KEYFACT Energy
Dave Waters, Director & Geoscience Consultant, Paetoro Consulting UK Ltd
Likely, locally, in specific contexts, it can do some helpful stuff for a certain lifespan, but is it an ongoing answer, at scale, to the world's CO2 woes? Hard questions need to be asked of existing projects, as Michael does here, not mincing his words...
Can new approaches, new places, be deployed to help more? Perhaps, but they always need to be ground-truthed against the performance of existing projects - not what they capture, but what they don't, and the scale of the world's ongoing man-made CO2 production. The atmosphere doesn't care what is stored, it reacts to what isn't - that is the key metric of importance for any CCS project. Neither is there an unlimited supply of economic sites. Just like oil and gas, the best ones are used first and after that the harder ones become more expensive. Maybe some tech. streamlining and learning curves will help costs with time, but that's a limited playing field given the long history of offshore & onshore drilling, and CO2 handling.
The expense is significant. Is it cheapest to do CCS or cheapest to access (or conserve) energy in different ways that don't need it? How often is the answer to that question yes-CCS, really, where there isn't associated secondary oil/gas recovery to boost profit? That just makes it a net emitter. Sometimes there might not be viable alternatives to HC combustion, or hydrogen & CCS - but how often, really? These are questions that routinely need to be asked.
Technically achievable CO2 repositories in the subsurface are one thing, but they remain academic if it is cheaper to go other routes that don't make it in the first place.
The time for qualitative arguments about nice concepts long passed, and now it has to be quantitative. Not everything helps to the same degree in a given place and the wallet is only so full. Winners need to be chosen, dubious merit money sinks avoided. Can it help sometimes, worth checking out. But just at what scale, calls for realism and hard questioning.
Whatever the answer, burn and bury for hydrocarbons remains a philosophically unsatisfactory long term solution for a limited supply commodity that can potentially be recycled if used in other ways than one-use combustion. Eventually we are going to need to find other routes.
If CCS becomes an excuse for new-build projects and releasing more emissions, whatever proportion is captured, it fails in its primary objective. If sites exist and it can work economically in a basin to alleviate existing emissions, then let's understand it and use it - that may well help our transitioning - which will take time. But let's not harbour false ambitions about what it can ultimately achieve at global scale.