It sounds like the Saudi oil minister’s wet dream: burning oil and gas to power parts of the economy, while still being on a path to limit global temperature rises to 1.5-degrees. Science is making this a reality.
Indeed, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are designed to complement the natural carbon sinks that remove the climate-harming gas from our atmosphere.
The idea is that carbon dioxide (CO2) is sucked out of the atmosphere and is then imprisoned underground instead of hanging in the air and stopping heat from escaping into space. Such innovations are needed given the abundance of climate- harming gases in the skies above us.
Indeed, 27 CO2 appraisal and storage licences have been approved in the UK so far. However, such approaches to help the world reduce the level of climate-harming CO2 in the atmosphere are proving to be controversial.
For some, it could be seen as an excuse to not invest in renewable forms of energy and therefore to continue using fossil fuels, which could save oil companies from extinction. For others, the efficacy of such technology is unproven.
Yet such innovations are needed to clean up the world’s energy system. In the UK, for example, an average of almost 20 million tons of carbon dioxide needs to be cut each year until 2030 to meet its carbon commitments.
With the country so reliant on fossil fuels, it is not going to be easy to make such a drastic reduction each year. And there are always going to be some areas of the economy that you cannot decarbonise.
“We call it net zero for a reason,” says Nick Stansbury, head of climate solutions at Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM), acknowledging that completely removing carbon from our economies will be di cult.
Steel, cement, chemicals and aviation are industries that will be hard to entirely decarbonise. The food on our plate is another problem. “However much we work at dietary change, we are going to struggle to remove all emissions from the agricultural system,” Stansbury says.
Then there are what Stansbury describes as “fugitive emissions” from municipal waste and land fill sites. “There are always going to be some quantum of harmful emissions in the system,” he adds.
Yet there are scenarios which could see the world completely abate all harmful emissions, Stansbury believes. But they involve “incredibly aggressive” policy action. “Our view is that those are relatively unlikely scenarios, so there is an important role for the ‘net’ in net zero,” he says.
Burying the problem
It is clear that developing more reliable cleaner sources of energy, changing how we produce food and dispose of waste in a way that is kinder to the climate will not be enough to help us achieve net zero in the next 25 years.
We have to deal with the emissions which cannot be prevented. Then there is the carbon that is already in the atmosphere, which could, scientists say, remain in the skies above our heads for up to a thousand years.
So there is a need for carbon sequestration, storage and removal. There are three approaches here, which are either natural or technical.
First, there is nature-based carbon removal. This means trees, peat bogs, seagrass, fungi, soil and the oceans, which are all carbon sinks. As trees grow, for example, they capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it.
But the issue is that trees are not a permanent store of C02, in that carbon is released when they are cut down and burnt for fuel or warmth. So this is a matter of preserving existing carbon sinks and creating new ones, such as through planting new forests.
Category two is geotechnical carbon storage, which is sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, also known as DAC. The captured carbon is then pressurised until it turns to liquid and is injected into permanent geological storage.
This typically means porous rocks or depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Confidence in the permanence of this method has been borne from a long track record of success. “If hydrocarbons formed over millions of years in a reservoir, we can be confident that any CO2 we put in do not leak out. If it could, it is highly unlikely that the hydrocarbons would have formed there in the first place,” Stansbury says.
The third method is carbon capture and storage (CCS). Rather than sucking CO2 from the air, gases are captured at the point of emission – a dream come true for the Saudi oil minister. “It is stopping emissions at the source,” Stansbury says. “It is not about undoing the harm of emissions which previously took place.”
The emissions are then liquefied and injected into the ground and capped o to keep them there. “We still produce CO2, but rather than allowing it to enter the atmosphere, we store it,” Stansbury says.
Part of CCS is bioenergy carbon capture and storage, which is known as BECCS. Stansbury describes this as key if we are to reach net zero. “In many scenarios, it is thought to have the potential to play quite an important role,” he adds.
But the process is controversial. As a route to generating net-negative emissions “BECCS is a provocative subject that will raise heated opinions from different people”, Stansbury says. Indeed, a study by Imperial College has highlighted the problems with such technologies.
The study labelled the goal to scale up carbon capture and storage technology to remove up to 30 gigatonnes of CO2 each year by 2050 as “overly ambitious”. It said that storing up to 6 gigatonnes of carbon underground each year by the halfway point of the century is more feasible. It could even rise to 16 gigatonnes if storage capacity increases, which will need much more investment into the sector.
If such an option is to make a positive impact on decarbonising our economies it needs to up its game. To achieve net zero, the International Energy Agency estimates that around 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide will need to be captured and stored globally each year.
Globally, about 51 million tonnes of carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere last year, according to BloombergNEF, which was only 0.14% of such emissions.
No golden bullet
So will CCS have a dominant role to play in meeting net zero? “No, we don’t think so,” Stansbury says. “It has an important role to play, but we don’t see a world in which we continue to burn the same quantity of fossil fuels as we do today and then simply capture the CO2 and store it in the ground,” he adds.
Economics is one reason. The cost of generating power from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, in most parts of the world has fallen to a level that makes it cost efficient to replace large parts of our fossil-fuel infrastructure with low-carbon alternatives. “That would be cheaper than relying substantially on CCS in the power system,” Stansbury says.
So is CCS not the game changer it appears to be on paper?
“CCS has an important role to play, but it isn’t a golden bullet,” Stansbury says. “It isn’t as though if we get CCS right then nothing else has to change.”
In fact, one of LGIM’s catchphrases here is “and not or”. “The challenge of reaching net zero requires us to say “and” an awful lot, and it doesn’t require us using “or” very much.
“It isn’t a case of using CCS or renewables or afforestation or hydrogen or nuclear,” Stansbury says. “It is a case of utilising all of the renewables, CCS, nuclear and hydrogen that we can.
“We need every one of these tools, and we need to use as many of them as we can manage if we want to stand a good chance of getting anywhere close to net zero by 2050,” Stansbury says. “We just need to keep saying, ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’.
“We need all of these tools. It is not a case of if you support CCS, you are not supportive of renewables. They are both important,” he adds.
That is not to say LGIM is being unrealistic about the problems and uncertainties that come with CCS. “We must never hold up CCS as a reason not to decarbonise,” Stansbury says. “It should never be looked at as something that we use instead of abating emissions.
“It is something we use alongside doing as much abatement as we can possibly get our hands on. That is why we find this ‘and not or’ framing helpful. “None of these technologies allows us not to use the other one,” Stansbury says.
Here to stay
Time is running out as we march towards 2050, a year where most companies have set their net-zero deadline. “The only way of getting there is to use every tool that we have in the toolkit, and to use as much of them as we can possibly get our hands on as quickly as possible. And even then, it’s going to be incredibly challenging.”
Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, was quoted by The Financial Times as saying: “We don’t live in a perfect world and there is always going to be some car- bon to be captured from different processes to enable particularly heavy industry to do what it needs to do.”
So it is clear that renewable energy alone cannot fully decarbonise the economy. Companies should focus all their energy on abating their emissions, but also developing CCS systems.
It’s not quite a strategy that will put a smile on the face of the Saudi oil minister or allow polluters to ignore their greenhouse gas emissions, but it is an acknowledgment that fossil fuels are unlikely to be eradicated for generations to come.
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