I learned of Bruce and Milad's Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) report, The Carbon Capture Crux – Lessons Learned, with fascination since I held out for carbon capture to be one of the major potential solutions to climate change. Though climate is only one of the many environmental problems risking civilization, it's one of the big ones.

I contacted them to learn what could work or not. Many projections take for granted that today's unproven technologies will work in time to help, but our wanting them to work doesn't mean they will.

In our conversation, we talked about their findings and what they meant. Sadly, the results aren't pretty. As they said “as a solution to tackling catastrophic rising emissions in its current framework however, CCS is not a climate solution.”

Some highlights from the report:

They studied 13 flagship large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS)/carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) projects in the natural gas, industrial and power sectors in terms of their history, economics and performance. These projects account for around 55% of the total current operational capacity worldwide.

They found seven of the thirteen projects underperformed, two failed, and one was mothballed.

"CCS technology has been going for 50 years and many projects have failed and continued to fail, with only a handful working. Many international bodies and national governments are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to Net Zero, and it simply won’t work. Although some indication it might have a role to play in hard-to-abate sectors such as cement, fertilisers and steel, overall results indicate a financial, technical and emissions-reduction framework that continues to overstate and underperform.”

The study found that Shute Creek in the U.S. underperformed its carbon capture capacity by around 36% over its lifetime, Boundary Dam in Canada by about 50%, and the Gorgon project off the coast of Western Australia by about 50% over its first five-year period.

“The two most successful projects are in the gas processing sector – Sleipner and Snøhvit in Norway. This is mostly due to the country’s unique regulatory environment for oil and gas companies,” said Robertson. “Governments globally are looking for quick solutions to the current energy and ongoing climate crisis, but unwittingly latching onto CCS as a fix is problematic.”

Last week the Australian government approved two new massive offshore greenhouse gas storage areas, saying CCS “has a vital role to play to help Australia meet its net zero targets. Australia is ideally placed to become a world leader in this emerging industry”. 

However, Robertson says, carbon capture technology is not new and is not a climate solution. “As our report shows, CCS has been around for decades, mostly serving the oil industry through enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Around 80–90% of all captured carbon in the gas sector is used for EOR, which itself leads to more CO2 emissions.”

Robertson says more research could be done on CCS applications in industries where emissions are hard to abate such as, cement, as an interim partial solution to meeting net zero targets. “As a solution to tackling catastrophic rising emissions in its current framework however, CCS is not a climate solution.”

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