Quartz - Akshat Rathi
 |
| Suck it up. (Tsjisse Talsma for Quartz) |
Iceland is cold. But it sits atop one of the world’s hottest
underground regions, giving the country the ability to tap into a
massive store of geothermal energy held by live volcanoes beneath
Icelanders’ feet. Drill down only a few hundred meters, and trapped
water will come gushing out as high-temperature steam. It’s easy enough
to turn that into electricity: just run it through a turbine to drive an
electrical generator, like we’ve been doing for over 100 years with any
kind of steam.
The only problem is drilling into these volcanic regions also releases
carbon dioxide,
the major greenhouse gas driving global climate change. Geothermal
power is still very clean, producing just 3% of the emissions of a coal
plant generating the same power. But Iceland wants to reduce its
emissions all the way to zero.
The solution can be found at the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant,
Iceland’s largest, just outside the capital Reykjavik. Since 2014, the
plant has been extracting heat from underground, capturing the carbon
dioxide released in the process, mixing it with water, and injecting it
back down beneath the earth, about 700 meters (2,300 ft) deep. The
carbon dioxide in the water reacts with the minerals at that depth to
form rock, where it stays trapped.
In other words, Hellisheidi is now a zero-emissions plant that turns a greenhouse gas to stone.
This October, it went a step further, partnering with Climeworks, a Switzerland-based startup, to install a machine that
sucks carbon dioxide out of the air.
That gas is also sent underground, where it, too, eventually turns to
rock. The result is a “negative emissions” power plant that literally
subtracts carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As of this writing, the
Climeworks machine has already pulled out more than 5 metric tons of
carbon dioxide from the air and injected it underground, the equivalent
of burying the annual carbon footprint of a household in India.
Critics laughed at those pursuing a moonshot in “direct-air capture”
only a decade ago. Now Climeworks is one of three startups—along with
Carbon Engineering in Canada and Global Thermostat in the US—to have
shown the technology is feasible. The Hellisheidi carbon-sucking machine
is the second Climeworks has installed in 2017. If it continues to find
the money, the startup hopes its installations will capture as much as
1% of annual global emissions by 2025, sequestering about 400 million
metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
For decades, certain scientists have hoped carbon-capture
technologies, deployed at large scales, could save humanity from
catastrophic climate change by providing a bridge to a future in which
we’ll have enough capacity to create, store, and supply all the world’s
energy from only renewable sources. Now that seems imminent. The 2015
Paris climate agreement set a number of goals designed to keep global
average temperatures from rising above 2°C as compared to pre-industrial
levels—a threshold beyond which there may be irreversible changes to
the climate. The foremost authority on the matter, the International
Panel on Climate Change, has modeled hundreds of possible futures to
find economically optimal paths to achieving these goals, which require
the world to bring emissions down to zero by around 2060. In virtually
every IPCC model, carbon capture is absolutely essential—no matter what
else we do to mitigate climate change.
But carbon-capture technologies have a tortured history. Though first
developed nearly 50 years ago, their use in climate-change mitigation
only began in earnest in the 1990s and scaling them up hasn’t gone as
planned. Over the past decade, billions of dollars have been spent on
carbon-capture projects that have not materialized. The most recent
failure was the $7.5 billion
Kemper Project
in Mississippi, whose owners earlier this year announced that instead
of finishing the planned low-emissions coal plant, they would just turn
it into a natural-gas plant.
Those fiascos have provided ammunition to environmental activists who
argue that carbon-capture technologies create a “moral hazard,” making
us complacent about the ongoing use of fossil fuels and extending the
time we take to wean off them. At the most recent climate talks in Bonn,
Germany in November,
protesters thronged
the only panel the US was officially hosting, because some of the
panelists were arguing for the use of carbon capture when burning coal.
“Clean coal is a myth!” they shouted.
After a year of reporting, I’ve come to a conclusion: Carbon capture is both vital and viable.
My
initial perception of carbon capture, based on what I had read in the
press, was to side with the protesters. Carbon-capture technologies
seemed outrageously expensive, especially when renewable energy is
starting to get cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. At the same
time, my training in chemical engineering and chemistry told me the
technologies were scientifically sound. And some of world’s most
important bodies on climate change keep insisting that we need carbon
capture. Who should I believe?
The question took me down a rabbit hole. After a year of reporting,
through visits to large and small carbon-capture plants around the
world, and conversations with more than 100 academics, entrepreneurs,
policy experts, and government officials, I’ve come to a conclusion:
Carbon capture is both vital and viable. Its mass deployment remains a
challenge, but not for the reasons that many environmentalists commonly
cite. Clearing up those misunderstandings could offer hope in a world
full of
doom-and-gloom climate stories.
Over the next two weeks, Quartz will publish a series of articles
exploring carbon-capture technologies from China to California,
showcasing an important but poorly understood part of the world’s race
to zero emissions. These are stories of staunch environmentalists who
take a different approach to solving the biggest global threat humanity
has ever faced, and of a new breed of energy entrepreneur trying to
convert carbon dioxide from a liability to an asset.
The case for carbon capture
Let’s first address the elephant in the room.
 |
| (AP Photo/Martin Meissner) |
Many would agree that if we have to burn fossil fuels, we should use
carbon-capture technologies to negate greenhouse-gas emissions. But why
do we need to keep burning fossil fuels?
In many countries, even without subsidies, solar and wind power are
starting to compete with fossil fuels on price. The trend points to a
world awash in renewable energy not too many years from now. Moreover,
there is now little doubt the
malice of some fossil-fuel companies delayed efforts to take global action against climate change. Why should we develop technologies that will help them now?The optimism surrounding renewable energy masks some harsh realities.
Despite decades of progress, about 80% of the world’s energy still
comes from fossil fuels—the same as in the 1970s. Since then, we’ve kept
adding renewable capacity, but it hasn’t outpaced the growth of the
world’s population and its demand for energy.
Today, about 30% of total world energy (and 40% of the world’s
electricity) is supplied by coal, which emits more carbon dioxide per
unit of energy produced than nearly any other fuel source. In a
recent analysis
(paywall), Deborah Adams of the International Energy Agency, an
intergovernmental think tank, notes that the world’s demand for coal
actually increased in 2017. (And,
not surprisingly,
global annual emissions are projected to increase and set a new
record.) New coal power plants are being built in most poor countries,
“because coal is a relatively cheap, readily available, secure, and
reliable source of power,” she writes. “A coal-fired power plant is a
massive capital investment and will typically operate for 40 years. This
means coal will continue to be a significant part of the energy mix for
decades to come.”
The hugely valuable oil and gas industries, accounting for 33% and
24% of total world energy use, respectively, are also entrenched. “Based
on what we know now, we would need major technological breakthroughs or
weak world growth, including for large emerging and developing
economies, for oil demand to peak in the next 20 years,”
says
Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti of the International Monetary Fund. Despite
the growth in electric vehicles, most oil companies agree that
peak oil is “not in sight.”
Even the head of the International Renewable Energy Agency, whose job
is to ensure that its more than 180 member countries reach 100%
renewable energy, is not exactly gung-ho about the prospects. “In the
electricity sector, 100% renewables by 2050 or 2060 may still be
achievable,” Adnan Amin told me, “but it’s unlikely to happen for all
energy use.” The global electricity sector is responsible for only
about 25% of all emissions.
To help get across the challenge we’re facing when it comes to
weaning humanity off fossil fuels, we’ve created a simulation where your
goal is to reduce the world’s emissions to zero as soon as possible.
You can either disincentivize energy sources that produce carbon dioxide
or incentivize clean-energy sources, or some combination of both. The
projections are based on the open-source
En-ROADS tool built by the nonprofit
Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan, which simulates the effect subsidies and taxes have on energy use and carbon emissions.
As you may have gathered, there is no way to achieve zero emissions
through subsidies and taxes that are within the bounds of what would
reasonably ensure that the global economy doesn’t come to a complete
halt. (For coal, for example, these would be in the range of ±$80 per
metric ton of CO2 emitted). You need something else to reduce emissions.
Carbon-capture technologies are essential.
If you’re still not convinced, consider this: there are a handful of
industries essential to the modern way of life that generate large
amounts of carbon dioxide as a side product of the chemistry of their
manufacturing process. These carbon-intensive industries—including
cement, steel, and ethanol—produce
about 20%
of all global emissions. If we want to keep using these products and
reach zero emissions, the only option is to have these industries deploy
carbon capture.
And we need to reach zero emissions, not just in the energy sector,
but completely, across every industry and every part of the world. The
last time there was so much carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere was
more than 800,000 years ago, when the world’s sea levels were 10 meters
(30 ft) higher than today. Even
conservative estimates
of a 2°C world suggest that by 2100 the oceans could rise more than one
meter from today’s levels, which could displace as much as 10% of the
world’s population. It would also increase the frequency of heatwaves
and intensity of storms, while decreasing crop yields. It’s not
something we can wait out.
In theory, there are many ways to get to zero emissions. But time is
running out, and it has forced many environmentalists to advocate for
the all-of-the-above option, where every technology that can cut
emissions, without dragging down the world economy, should be offered a
chance to flourish: from energy efficiency and renewable energy to
nuclear power and carbon capture.
 |
| (Reuters/Nick Oxford) |
Picking the winners we need
Technology development has and continues to improve the lives of
billions. Many of these advances haven’t required government support to
become reality, but
not a single energy technology
in recent history has been deployed at large scale without significant
help from a benefactor who can take the risk of investing tens of
billions of dollars without guaranteed success.
After World War II, the countries with the capacity to build nuclear
weapons began to see generating nuclear power as a strategic goal.
Governments supported early research, transferred military knowhow on
handling radioactive materials to the private sector, and provided
generous financial support. The combination created a successful private
industry that, today, can build nuclear power plants anywhere in the
world.
Another example is the liquefied natural-gas industry. In the 1970s,
Japan was becoming dangerously dependent on importing large amounts of
coal and oil. Huge fields of natural gas had been discovered in Asia,
but at the time, there was little understanding of how to liquefy and
safely transport large amounts of the stuff. Japan almost unilaterally
absorbed the risks associated with a nascent technology and created the
liquefied natural gas industry we know today.
One last example that will resonate with anyone who believes in the
value of renewable energy is the story of how Germany came to be
responsible for the solar-power revolution we’re living through today.
Starting in 2000, the German Renewable Energy Sources Act required that
electricity from renewable sources be prioritized over all other sources
in the country. The German government also set a fixed price for
renewable electricity, and provided low-cost loans for homeowners to
install rooftop solar panels. The combination of incentives suddenly
created a huge market for solar cells, which were still expensive at the
time. At one point, Germany was buying nearly half the world’s supply
of solar cells. The huge demand pushed innovation and gradually lowered
the price, and today the whole world reaps the benefits of Germany’s
efforts.
These examples show it’s possible for national governments, possibly
even just one rich country, to fundamentally alter how the world
produces energy. All of these developments were strategically important
in their time. As we enter the first few years of earnestly trying to
reach zero global emissions, the time has come for the strategic
development of carbon-capture technologies.
 |
| WA Parish power-generating station, with train carriages supplying coal. (Flickr/Roy Luck under CC BY 2.0) |
There’s a fix
Just outside Houston, Texas, spread over an area of 4,300 acres (more
than 3,500 soccer fields), is the WA Parish Generating Station. It
comprises four natural gas-fired units and four coal-fired units,
producing 3,700 MW of power, enough to meet the energy needs of 3
million US households. The power plant is so big it has its own train
station, where, two to three times a day, dozens of carriages unload
15,000 metric tons of coal from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.
One of the coal units was recently retrofitted with state-of-the-art
carbon-capture technology, diverting emissions from the production of
about 240 MW of power (enough for 200,000 households). The project,
operated by two energy companies, the US’s NRG and Japan’s JX Nippon,
was christened “Petra Nova,” which means “new oil” in Latin. When it
started operating earlier this year, it became—and remains—the world’s
largest coal power plant with carbon-capture technology, with the
capacity to capture more than 90% of its emissions, about 1.6 million
metric tons of carbon emissions each year. It cost $1 billion to build,
$190 million of which came from the US government.
Among a string of failures, Petra Nova stands tall as a
carbon-capture project completed on time and within budget. Its success
is partly attributable to its use of off-the-shelf technologies that had
been tested and proven. The failed Kemper Project, on the other hand,
tried to build its own set of technologies to convert coal into gas
before doing carbon capture. The main causes for its failure, however,
had to do more with reasons beyond technology innovation, such as an
unanticipated drop in natural-gas prices.
The idea of capturing and burying emissions is simple, but executing
it at scale is complex, NRG spokesperson David Knox warned me before we
began the tour. “Petra Nova is really five projects in one,” he said.
Petra Nova does all five steps of carbon capture and storage (CCS):
generating carbon dioxide, capturing the emissions (which is a two-part
process), transporting it to where it will be stored, and injecting it
deep underground and then monitoring it.
The generation step is easy. For centuries, we’ve been burning coal
to generate heat. In some cases, the heat is used directly and in others
it’s converted to electricity.
Part one of the capture step involves taking the mixture of gases in
the exhaust spewed out by burning coal, typically about 10% carbon
dioxide, 10% oxygen, and 80% nitrogen, and separating out the CO2.
Carbon dioxide is slightly acidic, which means it will react with a
base. Neither oxygen nor nitrogen is acidic, so in this case, if you add
a base into the process, it will selectively trap the carbon dioxide
from the mixture.
Once the other gases—which don’t have any greenhouse effects—are
vented to the atmosphere, part two of the capture step begins: applying
heat breaks the bond between carbon dioxide and the base, creating a
pure stream of carbon dioxide, which can be captured before it enters
the atmosphere. The base can be reused to capture more carbon dioxide.
Separating out the carbon dioxide is necessary because of the next
step: compression and transport. Studies have shown that to ideally
store carbon dioxide, the gas should be compressed to 100 times the
atmospheric pressure. Compressing a gas that much requires a lot of
energy. If the carbon dioxide wasn’t isolated, the full exhaust gas
mixture—about nine times more gas—would need to be compressed, consuming
nearly as much energy as the entire power plant produces.
After the CO2 is compressed, Petra Nova transports it about 80 miles
(130 km) via a pipeline built specially to carry high-pressure carbon
dioxide without leaking. Pipes may not seem like a big deal, but many
carbon capture projects fail to take off because power plants are too
far from injection sites, and there’s no pipeline already set up. It’s
not cheap to build your own: industry experts say each mile of a CO2
pipeline can cost as much as $2 million in the Houston area.
Finally, after the carbon dioxide has been transported by pipeline,
the gas is injected underground, beneath a depleted oil field. The site
wasn’t chosen arbitrarily. Before the CO2 injections began, the oil
field was producing about 300 barrels of oil per day, massively down
from its peak of 52,000 barrels per day in 1970. Now, the field’s
production has risen to about 4,000 barrels per day.
 |
| Petra Nova’s carbon-capture unit, in front of the large coal store that powers the WA Parish power plant. (NRG) |
Out of sight
This huge increase in production is thanks to a process called
“enhanced oil recovery,” and it’s the largest current market for carbon
dioxide. The oil we use to produce energy is typically found in a
porous, rocky layer of the Earth’s crust. When an oil field is first
discovered, the initial drilling is easy. But after the first easy
pickings are sucked out, oil companies need to flood the field with
water to push out more of the fossil fuel. Because water and oil don’t
mix, however, only a limited amount of the total available oil makes it
to the surface even then. Compressed CO2 solves the problem. The gas can
get into hard-to-reach crevices of the rocky layer and dissolve the oil
there (much like a detergent removes stains from your clothing)
flushing out more of it to the surface.
Every time CO2 is pumped into the oil field, about 20% of the gas
remains underground. The rest comes back up to the surface with the oil.
That CO2-oil mixture is separated by simply lowering the pressure and
letting CO2 bubble out of the sticky black liquid. Then the carbon
dioxide is recompressed and put back into the field. In the end, all of
the greenhouse gas is sequestered.
Enhanced oil recovery currently provides the largest revenue stream
for companies capturing carbon dioxide. At a price of about $50 per
barrel, Petra Nova is projected to break even—thanks to the extra oil
recovered by captured-CO2 injections. If oil prices rise, it may even
make a profit from burying carbon dioxide.
This may not sound like a solution to the climate-change problem.
After all, investing in this technology could actually help the
fossil-fuel industry. But it has the potential to make a huge dent in
our CO2 emissions.
Oil companies currently pump about
68 million metric tons
of CO2 into oil fields in the US every year. Only 25% of that comes
from capturing emissions from human-made sources. The primary source of
carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery today is—I kid you
not—naturally occurring CO2 fields. In other words, oil companies are
mining carbon dioxide just as the world is desperately trying to stop
producing so much of it.
It’s currently cheaper to mine underground carbon dioxide in one part
of the country (where it’s available as a pure gas) and then transport
it by pipeline hundreds or thousands of miles away than to go through
the whole five-step process necessary to capture it from human-made
sources. And oil companies aren’t going to stop doing that until we stop
using oil, which is not happening any time soon. If others follow the
path Petra Nova has laid out, though, to provide anthropogenic CO2 at a
similar or cheaper price, oil companies would give up using geological
sources in a heartbeat.
We’ve been injecting carbon dioxide underground since the 1970s, and
know plenty about oil and gas fields, so scientists have a good idea of
the geology at play. US regulations require that injections of
anthropogenic carbon dioxide in oil and gas fields are
continually monitored for any possible leakage, and there’s strong evidence that this is a relatively safe feat of engineering.
Eventually—it could be a few years, or decades, depending on how fast
the world adopts CCS—we’ll exhaust the storage capacity of depleted oil
and gas fields. Luckily, carbon dioxide can be also stored in
underground saline aquifers, which are water-permeable rocks saturated
with salt water. There, the CO2 mixes in with water and remains trapped
underground. (The Sleipner project in Norway, run by Statoil, stored
10 million metric tons
of CO2 in saline aquifers between 1996 and 2008.) And CO2 can also be
stored in widely available basalt-type rock, where the gas can
mineralize into stone (as in Iceland’s Hellisheidi project). Peter
Kelemen, a professor of earth and environmental science at Columbia
University, warns that we still need more research on saline aquifers
and basalt-type rocks before we start shoving all our CO2 emissions in
them. But if proven out, research suggests there’s more accessible
carbon-storage space than we would need for
decades to come.
And yet Petra Nova is one of only
17 large-scale CCS facilities
in the world, with just a handful more under construction. The world
needs at least 200 facilities by 2025 to stay on track to hit zero
emissions. The major reason why we don’t have more is because there
isn’t a long-term business model for CCS yet. Studies
have shown
that revenue from enhanced-oil recovery can provide a bridge to the
creation of business models that make CCS more sustainable. Still, not
every project will be able to sell its CO2 for use in enhanced-oil
recovery.
To environmentally minded entrepreneurs, this demand for more CCS
projects presents a major opportunity. Their challenge: either convert
carbon dioxide into products people are ready to pay for, or find a way
to capture the gas at zero cost.
 |
| (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan) |
Catching the S-shaped wave
Issam Dairanieh has always believed technology could help beat
climate change. As the head of the oil giant BP’s venture-capital arm in
the early 2010s, Dairanieh invested in many clean-energy startups. But
he was frustrated with the pace of development. Now, he’s the CEO of the
Global CO2 Initiative, where he hopes to accelerate what he started by
investing $300 million over the next 10 years in 300 clean-energy
startups.
Investing now, Dairanieh believes, will position him well to take
advantage of what could become a massive industry. “The potential market
for products made from carbon dioxide could be as much as $1.1 trillion
by 2030,” says Dairanieh.
“The potential market for products made from carbon dioxide could be as much as $1.1 trillion by 2030”
He’s
not the only one placing big bets on carbon-capture tech. Just over the
last few years, hundreds of startups have sprung up in search of ways
to convert carbon dioxide into new products. As Dairanieh was beginning
his work with the Global CO2 Initiative in 2015, the $20-million Carbon
X-Prize was wading through the project proposals of 47 teams competing
to create the most valuable product from carbon dioxide. Since then, the
applicants have been culled to 20 semi-finalists. Each has until
February next year to build a prototype that can capture at least 200 kg
of carbon dioxide per day for at least three days straight, and convert
it into useful products. The teams will use emissions from a
coal power plant in Wyoming to test their technology. “We seek inventions that are audacious but possible,” says Marcus Shingles, the CEO of X-Prize.
The X-Prize takes its inspiration from the Orteig Prize, which in
1919 challenged anyone in the world to try to complete the first
non-stop flight between Paris and New York. In the end, teams competing
spent more than $400,000 trying to win $25,000 (about $6 million and
$375,000 in today’s money, respectively). The winner, Charles Lindbergh,
changed the commercial aviation industry forever when he made the first
non-stop, trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. Barely two years later, more
than 170,000 passengers flew across the ocean on commercial airlines.
The rapid development of long-distance flying isn’t as extreme as it sounds.
Charles Sandstrom
at the Chalmers University of Technology notes that many technologies
develop along an S-shaped curve, where progress is slow at first, then
reaches a breakthrough and from that point on advances rapidly, until
the development reaches the upper limits of scientific possibility.
Shingles’ team created the Carbon X-Prize because they believe
carbon-dioxide conversion technologies are at that inflection point.
Some companies are already selling CO2 products. Covestro (formerly Bayer Materials) in Germany
offers a mattress foam made partially from a polymer with carbon dioxide trapped inside.
Tuticorin Chemicals
in India is capturing carbon dioxide from burning coal and converting
it into soda ash. Another startup I interviewed, which didn’t want to be
named because it is in the process of launching a product, is
converting carbon dioxide into ethanol to make liquor. (Usually,
distilled spirits are made with the ethanol produced by fermenting
grains, fruits, or vegetables—a process that actually releases a lot of
CO2.)
And there are many more in the development phase. In New Jersey, a
startup called Solidia Technologies is working on a form of cement that
absorbs carbon dioxide as it
sets into concrete.
Algoland in Sweden is using emissions captured from a cement plant to
feed algae and grow them at faster-than-normal rates, and then selling
the protein-rich algae as
animal-feed additive.
Carbon Engineering in Canada is capturing CO2 from the air and
developing a process of converting it into biofuels. Opus 12 in
California has a lab prototype producing speciality chemicals from
carbon dioxide. Newlight Technologies, also in California, is in the
process of commercializing a plastic made in part with CO2.
To be sure, the laws of thermodynamics state that converting carbon
dioxide into a product will require more energy than was produced when a
fossil fuel was burned to generate that same CO2. But that doesn’t make
it a bad idea. Renewable energy will keep getting cheaper. Moreover,
wind and solar power are intermittent in nature, producing less power on
windless or cloudy days. To ensure reliable supply on those days, the
overall capacity of renewable power plants needs to be two or three
times the amount of power needed for actual use. On the flip side, there
will be times when the world is producing more wind and solar energy
than we can consume.
“Using abundant renewable cheap energy to do CO2 conversion is no
longer crazy,” says Julio Friedmann, a former deputy assistant secretary
at the US Department of Energy and an expert in carbon management. “It
was crazy three years ago. It’s not crazy now.”
 |
| (Reuters/Javier Barbancho) |
Seeking breakthroughs
Dairanieh estimates new CO2 products could store as much as 10% of
the world’s annual emissions, about 4 billion metric tons of carbon
dioxide. However, that still leaves a lot for us to capture and bury,
and to do it, we need to figure out how to make the process cheaper.
Ethan Novek won his first science fair at the age of 12; he got his
first patent at 16; and now, at 18, he runs his own company, Innovator
Energy. Novek took an idea from a school project that won him awards at
the International Science and Engineering Fair in 2015, and developed it
into a technology he now believes could capture and bury carbon dioxide
at $10 or so per metric ton, about 85% less than industry standard. The
basic science was validated in a lab at Yale University and published
in a peer-reviewed journal; he recently moved to San Antonio, Texas, to
build a pilot-scale plant. (Quartz’s feature story about Novek and his
work will be published
later in the series.)
About three hours east of San Antonio, another startup is piloting
what could be an even more revolutionary technology. A conventional
natural gas plant, though better than coal, is still only 60% efficient.
Net Power has built a $150-million facility in Houston, Texas, that
utilizes some of the unique properties of CO2 to increase that overall
efficiency. Better still, because the plant uses pure oxygen to burn the
fuel, the exhaust contains only carbon dioxide and water. That means,
after a little bit of cooling and recompression, which require extra
energy, that CO2 can be pumped underground. In the end, Net Power gets
about the same efficiency as a standard natural-gas power plant but with
essentially free carbon capture. The startup’s 50 MW pilot plant—which
would produce enough energy to power 40,000 homes—is expected to start
burning natural gas in early 2018. If it succeeds, it will be the
world’s first fossil-fuel power plant that produces zero emissions at no
extra cost. (Quartz’s feature story about Net Power will also be
published
later in the series.)
The efforts to make carbon capture cheaper go beyond startups.
Researchers are developing membranes, which are essentially plastic
sheets containing microscopic holes, to let most gases in an exhaust
mix—like oxygen, nitrogen, and argon—pass through, while trapping the
much larger CO2 molecule without expending as much energy as needed for
conventional methods. Others are working on using a solid base to
capture carbon dioxide, unlike the difficult-to-handle liquid bases
commonly used today (including at Petra Nova).
 |
| (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) |
Conquering the cost conundrum
Conventional economics suggest we should let technologies compete in a
marketplace, and let the best ones win. But, as economist Nicholas
Stern puts it, climate change is “the biggest market failure the world
has seen.” Most of these nascent carbon-capture technological
developments, like other energy technologies, were only born due to
government funding. To get them to mature for deployment at scales that
would make a difference in our fight against climate change, they’ll
need additional government help.
One way to create a realistic CO2 market is through government
regulations that specify limits on how much of it can be emitted. It
doesn’t have to be all or none—there are ways, that the US has
successfully implemented before, to work with the private sector to get
it to where it needs to be. Take the case of sulfur emissions.
Sulfur-containing gases emitted by fossil-fuel power plants are a
major cause
of acid rain and toxic particulate-matter pollution. Following public
outcry about air pollution in the 1960s, the US government passed strong
regulations to cut sulfur emissions. Crucially, however, the
regulations were introduced in a phased manner. First, the government
awarded grants to support early-stage research into technology that
would scrub sulfur from fossil-fuel emissions. This helped lower the
costs of these technologies, making them more palatable for the private
sector. Then, the US government slowly tightened limits on how much
sulfur-containing gases could be emitted and created a cap-and-trade
system that gave companies flexibility on the speed and scope of their
implementation. In the end, with the right legislative and regulatory
support, the sulphur-scrubbing industry took off.
Nicholas Stern says climate change is “the biggest market failure the world has seen.”
When
it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, one market-friendly government
policy is to set a price on carbon production. Economists have already
thought this through, developing the concept of a “
social cost of carbon” (SCC). A
2014 study
looking at different models of SCC concluded that, conservatively,
every metric ton of CO2 emitted today will cost the world $125 in future
adverse effects. Depending on how much more we continue to emit, SCC
goes up or down.
About one-fifth of Norway’s gross domestic product comes from the oil
and gas industry. But the country also has a vast coastline and many
glaciers, which make it vulnerable to climate change. That’s why Norway
was one of the first countries to introduce a carbon tax in 1991.
The impact of carbon pricing was immediate. By 1996, Statoil, the
state-run oil and gas multinational, found it cheaper to capture and
store the carbon-dioxide emissions from its the Sleipner gas field than
to pay the taxes it would have owed if the CO2 was vented into the
atmosphere. Sleipner became the first large-scale project in the world
to do carbon capture and storage, followed shortly by the Snøhvit gas
field, also owned by Statoil. Together, the projects bury more than 1.5
million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Broadly speaking, the carbon tax has added rocket fuel to Norway’s
transition towards a zero-emissions country. In 2016, the country’s
parliament announced it was moving its emissions goals
up 20 years; it will now attempt to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030, instead of 2050. And that was with a tax of just about
$70 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, far lower than a SCC of $125.
Today, carbon taxes exist in some form in more than 15 countries
around the world. The UK introduced a carbon-floor price in 2011. Now,
six years later, the country that led the coal-powered industrial
revolution is
on the verge of eliminating the use of the dirty fuel. But perhaps the
most instructive example
of how carbon taxes affect emissions comes from Australia. When the
country announced it would levy the tax in 2012, its CO2 emissions fell
in anticipation of the new policy going into effect. For nearly two
years, emissions continued to dive until a political shakeup led to a
new government that reversed the policy in late 2014. Immediately, CO2
emissions began to rise again; by 2016, they had returned to 2012
levels.
Bring in parity
The Paris climate agreement’s goal to reach zero emissions have
reinvigorated interest in carbon-capture technologies across the world.
Canada has the most CCS projects besides the US, with three in operation
and two to launch in 2018. Norway has some of the longest-running after
the US, and is planning to build more in the near future. Australia
will soon be home to the world’s largest CCS plant: the Gorgon project,
expected to launch in 2018, will separate carbon dioxide from natural
gas, and bury nearly 4 million metric tons of CO2 annually. India is
planning to finance at least one carbon-capture project before 2020.
Finally, though China currently has no completed large-scale CCS
projects, it has more of them in the planning phase than any other
country. (Quartz’s feature story on China’s efforts will be published
later in the series.)
However, the world continues to look to the US’s advances in carbon
capture. There’s one thing the many innovations mentioned in this
article have in common: the US Department of Energy (DOE). The
department gave grants to Petra Nova to build the first coal-power plant
with CCS, to Solidia Technologies to help with research, to Newlight
Technologies to help scale up their technology, and to Opus 12 in the
form of lab facilities. Ethan Novek is currently applying for a DOE
grant. So it matters what US leadership thinks about climate change.
“Leadership matters tremendously,” a former US government official
told me. “Because it decides the priorities for the country.” Under
secretary Steven Chu, the DOE focused on solar power, energy efficiency,
and biofuels. When Ernest Moniz took over the job, the department
shifted towards nuclear power, electrical-grid resiliency, and CCS.
It’s not clear what current DOE secretary Rick Perry wants. On the one hand, he was happy to be at the
ribbon-cutting ceremony for Petra Nova. On the other, he has
raised doubts
about whether human-caused carbon emissions are the major cause of
climate change. (They are. Perry’s position has no scientific basis.)
Perry’s boss, Donald Trump, behaves even more unpredictably. On the one
hand, Trump promotes “clean coal” (even if he
doesn’t understand what it means). On the other, he wants to cut the budget of the Office of Fossil Energy in the DOE, which is responsible for
funding carbon-capture technologies.
Between 2010 and 2016, the world spent $2.3 trillion on renewable energy and only $10 billion on CCS.
The
US is still the global leader in carbon-capture technologies. An early
start at enhanced-oil recovery in the country created industry expertise
in the technologies and led to the creation of the world’s largest
network of CO2 pipelines (more than 4,000 miles, or 6,400 km, long).
Those infrastructure and technology investments have helped the US oil
and gas industry remain among the world’s most valuable.
But the US and the rest of the world need to do a lot more, and
quickly. Between 2010 and 2016, the world spent $2.3 trillion on
renewable energy, largely thanks to government subsidies for the
renewable sector (like Germany’s push for solar cells). In the same
period, CCS got only
$10 billion in investment,
according to the International Energy Agency. No surprise then, that
the Global CCS Institute, a not-for-profit group funded by governments
and corporations, calls for climate-change policy parity: If we want to
save the world, the organization argues, we should provide the same
incentives to any technology that cuts carbon emissions.
 |
| (AP Photo/Gregory Bull) |
Vote your mind
The term “clean coal” is a huge problem. It masks the fact that coal
is a dirty source of energy. Current so-called “clean-coal” technologies
nearly eliminate sulfur and mercury emissions, but they don’t reduce
carbon emissions. And the use of coal is seriously hurting our fight
against climate change. At the same time, over the past 20 years, coal
has brought electricity for the first time to some 1.6 billion people.
And if we care about the development of all people, our energies would
be better spent cutting emissions rather than being religious about one
fuel or another.
The trouble is that environmentalists conflate “clean coal” with CCS.
If the world is to hit zero emissions, we will need to apply CCS not
just to coal power plants but also to natural-gas power plants and then
to every carbon-emitting industry. In other words, CCS really isn’t
about coal. We cannot afford that confusion any more because time is
running out. Ultimately, whether or not CCS is deployed will come down
to people, who through their elected governments, can push for the right
policies to be adopted.
“There’s a perception around CCS that it adds a burden, as opposed to it accomplishes a goal. [That] needs to be changed.”
That’s
why perceptions matter. Consider what’s happening to nuclear power
around the world. Following the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, a poll of
23,000 people across 23 countries showed a
sharp decline in people’s appetite for nuclear power—a near-zero-emissions source of energy. In the disaster,
no one was killed or sickened
by radiation. The Japanese government’s response was to assume the
worst, and the panic that ensued spread a fear of radiation across the
world. Germany, formerly a champion of nuclear energy, has had to turn
on coal-power plants after implementing policies to limit the use of
nuclear power. The upshot is the country’s emissions have increased in
recent years, instead of fallen as they have in most of the rich world.
The notion of “clean coal” has similarly shaped wrong perceptions of
CCS.
In addition, even many of those who do understand that CCS is
distinct from “clean coal” don’t support it because of a natural human
bias towards production rather than reduction. “CCS doesn’t make
anything new. You just don’t have emissions,” says Julio Friedmann, the
former DOE official. “There’s a perception around CCS that it adds a
burden, as opposed to it accomplishes a goal. [That] needs to be
changed.”
The case for how people should think about CCS was best made by Peter
Kelemen, who told a story at the Columbia Global Energy Summit held in
April this year. In about 1820, London became the world’s largest and
arguably most important city. It wasn’t just the capital of Great
Britain; it was the seat from which the empire’s rulers controlled
nearly half the world’s population. But London, in some ways, was still a
backwater—it lacked a central sewer system. “If you were poor, you
threw it down the street,” Kelemen told the audience. “If you were
wealthy, you had a pipe that took it to a cesspool.”
John Snow, now known as the father of epidemiology, undertook
research that showed links between these cesspools and at least three
cholera outbreaks, which killed more than 30,000 people in first half of
the 19th century. To add to the woes, most of the human waste
eventually found its way into the Thames River. “I can certify that the
offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most
head-and-stomach-distending nature,” Charles Dickens wrote in a letter
to a friend in 1857.
“Then in 1858, there was a summer when it didn’t rain,” Kelemen
continued. The Thames dried up, and the stench got stronger. It was
called the Great Stink. The Queen and the royal court left London;
members of parliament debated moving to Oxford. Fortunately, instead of
leaving, they passed legislation to do something. “They dug up all the
largest roads in the world’s largest city, and they installed central
sewers over the next 10 years,” Kelemen said. “It cost about 2% of GDP,
and even today it costs about 1% of GDP to maintain the sewers. No one
questioned whether that was worth it. Until people think throwing CO2 in
the air is like throwing poop in the street, we’re not going to spend
what it costs. At 2% of global GDP, we can make the CO2 problem go
away.”
“Until people think throwing CO2 in the air is like throwing poop in the street, we’re not going to spend what it costs.”
Framed
this way, the long-term economics of CCS seem not only feasible, but
eminently reasonable. The International Energy Agency estimates that the
world needs to be burying
at least 6 billion metric tons of CO2 per year by 2050. Though Petra Nova won’t say it, experts estimate the project’s carbon-capture cost to be
about $60 per metric ton
of CO2. That’s half the social cost of not capturing the same carbon.
Knox, Petra Nova’s spokesperson, says that were the company to build a
second unit, costs would be at least 20% lower than the first project,
thanks to the lessons learned.
Even using a conservative number, like $60 per metric ton, all the
world would need to pay to start to make the CO2 problem go away today
is $360 billion. For comparison, the world’s GDP is forecast to be $78
trillion in 2017.
In other words, we could save the planet from disastrous climate
change for less than 0.5% of world GDP in today’s economy—much lower
than Kelemen’s already modest estimate.
Last resort
If people don’t change their mind about CCS and governments don’t
invest to make deployment of CCS at large scale a reality, the world
will soon exceed the carbon budget required to keep global temperature
rise below 2°C. Some models suggest we’re already
on track
to cross that point, and the world will have to turn to some form of
the “direct-air capture” technology currently being tested at a humble
scale in Iceland. To suck up carbon dioxide from the air at the levels
to stop global-temperature rise, we’d need to deploy hundreds of
millions of the machine now working at the Hellisheidi plant.
That’s a scary prospect. CCS might seem expensive now, but direct-air
capture in the second half of the 21st century will cost many multiples
more. The reason is simple physics: CCS happens at the source of
emissions, which typically contain more than 5% carbon dioxide in the
exhaust gas mix. The concentration of CO2 in the air is just 0.04%—100
times more dilute. Far more energy would be required to pull carbon
dioxide straight out of the air, and that means far more money. The
most recent estimates
suggest the cost of direct-air capture could be as high as $600 per
metric ton—nearly 10 times the cost of carbon-capture technologies
today.
That economic hit would hurt a lot more than deploying carbon capture
at large scale today. But even that may not hurt as badly as
uncontrolled climate change. The latest projections show that, as soon
as 2027, the cost of rising temperatures will be $360 billion per year
for the US alone. The damage to the rest of world could be four times as
much.
Prevention is better than cure. And, for our dying planet, either is better than doing nothing.
Links
