One of the biggest causes of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But what if you could catch the carbon dioxide before it went out into the atmosphere, and push it back into the earth? This is the promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies.
CCS technology is not new – oil plants in Texas have used the technology since 1972 for enhanced oil recovery. Since then, global capacity has grown modestly to capture 40 megatonnes of carbon each year by 2020, equivalent to 10% of the UK’s annual carbon emissions.
While improvements in CCS technologies have been modest, the hopes that planners, governments, and international agencies have pinned upon CCS are not. According to the International Environmental Agency (IEA), for countries to meet sustainable development goals, CCS capacity will need to be more than a hundred times larger by 2050.
According to the IEA, in 2020, governments and industry pledged more than $4.5 bn (£3.2 bn) to CCS. Initially, the focus is on fitting power stations with CCS before using newer CCS technology to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere directly. But, with the technology in its infancy, CCS costs remain high, and, in the UK, not a single large scale cluster of CCS has been built.
The UK case
CCS forms a central part of the UK government’s plan to decarbonise industries like cement and steel. Without it, emissions from industrial processes “cannot be reduced to levels consistent with net zero”, wrote the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy last year in their report on reaching net-zero. UK chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a £1 bn CCS Infrastructure Fund in the 2020 budget, intending to build two carbon capture clusters by 2025.
The CCS Infrastructure Fund marks the third attempt by a UK government to entice CCS innovation. Two funding competitions for government support to create CCS projects have been launched and scrapped, first in 2007 and then in 2011. To date, the government has spent £190 m in today’s prices on the two competitions for funding, without a single CCS cluster being built.
“There's been very slow progress with CCS,” says Professor Nils Markusson, a researcher on the politics of CCS technology at Lancaster University. “There's no market because there's no product coming out. Someone has to foot the bill.”
While funds have been launched and relaunched, CCS has moved further from reach. In 2007, the plan was for the first CCS plant to be in operation by 2014. After that plan was scrapped and the 2011 competition was launched, the aim was the “early 2020s”. The latest CCS Infrastructure Fund has now set its sights on the “mid-2020s”, and complete details on how the new fund will work will not be released until later this year. The size of the fund, though, has always remained at £1bn despite inflation. If pledges kept up with prices, £1.4 bn would now be up for grabs.
An enduring appeal
With technology still at an early stage, it might seem odd to target CCS to solve the climate crisis. But CCS is not the only outlandish technology governments, planners, and media outlets have touted. Hopes have been pinned on an unprecedented rise in the use of hydrogen, electric cars, and even bringing woolly mammoths back to life.
“Technologies like CCS are appealing because they allow the maintenance of the status quo. If we have CCS, we can carry on burning fossil fuels," says Professor Jennie Stephens, author of Diversifying Power: Why We Need Antiracist, Feminist Leadership on Climate and Energy. "What we have not done is invest in social innovation, the things in society that we need to change.
“It’s what I call ‘climate isolationism’, the idea that climate is just a technical problem, that needs a technical fix. It doesn't get at the root of the problem, that we need to move ourselves away from fossil fuels.”
According to Benjamin Sovacool, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Sussex, high hopes for technology are not only a question of serving the fossil fuel industry's interests. Humans like to tell stories, including stories about technology. “We’ve probably seen 20 movies about boy meets girl, or a detective catching a killer, or a sports team that wins against all odds,” he says. “We still keep going back because there’s a human need for drama.”
Fantasy versus facts
The more vague a vision, the more powerful it can be. “I could give you a very specific narrative, such as ‘In the year 2050, we will see 20 million electric cars,” explains Sovacool. “There’s something you could check, and that, by nature, makes it weak because you can debate the numbers. If I say ‘imagine a future where the air is clean and streets are quiet', I haven't really said much, but the vision is more compelling because it lets you fill in the details yourself.”
Vague visions of the transformative power of CCS could detract from more realistic near-term solutions, like tackling energy demand or investing in renewables. According to CarbonBrief, lockdown lifestyle changes meant that UK carbon emissions in 2020 were at their lowest since 1879. Renewables even overtook fossil fuels as a share of electricity generation for the first time. But, in the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s paper on reaching net-zero, CCS and hydrogen were mentioned a cumulative 430 times. In comparison, renewables were mentioned less than 10 times.
But vague visions can be more than PR stunts- they can be valuable motivators. "Imagine if we had the same level of sophistication as some of these technology missions applied to behavioural change,” says Sovacool. While many of us would prefer not to repeat the past year, lockdowns have broadened the scope of behavioural change. For the sake of the climate crisis, we may want to take that with us as we move into "precedented times."
Image credit: Wix Media.
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