Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 2: I'm Olivia Rodgaard, a reporter for Bloomberg Green. I'm currently
Speaker 2: working on a piece about climate anxiety, and I have
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Speaker 3: Thank you, Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week corraling
Speaker 3: carbon Carefully. This is a climate solutions podcast, and I've
Speaker 3: talked with experts about all kinds of weird and wonderful solutions,
Speaker 3: everything from stuff that got to start in a garage
Speaker 3: to things that make billions of dollars in profit every year.
Speaker 3: Deploying these solutions means avoiding carbon pollution in the first place.
Speaker 3: Deploying a solar panel means someone has to burn less coal.
Speaker 3: But there is a type of climate solution that directly
Speaker 3: manages those emissions. It's called carbon capture and storage or CCS.
Speaker 3: As a commercial technology, is being exploited for more than
Speaker 3: fifty years by the oil and gas industry. Its use
Speaker 3: for climate purposes is more recent and has often failed.
Speaker 2: Some say carbon capture is an expensive and misguided distraction
Speaker 2: in the fight against climate change.
Speaker 3: The fundamental problem of this industry, which is that it
Speaker 3: lacks revenue.
Speaker 1: Carbon capturing storage is a priority for this administration.
Speaker 3: Over the next two episodes, we will explore the different
Speaker 3: ways in which carbon pollution can be managed using CCS technologies.
Speaker 3: It's a crucial time to talk about carbon capture because
Speaker 3: there's a resurgence in interest. This year, the United Nations
Speaker 3: Climate Conference COP twenty eight will be hosted in oil
Speaker 3: dependent United Arab Emirates, and the COP twenty eight president
Speaker 3: is the CEO of the country's national oil company. He
Speaker 3: has promised that oil and gas companies will come with
Speaker 3: credible climate promises at COP twenty eight. Carbon capture and
Speaker 3: storage has been the oil industry's favorite solution. As you
Speaker 3: drive out of the Dubai Airport, you are greeted with
Speaker 3: billboards put up by oil companies advertising CCS. Carbon capture
Speaker 3: technologies can be put in two big baskets. Those that
Speaker 3: capture emissions from smokestacks of power plants or industry, and
Speaker 3: those that attempt the harder challenge of trapping carbon dioxide
Speaker 3: directly from the air. In all climate models, point source
Speaker 3: carbon capture from smokestacks is supposed to play a much
Speaker 3: bigger role in helping the world reach net zero emissions
Speaker 3: by twenty fifty. After that, carbon capture from the air
Speaker 3: is supposed to play the bigger role to undo climate damages.
Speaker 3: This technology is often referred to as carbon dioxide removal,
Speaker 3: which we will look at more closely next week. For
Speaker 3: this episode, we will look at coin source carbon capture.
Speaker 3: It's the technology that's been used by the oil industry
Speaker 3: since the nineteen seventies to extract more oil. The same
Speaker 3: process can also be used for climate good if the
Speaker 3: trap pollution is simply put into the ground without extracting
Speaker 3: more fossil fuels. The US is a country that has
Speaker 3: deployed csious technologies the most under President Donald Trump and
Speaker 3: Joe Biden. There has been growing support for the technology
Speaker 3: in the form of billions of dollars in new incentives,
Speaker 3: But given the string of failures that have dotted the
Speaker 3: use of carbon capture for climate good, is it a
Speaker 3: waste of money.
Speaker 1: Carbon capture technologies are precious, They're incredibly energy intensive. They
Speaker 1: involve a lot of demand for storage that takes a
Speaker 1: lot from the communities that host it. We really need
Speaker 1: to be extremely pointed with where we're talking about deploying this.
Speaker 3: This is Emily Grubert, a professor at the University of
Speaker 3: Notre Dame and one of the leading experts on CCS.
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask her whether point source carbon capture
Speaker 3: will work this time, which sectors deserve the use of ccs,
Speaker 3: and whether the oil and gas industry is necessary for
Speaker 3: deploying this technology. So I first got into writing about
Speaker 3: climate solutions back in twenty seventeen, and I started with
Speaker 3: carbon capture and it was just sort of an idea
Speaker 3: that my editor had, Well, Trump's talking about it, What
Speaker 3: is this thing? Can you write about it? And it
Speaker 3: became so quickly, so complicated. Yeah, but I ended up
Speaker 3: spending in an entire year just trying to understand and
Speaker 3: write about the set of technologies that exist within this sphere.
Speaker 3: What's your story about getting interested in carbon capture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, carbon capture specifically is an interesting one. I think
Speaker 1: a big piece of how I got this involved with
Speaker 1: thinking about carbon captures that I was asked to run
Speaker 1: the Office of Carbon Management for the DOE a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago. But I think that happened because I've
Speaker 1: been kind of a fossil oriented academic that works on
Speaker 1: climate mitigation for a long time. Where that really comes
Speaker 1: from is I grew up around the oil industry. So
Speaker 1: my dad's a petroleum engineer. On the other side, my
Speaker 1: grandfather and my great grandfather also were in oil kind
Speaker 1: of going way back in California, and so I grew
Speaker 1: up around the industry and kind of understood it from
Speaker 1: that perspective, and really as it became a lot more
Speaker 1: clear that climate change was this massive, massive thing as
Speaker 1: I was kind of getting into high school and beyond.
Speaker 1: Bringing those two things together has kept me really interested
Speaker 1: in what transition looks like, and particularly in what phase
Speaker 1: out looks like. So a lot of the work that
Speaker 1: I do is around how you kind of safely transition
Speaker 1: away from fossil fuels in a way that allows us
Speaker 1: not to have a bunch of industrial explosions and things
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 3: Now we're going to talk about a number of things
Speaker 3: that are going to involve many acronyms like CDR, CCS,
Speaker 3: CCUS E R DAC. Before we get into all that complication,
Speaker 3: let's just define the large umbrella term that is carbon capture.
Speaker 3: What set of technologies come underneath it. How do you
Speaker 3: think about that technology set?
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so carbon capture. The way that I think
Speaker 1: about it is when you have some sort of mechanical
Speaker 1: or chemical intervention to separate carbon dioxide from some other
Speaker 1: set of gases. Sometimes it's at very very high concentration,
Speaker 1: as with ethanol, where you may have essentially a ninety
Speaker 1: nine percent pure CO two stream coming off of a process.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's directly from the air, where you know you're
Speaker 1: about four hundred and twenty parts per million. Basically, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of other kinds of technologies or approaches
Speaker 1: that we think about that can take CO two out
Speaker 1: of the I typically don't define as carbon capture. So,
Speaker 1: for example, when you have like a reforestation project, we
Speaker 1: consider that as something where the trees are pulling CO
Speaker 1: two out of the air. But I typically wouldn't call
Speaker 1: that carbon capture, even though it can provide some of
Speaker 1: the similar functions.
Speaker 3: So let's do the abbreviations right. CCS is carbon capture
Speaker 3: and storage, but then there are all these other variations.
Speaker 3: What are the other acronyms you come across? And why
Speaker 3: is there such a plethora of abbreviations in this industry?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the kind of silly answer I feel
Speaker 1: like is a lot of these are really long words,
Speaker 1: and people get tired of writing them a bunch of times.
Speaker 1: But carbon capture and storage, like you say, typically is
Speaker 1: how we would define CCS. People will also sometimes say
Speaker 1: carbon capture and sequestration, same thing. Essentially. CCUS often also
Speaker 1: comes up as even more of an umbrella term. So
Speaker 1: carbon capture, utilization and storage. That also gets very complicated
Speaker 1: because some utilization is storage, some utilization is not storage.
Speaker 1: But that's another term that you'll see a lot. Then
Speaker 1: CDR carbon dioxide removal is an interesting one because it
Speaker 1: doesn't really refer to technologies. It refers to an atmospheric
Speaker 1: function where you're taking CO two out of the atmosphere
Speaker 1: and storing it away. It includes a number of CCS
Speaker 1: technologies though, and so you often kind of see it
Speaker 1: in this category. One of those is direct air capture DAK.
Speaker 1: Usually we talk about it as direct air capture with
Speaker 1: carbon capture and storage, So DAX is a term that
Speaker 1: you'll often see, and then I think one of the
Speaker 1: ones that shows up quite frequently that isn't really about
Speaker 1: the CCS element is ER or enhanced oil recovery. EOR.
Speaker 1: Can be done in a number of different ways. This
Speaker 1: is basically usually referring to using a fluid to increase
Speaker 1: pressure and kind of drive oil out of a reservoir.
Speaker 1: When you do it with CO two, that's considered to
Speaker 1: be kind of a direct working fluid utilization for CO two,
Speaker 1: and so you'll see it pop up around CCS as well.
Speaker 3: Today we are talking about point source carbon capture, which
Speaker 3: is basically capturing carbon pollution from smokestacks. When first used commercially,
Speaker 3: the oil and gas industry used it for something called
Speaker 3: enhanced oil recovery or EOR. It's when compressed carbon dioxide
Speaker 3: can be used as a perfect lubricant to push out
Speaker 3: the hardest to reach oil in aging wells. I asked
Speaker 3: Emily why that origin has affected the development of the technology.
Speaker 1: CO two e R or enhanced oil recovery, has been around,
Speaker 1: I think even longer than we've been talking about CCS
Speaker 1: as a climate mitigation technology in the United States. When
Speaker 1: we use CO two EO r. Most of that is
Speaker 1: actually using natural CO two that we extract from domes,
Speaker 1: and so because that was already something people were doing
Speaker 1: basically to give new life to certain oil fields, and
Speaker 1: actually finding that CO two underground, putting it in a
Speaker 1: pipeline and moving it to your oil field is not
Speaker 1: cheap particularly, and so once the climate conversation started to
Speaker 1: get a little bit louder, kind of you know, in
Speaker 1: the nineties or even a little bit longer after that,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of interest in the notion that
Speaker 1: you might be able to do some pollution control that
Speaker 1: would also allow you to do this oil production via er.
Speaker 1: So because there was this existing structure, there's an existing
Speaker 1: demand for CO two associated with oil production, and there
Speaker 1: seemed to be an opportunity where a lot of capital
Speaker 1: might be available to do this, most of the projects
Speaker 1: that really got going were associated with you are also
Speaker 1: because somebody was willing to pay for the CO two.
Speaker 1: That paying for the CO two bit has been quite
Speaker 1: relevant for a long time and is part of the
Speaker 1: reason why people are excited about alternative ways to make
Speaker 1: this viable.
Speaker 3: Point source carbon capture. The technology has been around for
Speaker 3: fifty years and clearly the urgency of using it for
Speaker 3: climate purposes has been growing, especially in the recent decades.
Speaker 3: But just to situate the listener, where are we on
Speaker 3: that progress metric of being able to use this technology
Speaker 3: for putting us on the track to be net zero?
Speaker 1: So the technologies have been around for around fifty years,
Speaker 1: but they haven't been around in a climate oriented way
Speaker 1: for that long. But yeah, in terms of where they
Speaker 1: actually are and how they putent contribute to net zero,
Speaker 1: I think there's a couple of things going on here.
Speaker 1: One is that the kinds of carbon capture and storage
Speaker 1: that we use for emissions mitigation in the sense that
Speaker 1: we're reducing emissions from something that's creating them, whether that's
Speaker 1: a power plant or a cement factory or a stealel
Speaker 1: mill or something like that that has the potential to
Speaker 1: reduce emissions. Hypothetically, it has the potential to eliminate emissions.
Speaker 1: But generally speaking, when we look at those types of
Speaker 1: mitigative carbon capture on point sources, they're not going to
Speaker 1: get the CO two all the way down to zero.
Speaker 1: So they've typically been thought of as a way to
Speaker 1: decarbonized processes that kind of fundamentally have CO two associated
Speaker 1: with them, largely power, but increasingly we look at this
Speaker 1: maybe more for industrial applications where there aren't obvious other
Speaker 1: mitigation strategies, especially because power has a lot of other
Speaker 1: decarbonization options now that we have things like wind and
Speaker 1: solar kind of readily available. The other big piece of this, though,
Speaker 1: is carbon dioxide removal, which actually takes CO two that's
Speaker 1: already in the air out of the air and stores
Speaker 1: it out of the end atmosphere. That one is exceptionally
Speaker 1: relevant to net zero strategies because it basically generates a
Speaker 1: negative emission. Direct air capture with storage is actually a
Speaker 1: really potentially important technology when we think about net zero
Speaker 1: because it does create these negative emissions. You can't have
Speaker 1: net zero without a negative.
Speaker 3: If you look at the next thirty years, say between
Speaker 3: now and twenty fifty, when we need to reach net zero.
Speaker 3: What we see in climate models is that the bulk
Speaker 3: of the work that is done towards mitigation first starts
Speaker 3: off with point source carbon capture, and none of the
Speaker 3: technologies that we have towards mitigation right now, CCS being
Speaker 3: one of them, are things that we are on track
Speaker 3: for net zero. Solar and wind and electric cars their
Speaker 3: adoption is growing pretty rapidly. Point source carbon capture, on
Speaker 3: the other hand, has been around for fifty years, and
Speaker 3: yet the gap between where we are, which is about
Speaker 3: thirty to forty million tons of capture globally versus what
Speaker 3: we should be on for net zero by time twenty
Speaker 3: and fifty, there's a ten x difference. Why is that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think part of the reason is that carbon
Speaker 1: capture on something like a powerplant, on something like a
Speaker 1: cement plant is a pure cost. You are not getting
Speaker 1: any benefits from those types of things really beyond the
Speaker 1: CO two reductions, and so if you're not required to
Speaker 1: do it, you're not going to do it. Probably generally,
Speaker 1: when you talk about retrofitting a plant with CCS, you're
Speaker 1: talking about kind of a hundreds of millions of dollars
Speaker 1: to billions of dollar retrofit that involves your plant being
Speaker 1: down for maybe years. It's not an easy thing to
Speaker 1: do and it's not required. Looking at CCS in particular
Speaker 1: is an interesting one because in many cases where models
Speaker 1: suggest that CCS could be helpful, there are probably alternatives,
Speaker 1: and so you can have a wind farm instead of
Speaker 1: a coal plant, you can have a solar plant with
Speaker 1: batteries instead of a gas plant. Those are alternatives that
Speaker 1: we could do. If CCS is not really showing up
Speaker 1: in areas where there's not really a lot of other
Speaker 1: mitigation options, then I think those are the places we
Speaker 1: probably need to be focusing on deployment. Potentially, this varies
Speaker 1: a lot from country to country. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: dynamics like that around just what it means to retrofit
Speaker 1: a plant and whether you have other alternatives for mitigating
Speaker 1: those emissions.
Speaker 3: The nice thing, if there is one nice thing about
Speaker 3: all this, is that all these experiments have been happening
Speaker 3: around the world in different places. But let's focus on
Speaker 3: the US, because the US is where carbon captures of technology,
Speaker 3: both for climate purposes or for other purposes, has been
Speaker 3: scaled up. It is the country with the largest deployment
Speaker 3: of carbon capture technologies. It has the largest carbon dioxide
Speaker 3: pipeline network. It also has some of the most generous
Speaker 3: incentives now, both under Donald Trump's administration and under Joe
Speaker 3: Biden's administration. So what are the thorny issues that have
Speaker 3: still held this back?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, fascinating question, And I think one of the
Speaker 1: things about the US that I just want to make
Speaker 1: super clear to people that might not be pre familiar
Speaker 1: with this. Also, I'm a little not caught up quite
Speaker 1: exactly on where China is with some of their projects
Speaker 1: that have been announced versus whether they're online. But we
Speaker 1: are definitely top tier in terms of projects that have
Speaker 1: been deployed. That still means there's like ten of them.
Speaker 1: This is not something that exists in a real way.
Speaker 1: We have never done a full demonstration of carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: capture on a full scale power plant. We have one
Speaker 1: operating slipstream on a single unit, so it's part of
Speaker 1: one unit of a multi unit plant that was offline
Speaker 1: for a while because of a fire and some other issues.
Speaker 1: But this is not something that's widely deployed. It exists,
Speaker 1: We've tested it, We have a couple of examples, like
Speaker 1: on ethanol plants and things like that, but this is
Speaker 1: not something that's widely deployed, even if it's more than
Speaker 1: what a lot of other places see. But I think
Speaker 1: really the core reason why we haven't seen a lot
Speaker 1: more of it is this issue of it not being required.
Speaker 1: You alluded to the CO two pipeline network in the
Speaker 1: US being very large comparatively. That's true, but it's oriented
Speaker 1: around the CO two that we're producing naturally from ground resources.
Speaker 1: It's not really about the climate pieces of this, and
Speaker 1: so a lot of the infrastructure we have is kind
Speaker 1: of cobbled together because of these historical associations with oil production.
Speaker 1: And now we do expect to see more deployment exactly
Speaker 1: like you say, because there have been some really big
Speaker 1: incentives announced in the last couple of years. But we'll
Speaker 1: see what that uptake looks like, because again it's it's
Speaker 1: not required, and it is something where even with that incentive,
Speaker 1: it's still pretty disruptive for a lot of people. I
Speaker 1: will say too, it's interesting because we talk a lot
Speaker 1: about the increased incentive for carbon storage, which is really
Speaker 1: what we're paying for. There's the incentive is per ton
Speaker 1: of CO two that you put underground for the most part,
Speaker 1: but that incentive has been around for a while. I
Speaker 1: think it was initially introduced in around two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: and what the Inflation Reduction Act did was jump that
Speaker 1: value for that tax credit from about fifty dollars a
Speaker 1: ton to about eighty five dollars a ton when you
Speaker 1: look at inflation over that period. Though it's really not
Speaker 1: that big of an increase, and so it's an interesting
Speaker 1: question to see exactly where people go with this, and
Speaker 1: probably it does incentivize the people with the highest concentrations
Speaker 1: of CO two most.
Speaker 3: Let's try and take an example of a project to
Speaker 3: unravel some of these complications, and you already hinted at
Speaker 3: that project, which is Petronova. This is a point source
Speaker 3: carbon capture unit set up on a coal power plant
Speaker 3: south of Houston in Texas. As you said, it takes
Speaker 3: only a portion of the emissions of that power plant
Speaker 3: and captures it and then pipes it a few tens
Speaker 3: of kilometers away for enhanced all recovery, which is essentially
Speaker 3: using the CO two to extract more oil. It was
Speaker 3: built on time, it was built within the budget. It
Speaker 3: had received direct money from the US Department of Energy
Speaker 3: towards some of its construction, a small portion, not the
Speaker 3: majority of the construction cost. It ran for a few years,
Speaker 3: then it stopped, and now it's been restarted. Us through
Speaker 3: exactly what this project is, why it worked in the
Speaker 3: first place, why it stopped, and what does it tell
Speaker 3: us about the future of CCS projects.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an interesting one, and I think one of
Speaker 1: the major critiques of Petronova has been, like you say,
Speaker 1: it was built on time and on budget, but the
Speaker 1: climate benefits of that project are quite questionable, both because
Speaker 1: you know, it's essentially extending the life probably of a
Speaker 1: coal plant if it's super successful. They had to build
Speaker 1: an extra natural gas unit to power the capture unit
Speaker 1: because again this is extraordinarily energy intensive and the CO
Speaker 1: two is being used for oil recovery. So that's not
Speaker 1: really a project that is oriented around massive climate benefits,
Speaker 1: but it is a technology demonstration. Essentially. The history is
Speaker 1: we as a country supported this demonstration project on I
Speaker 1: think a two hundred and forty megawatt slipstream on a
Speaker 1: six hundred megawat unit at Parish, which is this coal
Speaker 1: plant in Texas that was coupled to enhanced oil recovery,
Speaker 1: and at the beginning of the pandemic, oil price started
Speaker 1: to fall and they essentially said, we can't afford to
Speaker 1: keep this plant running anymore because we were counting on
Speaker 1: the revenue associated with the oil being produced based on
Speaker 1: our CO two that we are getting paid for. Essentially
Speaker 1: closed it as a result of those dropped oil prices,
Speaker 1: which made a lot of people realize that these projects
Speaker 1: were highly highly dependent on ongoing oil production in the
Speaker 1: way that they were set up. About a year and
Speaker 1: a half ago, I want to say, the unit that
Speaker 1: the carbon capture project was installed on caught fire, which
Speaker 1: delayed their ability to restart. But as of mid September
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty three this year, they have restarted it
Speaker 1: from what I understand, and I believe that it is
Speaker 1: still coupled to enhanced oil recovery.
Speaker 3: Technology demonstration is important, so it's not money that is
Speaker 3: poorly spent, but can you try and separate why having
Speaker 3: these projects run for a while, even if to show
Speaker 3: that the tech works is not enough.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm such a broken record on this, but I
Speaker 1: think the core point is basically, we're not going to
Speaker 1: see major progress on climate until we have a requirement
Speaker 1: to act on climate. We have a bit of a
Speaker 1: policy history in the United States of saying, go do
Speaker 1: something before we know the tech works, and then not
Speaker 1: having that work out, and so it is important to
Speaker 1: actually make sure the technologies work. That said, I think
Speaker 1: one of the major critiques that I have of the
Speaker 1: way that the US in particular has approached technology demonstrations
Speaker 1: is that we're not necessarily choosing the things that are
Speaker 1: going to teach us the most in ways that are
Speaker 1: useful for long term climate benefits. In particular, the BIPART
Speaker 1: is an infrastructure law, Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act that
Speaker 1: passed a couple of years ago, mandates two demonstrations of
Speaker 1: ccs on coal fired power plants. The US's coal fleet
Speaker 1: is very old, like mostly approaching end of life. There
Speaker 1: are very few power plants that have even been built
Speaker 1: in the last decade. I think actually now that it's
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, there are no large coal fired power
Speaker 1: plants built in the last decade. These are old pieces
Speaker 1: of infrastructure, and so if you demonstrate a retrofit on
Speaker 1: a fifty year old coal plant, first of all, if
Speaker 1: that works, you're probably making that plant stick around longer.
Speaker 1: Most of these plants closed at around fifty years. But
Speaker 1: second of all, you're not necessarily learning anything that's going
Speaker 1: to take you past one technology generation. We're not building
Speaker 1: new coal fired power plants, and so if you learn
Speaker 1: how to do this really well, it's not like that's
Speaker 1: going to help you on new plants. A lot of
Speaker 1: the time, the argument as well, if the US does it,
Speaker 1: maybe other countries can use that, but other countries are
Speaker 1: not using nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies pulverized coal technologies
Speaker 1: and having to do retrofits. So certainly you learn something
Speaker 1: from it, but if you learn something that you didn't
Speaker 1: need to know, I'm not sure that that's super super
Speaker 1: helpful in some of the areas where we're looking at,
Speaker 1: you know, can we demonstrate this on a natural gas
Speaker 1: fired power plant, or can we demonstrate this for a
Speaker 1: cement facility or something along those lines. I think those
Speaker 1: are much better oriented around things that might see maybe
Speaker 1: one or two technology generations as opposed to zero or one.
Speaker 1: But we have not historically been surgical in the way
Speaker 1: that we choose tech demos.
Speaker 3: After the break, Emily tells me how she would invest
Speaker 3: the billions of dollars available for point source cobon capture. So,
Speaker 3: if you were given a blank check and also all
Speaker 3: the power to be able to make policy, how would
Speaker 3: you go about trying to build both the incentive system
Speaker 3: in subsidies but also the policy is required to enable
Speaker 3: cloun capture technology to play a crucial role, as many
Speaker 3: of the models say it must to try and reduce
Speaker 3: emissions for.
Speaker 1: The United States, I think i'd move entirely away from
Speaker 1: CCS in the power sector. On some of the other things, though,
Speaker 1: I think from a policy perspective, I would move to
Speaker 1: a much more regulatorily oriented one and out of a
Speaker 1: market based scenario. Most specifically, what I would do is
Speaker 1: really go kind of industry by industry, determine which sectors
Speaker 1: don't have another pathway in the kinds of time frames
Speaker 1: that we're looking at. Where I land on that is
Speaker 1: essentially just the cement industry, which is quite small. It's
Speaker 1: about forty million tons a year in the United States,
Speaker 1: about point seven percent of emissions. There are possibilities that
Speaker 1: we might be able to replace cement chemistries in the
Speaker 1: maybe even medium term, but I think that those are
Speaker 1: the ones where there's the least opportunity for alternative mitigation
Speaker 1: processes and then basically put the rest of attention into
Speaker 1: CDR oriented CCS projects.
Speaker 3: So two aspects of that that I would like to
Speaker 3: touch upon. One is that among the suite of technologies
Speaker 3: that can cut emissions, carbon capture has been one of
Speaker 3: those technologies which in the US has received bipartisan support.
Speaker 3: And one reason that's happened is because it is said,
Speaker 3: and that's true just from looking at the numbers, that
Speaker 3: the oil and gas industry can play a big role
Speaker 3: in being a part of the solution by scaling up
Speaker 3: carbon capture technologies. But then there's a different set of
Speaker 3: voices that say, well, it is this industry that has
Speaker 3: stopped us from doing as much as we can on
Speaker 3: using emissions by delaying, by lobbying against regulations. So why
Speaker 3: should we expect that this industry will suddenly turn around
Speaker 3: and actually make use of their skill set for actual
Speaker 3: climate purposes. So where do you land on the role
Speaker 3: of oil companies in carbon capture?
Speaker 1: Yeah, oil companies themselves I don't think are particularly necessary
Speaker 1: or needed. I agree that there are some technical skills
Speaker 1: that people have, and those people may have come through
Speaker 1: the oil and gas industries. This is largely around subsurface mapping,
Speaker 1: but it's much more about the technical expertise than about
Speaker 1: the companies themselves. I think that what history does kind
Speaker 1: of show is that there has not been a great
Speaker 1: track record for oil and gas companies or coal companies
Speaker 1: for that matter, which are also very excited about ccs,
Speaker 1: largely because it's so energy intensive that if you add
Speaker 1: ccs to a coal plant, for example, you're roughly doubling
Speaker 1: the amount of coal you need. Those kinds of things
Speaker 1: are real incentives for the extraction industries that I think
Speaker 1: we overlook. Sometimes a large buildout of ccs on gas
Speaker 1: plants would dramatically increase the demand for gas. Large build
Speaker 1: out for coal would dramatically increase the demand for coal,
Speaker 1: And so these incentive structures are not very well aligned
Speaker 1: with climate action. I think we do need to in
Speaker 1: general separate where we're talking about skill sets and where
Speaker 1: we're talking about actual corporate structures and corporate priorities. Though
Speaker 1: I mean, frankly, I think when we think about the
Speaker 1: kinds of ccs that are actually sort of quote unquote
Speaker 1: necessary in the sense that it would be very difficult
Speaker 1: to reach and at zero without something like direct air
Speaker 1: capture and storage, It would be very difficult to decarbonize
Speaker 1: the cement industry without a small amount of mitigative ccs.
Speaker 1: Things like that, those are not the kinds of applications
Speaker 1: that the oil and gas companies are necessarily super good at.
Speaker 1: So I think when we really look at what this means, Yeah,
Speaker 1: doing a bunch of deployment in the power sector absolutely
Speaker 1: would be engaging a lot of the skills that the
Speaker 1: oil and gas companies already have and that the coal
Speaker 1: companies to some extent already have, But we don't necessarily
Speaker 1: need to do that. Who do we need for what
Speaker 1: and why? I think is always a really good question
Speaker 1: to ask in these situations, especially when there are some
Speaker 1: really really long standing power dynamics that we know have
Speaker 1: gone a specific direction.
Speaker 3: Many times, we know that when you have facilities either
Speaker 3: processing oil and gas or power plants that are burning
Speaker 3: fossil fuels, the areas around it do suffer from pollution.
Speaker 3: This is local pollution that needs to be tackled, and
Speaker 3: carbon capture doesn't particularly lend itself to making sure that
Speaker 3: that happens. But what are other environmental justice issues that
Speaker 3: we should keep in mind as we think about building
Speaker 3: out carbon capture projects.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a couple of really big ones. I think. One
Speaker 1: is that when you retrofit a facility with carbon capture,
Speaker 1: the counterfactual might not be that that facility would have
Speaker 1: continued to operate as it always had. But I think
Speaker 1: when you look at these a lot of the time,
Speaker 1: if you didn't install the carbon capture, the alternative would
Speaker 1: be that the plant would close, eliminating all of those
Speaker 1: pollutants rather than reducing them. And that's going to a
Speaker 1: little bit site by site. But I think that from
Speaker 1: an environmental justice perspective, recognizing that we're not just talking
Speaker 1: about marginal pollution levels, we're actually talking about like whether
Speaker 1: the facility is still there or not, is a really
Speaker 1: big one. And oftentimes, yeah, like with a retrofit, you're
Speaker 1: dealing with plants that have not necessarily been good neighbors.
Speaker 1: Many of them have explicitly not been good neighbors for
Speaker 1: a very long time. And so especially when you think
Speaker 1: about carbon capture coming in a lot of the time,
Speaker 1: the community kind of recognizes, you know, we finally thought
Speaker 1: that this thing was going to go away, and now
Speaker 1: you're saying it's going to be here for another fifty years.
Speaker 1: Like that's it's a hard thing to think about. I
Speaker 1: think the biggest concern that people have expressed is really
Speaker 1: around pipelines and thinking about moving CO two through communities,
Speaker 1: especially if they're co located with existing pipelines, because it's
Speaker 1: easier to get right of ways that way. That sort
Speaker 1: of thing you do end up adding to burden and
Speaker 1: existing overburdened communities. Many times we don't really have CO
Speaker 1: two pipeline regulations in the United States, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the time the kinds of things you need to
Speaker 1: do if there is a rupture or an accident are
Speaker 1: quite different from what people are trained to do. These
Speaker 1: are not flammable gases. They freeze. COO two is what
Speaker 1: we use in fire extinguishers, and so when you can
Speaker 1: think about a pipeline rupturing, you basically fire extinguishing area.
Speaker 1: That means trucks can't run, so like your ems, ambulances,
Speaker 1: whatever internal combustion engines cannot go through that, you can
Speaker 1: end up a scuffocation risks those types of issues, and
Speaker 1: so people are quite worried about that, particularly in the
Speaker 1: kind of unregulated space that we exist in. And then
Speaker 1: there's just a lot of questions about whether development of
Speaker 1: these kinds of infrastructures also means a lot more industrialization
Speaker 1: to take advantage of those, and that again kind of
Speaker 1: concentrates this burden in the same places all over again.
Speaker 3: This is an application of electric vehicles that I had
Speaker 3: not thought about, which is if you have COO two rupture,
Speaker 3: which means CO two being a heavier gas, is going
Speaker 3: to sort of displace all other gases. You're going to
Speaker 3: have no oxygen or low oxygen, which means you cannot
Speaker 3: burn oiler gas, and thus you can't run an internal
Speaker 3: combustion engine, and so you can't get the emergency equipment
Speaker 3: coming to you. Wow, that's a situation I had not
Speaker 3: imagined electric vehicles would be like the solution for. But hey,
Speaker 3: when you have a technology that can do things, it
Speaker 3: ends up in places you wouldn't think of. But coming
Speaker 3: back to thinking about the solutions that you raise this
Speaker 3: idea that we should focus on using carbon capture for
Speaker 3: what it's really needed, and much of the focus then
Speaker 3: should be on direct air capture as a technology. Now,
Speaker 3: that technology requires also a ton of energy. That's why
Speaker 3: it is so expensive. It requires even more energy than
Speaker 3: would be needed from point source carbon capture. And yet
Speaker 3: it's also a technology without which we cannot reach on
Speaker 3: at zero goals. And so there is an exuberance currently
Speaker 3: both from governments but also in private sector to try
Speaker 3: and scale this technology. And that is well informed in
Speaker 3: the sense that technologies that will be needed after twenty
Speaker 3: fifty yet very big scales ought to start to be
Speaker 3: developed today. But there's also this sort of fear, which is,
Speaker 3: if you end up spending a lot of money but
Speaker 3: also intellectual capital on these technologies, then you're not focusing
Speaker 3: on the stuff that needs to be focused on right now,
Speaker 3: which is to reduce the emissions we are putting out today.
Speaker 3: So how do you think about the development of direct
Speaker 3: air capture and related Commondact side removal technologies with those
Speaker 3: caveats in place.
Speaker 1: Director capture itself is not necessary for reaching that zero,
Speaker 1: but CDR in some form is in direct air capture
Speaker 1: seems to be one of the ones that we're a
Speaker 1: little bit more able to track and we can say
Speaker 1: for sure that it's actually potentially removing these emissions, so
Speaker 1: it is an important one there. I think where I
Speaker 1: come from on director capture is very much thinking about
Speaker 1: where it's needed as well. So it's not just sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, do we need mitigative carabing capture? Do we
Speaker 1: need CDR? It's also how much what do we need
Speaker 1: it for? These kinds of questions, And I think that
Speaker 1: when you really start thinking about how we minimize the
Speaker 1: amount of carbon dioxide removal that's actually necessary so that
Speaker 1: we make sure that we're actually investing in mitigating those
Speaker 1: emissions as quickly as we possibly can. Because this is
Speaker 1: a cumulative game, not a kind of marginal game. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter if we end up emitting as high as
Speaker 1: we are now until twenty fifty and then suddenly go
Speaker 1: to net zero. Like that's not a great pathway, can't
Speaker 1: do that anyway. But there are a lot of reasons
Speaker 1: to reduce cumulative emissions much quicker. But thinking about director
Speaker 1: capture and how much of it we actually need to
Speaker 1: reach net zero goals, assuming that we hit all of
Speaker 1: these mitigation targets, leads you to a very different picture
Speaker 1: of how much is necessary versus if you think about
Speaker 1: director capture is a way to kind of offset ongoing
Speaker 1: emissions from a lot of things that we probably could
Speaker 1: be mitigating. So you know, using director capture to offset
Speaker 1: the ongoing emissions of a coal plant, for example, is
Speaker 1: kind of a ridiculous thing to do. So really, I
Speaker 1: think being tactical in understanding how much we need and
Speaker 1: really thinking about the governance of what carbon dioxide removal
Speaker 1: and director capture and storage in particular look like, I
Speaker 1: think is where we really need to be dedicating our
Speaker 1: time now. I do think that it's easy to forget.
Speaker 1: The twenty fifties only about twenty five years away, so
Speaker 1: it probably is worth really trying to understand whether these
Speaker 1: technologies can deliver the things that we are counting on
Speaker 1: them too. Like, if we're going to rely on some CDR,
Speaker 1: we should probably find out if that works. But I
Speaker 1: think that we are rushing a little bit too quickly
Speaker 1: to marketize and commodify carbon credits associated with director capture
Speaker 1: at a point where it's a lot more important to
Speaker 1: be thinking about what do we actually do to get
Speaker 1: to net zero? Does this technology work, and how can
Speaker 1: we plug it into an overall regime that gets us there.
Speaker 3: If you had a minute, and that's all you have
Speaker 3: to let somebody know what they must know about carbon capture,
Speaker 3: what would you say?
Speaker 1: Carbon capture technologies are precious, They're incredibly energy intensive, They
Speaker 1: involve a lot of demand for storage that takes a
Speaker 1: lot from the communities that host it. As such, I
Speaker 1: think we really need to be extremely pointed with where
Speaker 1: we're talking about deploying this, And I think my single
Speaker 1: biggest point is there are a lot of different ways
Speaker 1: this could go. Some of them are much less harmful
Speaker 1: than others, and really focusing on where this is absolutely
Speaker 1: necessary and promotes justice is going to get us to
Speaker 1: a much better place than essentially trying to maximize it.
Speaker 3: Wonderful. This has been really fun. Thank you so much
Speaker 3: for making the time absolutely thank you. If you want
Speaker 3: to learn more about the limits of carbon capture and storage,
Speaker 3: you should check out a link in the show notes.
Speaker 3: It's a story that I recently published alongside my colleagues
Speaker 3: Natasha White and Kevin Crowley about the oil giant Occidental Petroleum.
Speaker 3: The US company until recently operated one of the world's
Speaker 3: largest CCS plants, but quietly sold the asset after a
Speaker 3: decade of underperformance. I hope the investigation prompts a reality
Speaker 3: check for the true potential of CCS. Thank you for
Speaker 3: listening to Zero. If you liked this episode, please take
Speaker 3: a moment to rate our review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 3: If you write a review, I might read it on
Speaker 3: a future episode. Share this episode with a friend or
Speaker 3: your local fossil oriented academic. You can get in touch
Speaker 3: at zero pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is
Speaker 3: Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Riskell. Our theme
Speaker 3: music is composed by wonderly special thanks to Kira bindrim
Speaker 3: i'm Akshatrati back next week