Every person interested in climate solutions should watch this, I think.
Carbon Capture and Storage (#CCS) has been around for decades in polluting industries' recommended "solutions" to the climate crisis.
Billions were invested, with some sites running for many years, with mixed results: extremely expensive to build and operate (the only business case has been using the pressurized CO2 to extract more fossil fuels from old wells), and almost never achieving planned performance.
But with the #climate crisis getting worse by the day, and the EU trying to set up new incentives for carbon removals, CCS is gaining new attention from promises that Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Bio-CCS technologies in particular could deliver removals from the atmosphere, and playing a big role in the EU's Climate "net-zero" goals.
Some of these promises are excessive (Bio-CCS for instance only reduces direct emissions from biomass combustion, the carbon removal comes from plant regrowth) in themselves, but all are based on a functioning, reliable CCS technology.
And until now, little was known in the public domain about the actual performances and risks of CCS.
This very informative presentation by Grant Hauber, senior Strategic Energy Finance Advisor at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), reveals how the technology performed in some of the world's most monitored CCS sites, Sleipner and Snohvit, in Norway.
To put it midly, his conclusions are sobering:
- Even top-level science and engineering failed to predict what would happen to the CO2 storage site or in it, and can only estimate what goes on once injection has started.
- Every site is unique, with no site being a template for the next - and the larger the site, the higher the chances for geological variations.
- Pressurised CO2 underground can only be monitored, not controlled. If something goes wrong, the operator can only stop injection and watch. And if there is a leak, even "minor", the CO2 abatement benefit is lost.
- Pressurised CO2 underground can stay active for decades and centuries, thus the risk of loss of containment remains - and the risk of failure, leakage and loss of storage is very real.
In sum: today, CCS-based technologies, at the heart of many governments and corporations' climate strategies, remain poorly known, extremely expensive, and not very reliable despite the serious risks involved.
This doesn't read like a technology you should base climate strategies upon. In any case, I hope you find the presentation as informative as I did.
https://lnkd.in/e5fDKWx7
Real Zero Europe Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe European Environmental Bureau Carbon Market Watch Carbon Gap Corporate Europe Observatory Christian Holzleitner Chris Malins Fabien Ramos Audrey Garric Zia Weise Theresa Crysmann Karin Kämmerling The Green Fix Linda Schneider Kash Burchett Duncan Preston Duncan Brack Dr Daniel Quiggin Julia Krzyszkowska