The coal-burning power plants stand behind the Petra Nova Carbon Capture plant at NRG’s WA Parish power plant in Richmond.
Officials at the groundbreaking ceremony for Oxy’s Direct Air Capture facility called “Stratos” in West Texas on Friday, April 28, 2023. The facility, which will be run by Oxy subsidiary 1PointFive, is expected to capture 500k tons of carbon dioxide per year and is the first of five hubs that the company is planning in Texas and Louisiana.
CarbonFree CTO Joe Jones gives a tour of their carbon free plant in San Antonio, Texas. CarbonFree has developed patented technologies that capture CO2 from stationary point source emitters and transform them into carbon-negative chemicals.
The Carbon Engineering Innovation Centre, a Direct Air Capture research and development facility in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada. Direct Air Capture is a technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air with an engineered, mechanical system to help counteract CO2 emissions, and address the large quantities of CO2 emitted in the past that remains trapped in our atmosphere.
One of the hottest topics in the fight against climate change is whether we can capture carbon and safely store it in the ground, with oil companies promising new technologies and radical environmentalists calling the new industry a scam.
If you’re confused, that’s OK because the carbon capture story is just beginning.
The proposition is simple: Human-generated carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the most significant contributor to global climate change. If we can capture carbon dioxide and reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, we could slow or stop global warming.
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Scientists know how to do it; the question is whether we do it on a large scale at an economical price. Oil and gas companies will argue at the next international conference on climate change, called COP 28, that carbon capture will allow them to keep producing fossil fuels at current levels.
“Leaving oil in the ground does nothing to stop the demand for it. It simply raises the price and makes it harder to alleviate poverty around the world,” Exxon CEO Darren Wood said in an agenda-setting speech last week. “When carbon reduction is economic, it will be everywhere.”
The oil industry has pumped carbon dioxide into the ground for more than 50 years. For decades, Occidental Petroleum and others have pumped natural carbon dioxide out of the ground in Colorado, piped it to West Texas and used it to force oil out of old wells that had lost pressure.
Most of the CO2 remains in the well, and Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub says the amount of carbon that goes down the hole exceeds the amount coming up. She calls the 500,000 barrels of oil produced from these wells daily carbon neutral.
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Occidental, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and dozens of other oil companies acknowledge global warming and know the world must reduce carbon emissions. Occidental is building a facility to capture carbon from the air and use that to produce oil rather than rely on natural CO2. Other oil companies plan to capture CO2 from power plants, refineries and other facilities that depend on fossil fuels.
President Joe Biden and Congress are also big believers, providing billions of dollars of incentives and funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency both agree the world cannot slow global warming without capturing 1 billion metric tons of CO2 by 2030 and several billion by 2050.
Critics of carbon capture accept the science; they worry the world will use carbon capture as a substitute for using fewer fossil fuels. The world does not have enough money or places to store enough carbon to continue business as usual. The world must radically reduce fossil fuel use in every scenario.
“While carbon capture technology is likely necessary to decarbonize some industrial processes like producing cement, it will make up just a sliver of the total emission reductions needed to keep our climate goals within reach,” said David Waskow, international climate director at the World Resources Institute. “At COP28, it is important that negotiators clearly articulate the limited role that carbon capture technology will play in tackling the climate crisis.”
Carbon capture’s scale in fighting climate change will ultimately depend on new, untested technologies.
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Trees and oceans are nature’s primary tools for capturing carbon. The fossil fuels we use today are from plant and animal life that captured solar energy millions of years ago. Hundreds of companies sell carbon credits from tree planting programs.
Corporations have spent millions on tree planting and other natural carbon sinks only to waste their money. Keeping trees alive and protected has proven difficult and expensive.
Occidental attracted a $550 million investment from BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset managers, for direct air capture, but only after realizing that the company’s traditional use of carbon injection will not work as well as first thought.
I’ve written about turning carbon from a cement plant into baking soda, and hundreds of companies are finding ways to use captured CO2. But even with an $85-a-ton federal incentive, these processes struggle to generate a profit.
Exxon and other Big Oil executives have long called for a carbon tax to encourage consumers to adopt alternatives and finance more carbon capture. Wood repeated that call last week.
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No one is paying for the damage carbon emissions are doing to our society. The most efficient way to solve the CO2 problem is to force polluters to pay for it.
Chris Tomlinson, named 2021 columnist of the year by the Texas Managing Editors, writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at HoustonChronicle.com/TomlinsonNewsletter or Expressnews.com/TomlinsonNewsletter.
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