Carbon Capture—Panacea Or Deception

CHENNAI: The future of fossil fuels is at the centre of the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, where many activists, experts and nations are calling for an agreement to phase out the oil, gas and coal responsible for warming the planet. On the other side: energy companies and oil-rich nations with plans to keep drilling well into the future.

In the background of those discussions are carbon capture and carbon removal, technologies most, if not all, producers are counting on to meet their pledges to get to net-zero emissions. Skeptics worry the technology is being oversold to allow the industry to maintain the status quo.

“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals – which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said before the start of talks.

What exactly is carbon capture?

Lots of industrial facilities like coal-fired power plants and ethanol plants produce carbon dioxide. To stop those planet-warming emissions from reaching the atmosphere, businesses can install equipment to separate that gas from all the other gases coming out of the smokestack, and transport it to where it can be permanently stored underground. And even for industries trying to reduce emissions, some are likely to always produce some carbon, like cement manufacturers that use a chemical process that releases CO2.

“We call that a mitigation technology, a way to stop the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Karl Hausker, an expert on getting to net-zero emissions at World Resources Institute, a climate-focused nonprofit that supports sharp fossil fuel reductions along with a limited role for carbon capture.

The captured carbon is concentrated into a form that can be transported in a vehicle or through a pipeline to a place where it can be injected underground for long-term storage.

Then there’s carbon removal. Instead of capturing carbon from a single, concentrated source, the objective is to remove carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. This already happens when forests are restored, for example, but there’s a push to deploy technology, too. One type directly captures it from the air, using chemicals to pull out carbon dioxide as air passes through.

For some, carbon removal is essential during a global transition to clean energy that will take years. For example, despite notable gains for electric vehicles in some countries, gas-fired cars will be operating well into the future. And some industries, like shipping and aviation, are challenging to fully decarbonize.

“We have to remove some of what’s in the atmosphere in addition to stopping the emissions,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, who leads the federally supported Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s carbon initiative in the U.S., the world’s second-leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

How is it going?

Many experts say that the technology to capture carbon and store it works, but it’s expensive, and it’s still in the early days of deployment.

There are about 40 large-scale carbon capture projects in operation around the world capturing roughly 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s a tiny amount — roughly 0.1 per cent — of the 36.8 billion metric tons emitted globally as tallied by the Global Carbon Project.

The IEA says the history of carbon capture “has largely been one of unmet expectations.” The group analyzed how the world can achieve net zero emissions and its guide path relies heavily on lowering emissions by slashing fossil fuel use. Carbon capture is just a sliver of the solution — less than 10 per cent — but despite its comparatively small role, its expansion is still behind schedule.

The pace of new projects is picking up, but they face significant obstacles. In the United States, there’s opposition to CO2 pipelines that move carbon to storage sites. Safety is one concern; in 2020, a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured, releasing carbon dioxide that displaced breathable air near the ground and sent dozens of people to hospitals. The federal government is working on improving safety standards.

Companies can also run into difficulty getting permits. South Dakota regulators this year, for example, rejected a construction permit for a 1,300-mile network of CO2 pipelines in the Midwest to move carbon to a storage site in Illinois.

The technology to remove carbon directly from the air exists too, but its broad deployment is even further away and especially costly.

Who’s supporting?

The American Petroleum Institute says oil and gas will remain a critical energy source for decades, meaning that in order for the world to reduce its carbon emissions, rapidly expanding carbon capture technology is “key to cleaner energy use across the economy.” A check of most oil companies’ plans to get to net-zero emissions also finds most of them relying on carbon capture in some way.

The Biden administration wants more investment in carbon capture and removal, too, building off America’s comparatively large spending compared with the rest of the world. But it’s an industry that needs subsidies to attract private financing. The Inflation Reduction Act makes tax benefits much more generous. Investors can get a USD 180 per ton credit for removing carbon from the air and storing it underground, for example. And the Department of Energy has billions to support new projects.

“What we are talking about now is taking a technology that has been proven and has been tested, but applying it much more broadly and also applying it in sectors where there is a higher cost to deploy,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an industry advocacy group.

Investment is picking up. The EPA is considering dozens of applications for wells that can store carbon. And in places like Louisiana and North Dakota, local leaders are fighting to attract projects and investment.

Even left-leaning California has an ambitious climate plan that incorporates carbon capture and removing carbon directly out of the air. Leaders say there’s no other way to get emissions to zero.

Who’s against it?

Some environmentalists argue that fossil fuel companies are holding up carbon capture to distract from the need to quickly phase out oil, gas and coal. “The fossil fuel industry has proven itself to be dangerous and deceptive,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at Center for Biological Diversity.

There are other problems. Some projects haven’t met their carbon removal targets. A 2021 U.S. government accountability report said that of eight demonstration projects aimed at capturing and storing carbon from coal plants, just one had started operating at the time the report was published despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

Opponents also note that carbon capture can serve to prolong the life of a polluting plant that would otherwise shut down sooner. That can especially hurt poorer, minority communities that have long lived near heavily polluting facilities. They also note that most of the carbon captured in the U.S. now eventually gets injected into the ground to force out more oil, a process called enhanced oil recovery.

Hausker said it’s essential that governments set policies that force less fossil fuel use — which can then be complemented by carbon capture and carbon removal. “We aren’t going to ask Exxon, pretty please, stop developing fossil fuels,’” he said.

CBAM: India threatens retaliation, EC says carbon leakage prevention sole aim

The European Commission said the sole aim of Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) - a tax the European Union plans to impose on energy-intensive goods from countries like India and China - is to prevent carbon leakage, a situation where companies decide to shift out their production from a country with stringent policies.

European Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra made this statement at a press conference at the UN climate talks here on Friday, even as India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal threatened retaliatory action at an event in New Delhi. Hoekstra said, “CBAM’s sole aim is to prevent carbon leakage.”

Peter Liese, a German politician and a member of the European Parliament, said the bloc aims to reduce emissions by 55 percent by 2030 and that achieving such a significant reduction without CBAM would not be feasible.

Stressing that CBAM is crucial for funding the bloc’s climate goals, he cautioned that any attempt to dismantle it would have far-reaching consequences beyond its scope. “Any agenda to destroy CBAM will destroy much more than that.”

After the G20 Summit in Delhi spotlighted the issue, the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) have raised concerns at COP28 in Dubai, saying this will harm livelihoods and economic growth.

The mechanism aims to set a fair price on the carbon emitted during the production of energy-intensive products, like iron, steel, cement, fertilizers and aluminium, entering the EU. It also encourages cleaner industrial production in non-EU countries. Companies meeting the EU’s carbon emission standards are exempt from this.

The carbon tax will come into effect from January 1, 2026. During the trial period, which started on October 1, 2023, companies from seven carbon-intensive sectors, including steel, cement, fertiliser, aluminium and hydrocarbon products, have to share emissions data with the EU.

A recent study by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2021) shows that through CBAM, a USD 44 per tonne carbon tax would cut leakage by more than half, from 13.3 percent to 5.2 percent.

According to a study conducted by New Delhi-based public policy think tank Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Indian exporters of steel and aluminium could lose up to USD 2 billion due to border taxation in European countries, bearing in mind that, India was the eighth-largest exporter of iron and steel to the EU in 2019.

Some believe that while carbon taxes may prompt producers to reduce emissions, it diverts the focus of resource-deficient countries from adapting to climate impacts to cutting emissions.

Can’t equate India with advanced economies, says EU Parliamentarian

Clubbing India with emitters like China and the US is completely unacceptable as its per capita emissions are “very low”, a senior official of the European Parliament said on Saturday.

Talking to PTI at the UN climate talks here, Peter Liese, a German politician and a member of the European Parliament, emphasised: “Indian people should be able to own a car when people in Germany own two cars.” There have been concerted attempts to club India with major emitters like the US at climate negotiations despite its low per capita emissions.

“It is very important to acknowledge for everybody that per capita emissions of the UAE, China and the US... they are very different from India. “Many people in Europe put China and India in the same basket and sometimes even with the Gulf states which is completely unacceptable. India has very low per capita emissions compared to these countries,” he said.

India’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions rose by around five per cent last year to reach 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide but these were still less than half of the global average, according to a report released by a global team of scientists earlier this week.

The scientists said the United States topped the per capita emissions chart with every individual in the country emitting 14.9 tonnes of CO2, followed by Russia (11.4), Japan (8.5), China (8), and the European Union (6.2). The global average stood at 4.7 tonnes.

On the controversial Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a border tax the EU plans to impose on energy-intensive goods from developing countries like India, Liese said meeting the bloc’s climate promises is “just not possible” without it. The EU has pledged to cut emissions by at least 55 per cent by 2030, compared with the 1990 levels.

“Despite low per capita emissions, India’s cement, iron and steel are as carbon-intensive as produced elsewhere in the world. So we need to find a good balance here,” he said.

The European Union’s plan to impose a carbon tax on goods imported from developing countries like India and China has sparked a debate at the international climate conference in Dubai, with poorer countries firmly arguing that this tax will harm livelihoods and economic growth.