June 10, 2015 – The headlines in Canadian newspapers stated that Canada was now on board with the rest of the G7 countries pledging a low-carbon future. But that is precisely what Canada’s leader, Prime Minister Steven Harper, did not do. The low-carbon future pledge has a shelf-life of 85 years. So our best before date for dealing with carbon emissions is the year 2100 AD. That should be of comfort to the next several generations who will face rising CO2 levels as we continue to burn carbon in excess of the planet’s ability to naturally absorb it.
For the Prime Minister it is business as usual in the oil sands. He is counting on technological innovation to be instrumental in allowing the oil to continue to flow as we develop the means to artifically capture the carbon we burn. But the history of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and carbon capture and usage (CCUS) so far is questionable. The fossil fuel industry’s commitment to CCS and CCUS is one of the reasons.
Energy producers will tell you that fossil fuels are not going away. Environmentalists would like that statement to be false. The producers see, as does Canada’s Prime Minister, that CCS and CCUS will be perfected and become the salvation for shareholders vested in fossil fuel companies and the planet. I attended a webinar in the last couple of weeks focused on the state of CCS and CCUS which asked the question, “can the technology deliver?”
One question worth asking is this: if we capture CO2 can we use it and not just find a place to dump and store it? The answer is: there are a lot of uses for CO2 in our advanced technical society. Here are just a few:
as an injectable to enhance oil recovery from old fields.
as a refrigerant.
as a flame retardant for use in fire extinguishers.
in food and beverage processes from carbonated drinks to bakery bread.
in hospitals for surgical procedures.
in wastewater treatment.
in pulp and paper production.
in welding and metal fabrication.
in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.
in electronics.
in chemicals.
in fuels.
In all these industries and fields we can repurpose captured CO2 but the total amount we produce today is much greater than these industries can accommodate.
At the webinar I listened to three fossil fuel carbon capture industry leaders: Howard Herzog of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tim Wiwchar of Shell Canada, and John Thompson of the Coal Transition Project.
They described the problem succinctly. Humans burn annually enough fossil fuels to generate 30 Gigatons of CO2. 12 Gigatons come from power plants. 7 from manufacturing, and the balance from transportation, industry and other uses. Of this CO2 much of it gets naturally sequestered by the boreal and tropical rainforests, by the oceans, and by soil, rivers and plants in general. But the excess has caused CO2 levels to rise from our first accurate global record keeping in the mid 19th century to today. The graph below illustrates the rising curve of both emissions and CO2 atmospheric levels which today hover at or above 400 parts per million. Sequestering CO2 using technology is no mean feat. To lower CO2 atmospheric levels by 1 part per million we would need to capture 9 billion tons of the stuff.
So let’s look at the state of CCS and CCUS to see just how much we are capturing today using current technology.
The biggest operating CCS plant is the Boundary Dam Project in Saskatchewan. It is capturing 1 million tons of CO2 per year. The remaining projects of which there are 22 associated with power generation plants, 13 operational and 9 under construction are designed to capture 40 million tons in total. 34 more are planned. In total these plants will capture about 170 million tons of CO2. Compare that to the 9 billion needed to take one tick off the CO2 meter. Not even two percent.
One of those CCS plants is Quest, a project in Alberta that Shell is implementing at a bitumen upgrader plant. Wiwchar in his presentation described the CCS technology being deployed. The upgrader produces hydrogen, CO2 and other outflow gases. The CCS technology captures the CO2 from the outflow, liquefies it and then pipes it to a field where it is injected underground into a saline aquifer 2.3 kilometers (1.42 miles) below the surface.
Wiwchar sees this as technology adaptable for almost any existing coal-fired power plant. He also described a variation on the Quest idea that China is pursuing, bolting CCUS technology to coal-fired plants in that country, reusing the gas for the kinds of industrial purposes I described above.
CCS and CCUS are obviously at an infantile stage in their technological development. If we were to scale them up over the next decade to a point where they could capture 9 billion tons of CO2 each year then we could continue to justify business as usual in the fossil fuel industry. But there is little enthusiasm on the part of the energy industry, including fossil fuel and power producers, to make these types of investments. The carrot approach of social responsibility to date has yet to work its magic industry wide. Neither has government underwriting of CCS and CCUS plants with many projects getting shelved when industry players dropped out.
So it would seem a stick is the answer and that stick is carbon pricing that forces the industry to invest in CCS and CCUS. All three experts who spoke at the webinar called for a global carbon tax. They also indicated a need to move from the current pace of CCS development capable of megatons of CO2 storage to gigatons.
What is the industry cost for CCS and CCUS to existing and future power plants that use coal or other fossil fuel sources? According to the experts the retrofitting of an existing coal-fired power plant is cheaper than closing plants and replacing them with renewable energy alternatives. And if we are to build new coal-fired power plants with CCS or CCUS the cost is 2 to 3 times more than plants without integrated sequestration technology. Compare that to the cost of mitigating climate change over the coming decades which these same experts say will cost many trillions of dollars.
What is the carrying capacity of the planet for storing CO2 beneath the surface. Researchers in the energy field believe there is at least a century of storage underground. Other novel ideas for CO2 capture and storage involve injecting into the deep ocean below 3,500 meters (almost 11,500 feet) where pressures would keep it and turn it into clathrate hydrate. One can be pretty sure that deep sea ocean life would be negatively impacted. Some of even suggested storing liquid CO2 in gigantic polymer bags in an area of the Pacific Ocean known as the abyssal plain. The CO2 would be pumped by pipeline into bags capable of holding 160 million tons each. You’d need a lot of bags to get to that 9 billion ton figure.
Will CCS and CCUS get to the scale of current levels of oil extraction? A global investment in CCS capable of extracting 3 billion tons of CO2 would be equal to the present level of oil extraction. And yet we need to get to 9 billion tons per year if we are to reduce CO2 by one point. That tells you the limits of relying on technological solutions to get us through the century while we practice business as usual with fossil fuels.
The head of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Tim McMillan, sees in the G7 announcement a positive step. He is quoted by Canada’s Global News as stating “when a country or a world puts its mind to something it can be pretty powerful.” Well that is reading diplomatic tea leaves in a most positive way. As a decarbonization announcement, the G7 leaders committed to act responsibly at some future time, not in the next decade, not even in the next three, but instead by 85 years from now. That is not a call to action but rather an abdication of responsibility.
There is no doubt in my mind that this timeline comes about because of the strong lobbying efforts by Canada and Japan among the G7 to give license to continuing in Canada’s case, to build out the oil sands and a pipeline infrastructure, and in Japan’s case to continue to burn coal while wrestling with nuclear in the post-Fukushima era. Agreeing to backing the IPCC’s conclusions about anthropogenic climate change and therefore the need to reduce greenhouse gases in the future to me is a Pyrrhic victory for the environmental movement and those who in the present and near future will be impacted most by CO2 in the atmosphere as it continues to rise toward the 450 parts per million level that the IPCC sees as the maximum human civilization can tolerate.
(R-L, clockwise), US President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Council President Donald Tusk, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper, sitting together at Elmau Castle in Elmau, Germany, 08 June 2015, at the third session of their G7 meeting. Photo by: Michael Kappeler/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
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