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carbon capture and storage
Green Groups Blast 'Reckless, Unscientific' EU Carbon Capture Plans
"Rejecting the influence of the fossil fuel industry and investing in climate action that can actually deliver emissions cuts and steer a just transition from the fossil fuel economy is crucial."
Oct 11, 2024
As attendees gathered in the south of France Thursday for the start of a European Union-hosted summit on carbon capture and storage, an international coalition of green groups warned against funding "reckless, unscientific, and lobbyist-driven" false climate solutions and instead urged investment in "a just transition that prioritizes renewable energy, energy demand reduction, and energy efficiency."
"Today the Industrial Carbon Management Forum (ICMF) kicks off in Pau, France," 43 organizations wrote in a letter to the European Commission. "This forum has been revealed to be dominated by fossil fuel interests to the exclusion of civil society stakeholders and other expert voices with critical views."
The letter points to a report published Thursday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), which concluded that "most of Europe's planned carbon capture and storage (CCS) applications are too expensive to work on a commercial basis and are nowhere near ready to be rolled out."
According to the report, Europe's planned CCS projects will cost an estimated €520 billion ($569 billion), which IEEFA energy finance analyst and report author Andrew Reid said "will force European governments to introduce eye-wateringly high subsidies to prop up a technology that has a history of failure."
The green groups' letter also notes widespread criticism of CCS, which has been panned by Food & Water Watch—whose European branch signed the letter—as a "false climate solution" and a "lifeline for the fossil fuel industry."
The signers wrote that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "has labeled CCS as one of the most costly and least effective emissions reduction methods, and an Oxford study found high-CCS pathways could cost $30 trillion more globally than renewable alternatives," the signers wrote, referring to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The letter continues:
As well as being prohibitively expensive, plans for carbon capture and storage (CCS) at scale face overwhelming technical challenges and the records show 50 years of failure. Even with $83 billion in investment since the '90s, research found that nearly 80% of large-scale projects fail. The industry itself has acknowledged that for all these efforts, only 52 metric tons of carbon dioxide have ever been stored long-term, highlighting the unlikeliness of achieving the E.U.'s stated goal of storing 280 metric tons of CO2 by 2040...
The union has already spent over €3 billion ($3.3 billion) on CCS and hydrogen projects—hydrogen is often paired with CCS to attempt to capture the carbon dioxide emissions released during hydrogen production from fossil fuels in order to label hydrogen a low-carbon fuel. However, this ignores the ineffectiveness of CCS to reduce emissions and the continued use of fossil fuels in the process.
"We cannot afford to give further investments to the fossil fuel industry to gamble with our future and our tax money," the green groups stressed. "Money allotted to CCS would be better spent on the communities and countries that need it most and on ensuring a full and fair phaseout of fossil fuels."
In stark contrast, E.U. Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson said during the opening session of the CCS summit that the 27-nation bloc's climate target plan "underlines that industrial carbon management is not just an alternative, it is a vital complement to renewable energy and energy efficiency."
The letter's signers are calling on E.U. policymakers to:
- Stop wasting money on CCS projects and commit to a full phaseout of fossil fuels;
- Reject the influence of the fossil fuel industry;
- Commit to a full consideration of the scientific and real-world evidence of CCS' failures, limitations, and challenges; and
- Invest instead in real climate, health, and nature solutions that deliver a transition to a clean, healthy, and safe economy.
"The current fossil fuel industry influence on the E.U.'s carbon capture policy undermines the E.U.'s ability to meet its climate goals and responsibilities, and is damaging its reputation and leadership," the groups asserted. "Rejecting the influence of the fossil fuel industry and investing in climate action that can actually deliver emissions cuts and steer a just transition from the fossil fuel economy is crucial if the E.U. is to deliver real solutions for climate, nature, and people."
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Big Oil to Benefit From Biden's Carbon Capture Tax Credits: Report
"Our report clearly lays out the way carbon capture tax credits rig the system in favor of the oil and gas industry to the tune of billions of dollars," one expert said.
Sep 18, 2024
As the U.S. moves to invest in climate solutions, is the money going toward projects that will meaningfully reduce emissions and transition the nation's energy system away from fossil fuels?
A report released Wednesday by worker-owned corporate accountability and environmental justice research organization Empower found that just 34 carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in Texas could receive between $3.2 billion and $33 billion in annual tax subsidies.
At the same time, most of the carbon dioxide pipelines in the state are managed by the major oil and gas companies like Kinder Morgan, Occidental Petroleum, and ExxonMobil that played a disproportionate role in creating the climate crisis in the first place.
"Carbon capture and storage is the most expensive and least effective carbon mitigation solution. It's really not where we need to be investing our money," said Paige Powell, the policy manager at Commission Shift, at a press briefing announcing the new research. "And the public dollars coming from the federal government to fossil fuel companies are our dollars, our taxpayer dollars that could be better spent elsewhere."
"I think it's important for us to ask ourselves, if carbon capture is receiving so much public dollars, why is there little public input?"
For its report, Empower turned up 98 carbon dioxide-related projects in the state of Texas, including 47 pipelines and 13 Class VI Geological Storage projects. These projects are currently primarily funded through tax breaks and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) subsidies; the report authors found little evidence of any private investments.
"Our report clearly lays out the way carbon capture tax credits rig the system in favor of the oil and gas industry to the tune of billions of dollars," Empower's Samuel Rosado said in a statement. "Public funding and tax breaks are the largest sources of revenue for CCS projects. Without the massive federal investment, the private sector deems most CCS projects unprofitable."
The main tax credit for CCS is the 45Q tax credit, which assigns a dollar amount for every metric ton of carbon dioxide captured and permanently stored. While this credit was first created by the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, the Inflation Reduction Act expanded it, raising the credit to $85 per metric ton. At the same time, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act earmarked more than $8 billion for the DOE's CCS programs.
"These are the key bills that were enacted that enabled CCS to be at least more financially available than it previously was," Rosado said in the briefing.
Yet climate and accountability advocates are concerned that the money is being misdirected.
Powell noted that CCS technology had been around for 50 years, but had failed to advance.
"All of these projects have been largely unprofitable, and they haven't expanded the way that renewables and other climate solutions have, primarily because the technology is problematic," Powell said. "It's unsafe, it's fraught with mechanical failures, and not to mention wildly expensive when compared to other climate solutions."
Dominic Chacon of the Texas Campaign for the Environment said that industry boosting of CCS amounted to a form of "greenwashing."
"It is essentially a marketing PR branding ploy to downplay the obvious risks associated with fossil fuels, to try and rebrand this industry as something that we need for the future," Chacon said.
Autumn Hanna, the vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted that there was a history of fraud in past allocation of CCS subsidies.
"A Treasury investigation found that from 2010 to 2019, 90% of tax credit claimants failed to comply with IRS [Internal Revenue Service] and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] requirements," Hanna said in a statement. "Instead of throwing good money after bad, we should focus our limited resources on climate solutions we know are safe and effective."
At the same time, most federal CCS subsidies actually ended up going toward injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells in order to extract even more oil, which is currently the only profitable use of the technology.
"Continuing to funnel these subsidies and tax breaks to the oil companies, which mostly use it to extract more fossil fuels, really weakens its supposed climate benefits," Hanna said in the briefing.
In Texas specifically, there are concerns about the safety of CCS infrastructure and its impact on ecosystems and communities, given the state's weak regulatory culture.
"We need to chart a new course here in Texas and in Washington to incentivize climate solutions that actually work."
"Our state oil and gas regulator, the Railroad Commission of Texas, is reluctant to oversee the industry in a way that protects people and the environment," Powell said.
The Empower report found that 19 CCS projects overlap with at least 24 million acres of water, threatening both coastal and river environments. The report authors also ran into a lack of transparency.
After filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Environmental Protection Agency to access data about CCS projects, they received documents with entire pages redacted on the behest of the companies and with the permission of the EPA.
"This is very dangerous when it comes to corporate accountability and transparency on environmental issues, because entire pages were redacted from FOIA requests and public information requests that are incredibly important for communities and safety in these communities," Rosado said.
The advocates called for greater transparency and accountability around public financing for untested and expensive climate solutions.
"I think it's important for us to ask ourselves, if carbon capture is receiving so much public dollars, why is there little public input?" Chacon asked. "There is no public transparency on this technology."
Hanna called for putting "the breaks on the whole thing until we start to really answer some big questions that are out there instead of just autopilot expansions and extensions that carry huge costs and, again, leave us with these big questions and this lack of transparency and oversight."
Community organizations in the Lone Star State are petitioning the EPA to reject the Texas Railroad Commission's request to have primary oversight over CCS projects in the state.
"Allowing Texas to continue down this path is irresponsible and only serves oil and gas interests. That's why it's critical that the Environmental Protection Agency not hand over regulation of dangerous CCS projects to the Railroad Commission of Texas, which has shown that it's in the pocket of fossil fuel companies, which stand to profit while putting our communities at risk," Powell said in a statement. "We need to chart a new course here in Texas and in Washington to incentivize climate solutions that actually work."
To that end, Commission Shift is also urging concerned residents to comment on new EPA draft permits for CCS projects in the Permian Basin.
"Let them know we need an extension to review the permits and that we really just don't want these here in the Permian, it's not the right place for all these projects," Powell said.
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Leak at First CO2 Injection Site in US Exposes Dangerous Folly of Carbon Capture
"This incident puts an exclamation point on concerns communities across the country have been raising for years about the dangers the CCS industry poses to public safety and drinking water," said one climate group.
Sep 13, 2024
Environmental groups said Friday that a newly reported leak at the first CO2 injection site in the United States highlights the threat—and false promise—of carbon capture and storage efforts, which climate advocates have long criticized as a ploy by the fossil fuel industry to preserve its extractive business model.
E&E Newsreported Friday that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has "issued a violation notice to the operator of the country's first carbon dioxide injection wells for permanent storage, alleging that the company hasn't complied with its federal permit."
The facility operator is Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), an agribusiness giant that has received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for carbon capture and storage (CCS) efforts—with underwhelming results.
E&E News published a three-page notice that the EPA sent to Archer Daniels Midland, alerting the company to a violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act at its CCS injection well in Decatur, Illinois.
The EPA said the company allowed "injection and formation fluids" to move into "unauthorized zones."
A spokesperson for ADM told E&E News that the company in March "detected some corrosion in a section of one of two deep monitoring wells at approximately 5,000 feet and below." According to E&E News, "that corrosion allowed CO2 and formation fluid to migrate into a formation where those liquids weren't permitted to go."
"There are significant risks at every step of the CCS process, and it's not a matter of if carbon sequestration facilities leak, but rather when."
Jim Walsh, policy director for Food & Water Watch, criticized the EPA for its "lack of transparency" surrounding the leak, adding that
"carbon dioxide injection wells are a dangerous endeavor, even if EPA does not capitulate to industry demands to rush permitting."
"This incident puts an exclamation point on concerns communities across the country have been raising for years about the dangers the CCS industry poses to public safety and drinking water," said Walsh. "The reality is this: CCS is a technologically unsound and economically unviable scheme, perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry to allow oil and gas companies to keep on drilling, keep on fracking, and keep on polluting our planet."
The Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition said in a statement Friday that the incident underscores that "there are significant risks at every step of the CCS process, and it's not a matter of if carbon sequestration facilities leak, but rather when."
"This incident demonstrates how important strict CCS regulations are to protect our communities and environment, and is exactly why we passed the CCS Protections Act in Illinois this year," the group said. "There are real concerns from many legislators, community partners, and Illinoisans who rely on public drinking water about the need for even stronger protections, and this incident shows that these concerns need to be taken seriously to ensure Illinoisians are protected to the fullest extent possible."
Concerns about leaks and other harms associated with CCS projects are expected to grow as the U.S. continues promoting them with taxpayer dollars.
"Federal and state regulators are reviewing 69 projects or permits to store CO2 underground, with 24 of those in Louisiana. Nine projects have already been approved while one more, in California, is pending," Inside Climate Newsreported earlier this year. "Companies plan to inject carbon dioxide into porous rock formations that are usually filled with brine containing not only extremely high salt levels but often heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and radioactive elements. Brine leaks, therefore, can be even more worrying than the escape of CO2."
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