICC climate report as a solution so fossil fuel companies can still own the infrastructure of energy.
Even if the science gets expedentially better it is nothing compared to degrowth, agricultural changes, or nuclear fusion.
It’s an abomination and doesn’t need to be given a “well maybe” at all.
Well yeah, degrowth is a precondition to any of the mitigation technologies on that list. The water’s coming in into the boat way faster than we can bail, so the priority should be to plug the leaks.
The chart reflects the fact that CCS is an immature technology that will be a nice to have if we can drop the energy requirements and store carbon in a form that’s stable at normal room temperatures and pressures. There’s some bench-scale experiments that have had promising results to that effect, so I don’t see any reason not to fund that research. We spend more money on worse stuff by a country mile.
Plus, all the other bars on that chart have their issues. The mineral requirement to build transmission and storage infrastructure for wind and solar at current rates of energy demand growth will require massive increases in mining for copper and lithium. Agricultural carbon storage has error bars you could drive a truck through because no one can measure it. Attempts to pay farmers for soil carbon sequestration have been a mess and we’re not sure about what the turnover rates for soil carbon pools might be under a warmer and wetter climate. Forest preservation just avoids future emissions and many forests are switching from carbon sinks to sources as they catch fire.
Fuel switching to natural gas: A recent study suggests NG is probably worse than coal. Plus quantification of leakage is notoriously messy.
We’re kinda boned and CCS only really makes sense under FALGSC conditions, but it could help if we manage to pull out of our capitalist nosedive.
:surprised-pika:
