Carbon Capture's Dangerous Delay

Last week, a new report from the International Energy Agency gave us all a bit of good news: in 2014, for the first time in 40 years, global emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is widely regarded as the primary contributor to climate change, did not rise.

It’s cause for celebration, to be sure, and the data hints that efforts to reduce carbon emissions -- legislative pushes, educational campaigns, business incentives -- could be making headway. But current emissions levels remain dangerously high. And despite the rise of renewable energy, carbon-emitting fossil fuels still provide 87 percent of our global energy supply.

So what can we do to ease the pressure on our environment? Renewables are essential to our energy future. Energy efficiency measures have proven simple and cost-effective. But if we want to achieve our emissions reduction goals, we can’t look away from fossil fuels. Instead, we need to face them head on.

Enter carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a process by which carbon dioxide, or CO2, is removed from power plants using chemical processes and transported via pipeline for permanent storage deep underground.

These storage sites are layers of porous rock topped off by an impermeable layer, the same kind that holds oil and natural gas beneath the earth for millions of years. When CO2 is injected into these storage sites, it is secure, and grows more secure the longer it stays there, binding with the rock surrounding it or sinking to the bottom.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, these processes can reduce a power plant’s CO2 emissions by 80 to 90 percent. That’s an impressive figure, but at present, CCS adoption has stalled. Just eight commercial-scale CCS plants are operating around the world, according to the Global CCS Institute.

The takeaway: CCS works, but the vast majority of plants aren’t using it. This begs the question, if CO2 emissions are almost entirely responsible for global warming, and we have the ability to halt them, why aren’t we doing so?

Several rationales exist, all with one thing in common: economics. Oil and gas companies argue that CCS technology is too expensive to be widely adopted. Investors don’t see a viable market. Some say the additional pipeline infrastructure needed for transport would be both costly and environmentally invasive.

These are not unreasonable claims. At present, CCS has not been “scaled up” to commercial levels, as Howard Herzog of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently wrote. To make things worse, government support in the United States has been weak, and the topic of climate change is politically divisive, destroying the potential for much-needed federal incentives.  

But Herzog maintained that the development of CCS technology is not only possible, but vital. If we want to mitigate climate change, and do it quickly enough to save ourselves from the worst of its impacts, we cannot rely on renewables and efficiency measures alone.

Fossil fuels currently produce 82 percent of energy in the United States. To make a meaningful and achievable impact on greenhouse gas emissions, we must grapple with our current energy landscape, in addition to embracing cleaner fuel sources for the future.