Carbon Engineering Ltd.
The Bill Gates-backed startup Carbon Engineering is developing a direct air capture technology. Here, a rendering of its technology.
- Carbon-capture technology is in vogue, and it's backed by big investors including Bill Gates.
- But researchers and analysts caution that it's not a silver bullet to stave off climate change.
- There's a problem of scale: Less than 0.1% of global emissions were captured by these technologies last year.
- Plus, the vast majority of captured carbon is used to extract more oil out of the ground.
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Carbon capture is, in theory, a simple solution to the climate crisis. There's too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and it's driving catastrophic planetary warming. Why not just suck as much as we can out of the air?
That's what a range of technologies promise to do. And lately, they've been gaining a lot of attention. Microsoft is talking about them. Major investors are backing them. Even US senators appear to be throwing in their support.
According to more than half of the models cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment, we'll need carbon capture and storage to limit warming to 2 degrees celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), relative to pre-industrial levels, beyond which climate change will unleash some of its nastiest effects.
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There's no doubt that this technology will play a role in decarbonizing the economy. In fact, it already is. As of last year, there were 19 large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities in operation around the world, according to the Global CC Institute, a leading carbon capture research firm.
But experts say the technology is still far from reaching a relevant scale. Some doubt that it will ever get there. And even if it does, some say it won't be an answer, on its own, to climate change.
"People are framing this as if it's a new industry that's going to be akin to solar or wind that just needs to scale up," Holly Buck, a researcher at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, said. "But really a better way to look at it is as a waste-disposal industry. It's basically cleaning up pollution for public health reasons and locking it away."
Here are four key reasons that carbon capture tech is likely to fall short of saving us from climate change.
ClimeWorks is among the startups developing technology to capture CO2 from ambient air.
1. All of the carbon capture technology in the world captures less than .1% of global emissions
This isn't the first time carbon capture technology has been presented as a solution to decarbonization. Remember so-called clean coal?
More than a decade ago, the oil and gas industry was talking about outfitting coal power plants with CCS, in order to lower their emissions. But for the most part, clean coal failed to launch.
"There was a big expectation 10 years ago that coal would be such a dominant portion of electric generation and to decarbonize, utilities would need to deploy carbon capture at their coal-fired power plants," said Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at the investment bank Raymond James & Associates. "Well, what's happening to coal in reality? Coal plants are shutting down left and right."
Molchanov says it's often cheaper to shut down coal plants in favor of other energy sources than to keep them running with carbon capture, which is one reason why CCS technologies haven't scaled.
The scale of these technologies really is small.
In 2019, the global capacity of CCS facilities that were either operating or under construction was just 40 million metric tons of CO2, per the Global CCS Institute. That same year, worldwide emissions reached an estimated 36.8 billion tons, according to projections by the Global Carbon Project.
Here's how the math shakes out: Last year, all of the CCS facilities around the world captured about 0.1% of global CO2 emissions or less.
"That's a rounding error," Molchanov said.
Reuters
In 2018, 90% of captured CO2 was used to extract more oil from wells.
2. Most of that captured carbon was used to extract more oil out of the ground
There's a lot you can do with CO2. You can mix it into concrete; you can recycle it into synthetic fuels and plastics; and you can use it to carbonate drinks.
You can also use it to extract more crude oil from the ground, in a strategy called enhanced oil recovery (EOR).
That may sound a little backward - after all, it's the combustion of that very oil that leads to CO2 emissions. But according to a research note that Molchanov published last summer, as much as 90% of the total carbon captured in 2018 was used by oil and gas companies for OER.
"They're putting it into these underground oilfields, and it actually helps you get more oil out," he said. "It sort of kills two birds with one stone: You get more oil out, so the oil companies are happy because they make more money, and it actually sequesters carbon."
Here's how it works: Typically, the oil inside underground reservoirs is pressurized, so some of it - about 10% - comes to the surface on its own, or through pumping mechanisms.
The rest is sucked out in secondary and tertiary phases, which commonly include injecting CO2 into the well. When the gas bonds with the oil, it swells and becomes easier to recover.
EOR techniques can recover as much as 60% of a reservoir's oil stock, according to the US Department of Energy, and most of the CO2 stays sequestered underground.
Climeworks
Climeworks founders Cristoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher in front of the startup's carbon capture technology
3. Carbon capture technologies are still expensive
Though CO2 is all around us, pulling it out of the air - which companies do through chemical processes - is energy-intensive and expensive. Absent a high price on carbon, some investors say that it doesn't yet pay off.
About "40 countries and more than 20 cities, states and provinces already use carbon pricing mechanisms," according to the World Bank. But in most regions including California - where the gas was about $15 a ton in 2018 - the cost of carbon doesn't come close to the cost of capturing and storing CO2 using technology.
Estimates for the cost of direct air capture technologies, which startups like Carbon Engineering are working on, range from $50 to $1000, according to a report by the research group Energy Futures Initiative.
Without legislation in place that ramps up the cost of carbon, it's unlikely that carbon capture technologies will scale through market mechanisms, Buck says.
"I think the people who are championing it right now don't want to spell out the kind of policy needed to get it to a gigaton scale," she said.
4. Carbon capture is opposed by many environmental groups
In a story published in The Conversation last year, Buck wrote about how hundreds of environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Climate Justice Alliance, oppose carbon capture and storage.
Many of these organizations represent underserved areas that have been fighting against oil and gas companies that have a history of polluting in their communities, she says. If these companies are able to offset their emissions by paying to remove CO2, instead of shuttering a polluting power plant, for example, it allows them to continue business as usual.
"This discourse began after 2005 when the coal industry was really interested in clean coal - carbon capture and storage as a way to continue coal production," she said. "We're in a new era of carbon removal. But those earlier concerns are still there."
What's changed is the ambition of carbon reduction targets. Dozens of countries, cities, and states like California have now set net-zero deadlines, as have oil and gas giants like Repsol.
"That implies removal to balance residual emissions," she said.
Environmental groups acknowledge the need for large-scale carbon removal projects, she said. But there are "a ton of questions about how you go about doing it."
This story is part of Business Insider's clean energy coverage. Do you have tips about these companies? Please contact this reporter at bjones@businessinsider.com or through the secure messaging app Signal at (646) 768-1657.
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