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direct air capture
Is Carbon Capture Just Climate Delusion?
Direct air capture and similar technologies come with glossy brochures and lofty promises but we must not be fooled. They are a distraction and a scam orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry.
Jun 05, 2024
A newly opened facility in Iceland that will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been heralded as a hopeful turning point in the urgent fight to stop climate catastrophe. In reality, it is further evidence of a new type of techno-optimism that is not quite old-fashioned climate denial, but something you might call climate delusion.
On its face, the technology known as direct air capture (DAC) seems like a plausible, painless solution to the climate crisis: Giant machines pull greenhouse gasses out of the air, and they are either injected underground or integrated into consumer products.
For years, we have been hearing that a massive breakthrough is just around the corner. The clamor grew much louder when the Climeworks facility in Iceland came online. It is the world’s largest DAC facility—and yet is designed to capture just 36,000 tons of CO2 annually—which is, for the sake of comparison, just one percent of the pollution generated by a single coal power plant. There are much larger DAC plans in the works: Occidental Petroleum is part of a group building a facility in Texas that they claim will capture 500,000 tons of CO2 per year.
Handing out free money to polluters is not only broadly unpopular, it is also terrible public policy. Congress must stop the public funding and support for these climate scams.
And while that theoretical capability sounds impressive, it is still less than 0.01 percent of annual U.S. carbon emissions. And these projections become even less impressive when we consider the track record of carbon removal so far. Another recent Occidental project, the Century carbon capture facility, failed to capture more than a third of its capacity before they liquidated this asset.
There is another more fundamental problem with most of these carbon removal technologies: When the captured carbon is used to squeeze out oil from existing wells (a process known as enhanced oil recovery), is it of any climate benefit at all? There is no doubt that Occidental sees direct air capture as a tool to help it continue extracting fossil fuels; when they are touting ‘net zero oil,’ one cannot escape the conclusion that the goal is to greenwash oil extraction as a climate solution.
Breaking ground on the world's largest DAC facilitywww.youtube.com
To hear proponents of DAC explain it, science tells us this technology is a necessity at this stage in the race to stop climate catastrophe. This is misleading; there is a wide range of modeled pathways for slowing down the rate of global temperature increase, and they do not all rely on carbon removal that have not been shown to work.
Even if DAC was shown to be effective, its costs are astronomical. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the cost range of early-stage DAC plants is $600-$1,000/ton of carbon dioxide; and operating DAC at a meaningful scale would consume an estimated one-sixth of the world’s energy output.
By promoting the adoption of technologies they insist will eventually work as advertised, fossil fuel giants can delay the transition away from fossil fuels.
Instead of viewing techno fixes like DAC as a necessity, many in the scientific community warn that reliance on DAC is a risky move that could “obstruct near-term emissions reduction efforts.” This is exactly what makes DAC and carbon capture so appealing to major polluters: By promoting the adoption of technologies they insist will eventually work as advertised, fossil fuel giants can delay the transition away from fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, U.S. taxpayers are funding these false climate solutions; billions of dollars in subsidies are available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and similarly lucrative corporate tax credits are a major part of the Inflation Reduction Act. There is ample evidence that this is a poor investment. A 2020 Treasury Department Inspector General investigation found that nearly 90 percent of tax credits claimed for carbon capture operations were done so with no accompanying verification that any carbon was actually being captured.
Instead of taking corrective action, Congress massively expanded these tax credits, making this scam even more lucrative than before. To make matters worse, the IRS will not release information about which companies are benefiting from this billion dollar taxpayer-funded boondoggle.
Handing out free money to polluters is not only broadly unpopular, it is also terrible public policy. Congress must stop the public funding and support for these climate scams. Continuing to encourage the expansion of direct air capture will waste precious money and time and perpetuate further harms on communities most affected by fossil fuel pollution.Keep ReadingShow Less
Revolving Door Spins as Ex-Fossil Fuel Regulator Joins Carbon Capture Firm
"This move is intended to make sure policymakers continue to make bad bets on carbon capture ever working," said one critic.
Mar 27, 2024
CarbonCapture Inc. on Wednesday announced the appointment of Neil Chatterjee to its board of directors—sparking fresh criticism of technology to capture and store carbon dioxide, the former U.S. regulator, and the revolving door between government and industry.
Chatterjee was appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Chatterjee served as FERC's chair twice before his term expired in 2021. Prior to joining the commission, he advised U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on energy.
"After greenlighting oil and gas expansion at FERC, Chatterjee is now capitalizing off of attempts to undo those harms," Hannah Story Brown, a senior researcher in climate and governance at the Revolving Door Project, told Common Dreams. "It would have been far less costly to the public interest and the public purse if Chatterjee had helped stanch the flow of carbon pollution into our atmosphere when he was in the position to."
"After greenlighting oil and gas expansion at FERC, Chatterjee is now capitalizing off of attempts to undo those harms."
Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said that "the so-called 'carbon capture' industry relies on billions of dollars in giveaways from the federal government, so it should not be a surprise that a company like this would add a Beltway insider to its board of directors."
CarbonCapture Inc.'s statement on Chatterjee celebrates his "deep ties in Washington and across the industry," saying that "in his time on Capitol Hill and at FERC, he established a reputation as a bipartisan operator who built alliances and cut through red tape."
The company's CEO, Adrian Corless, said that Chatterjee's "deep understanding of the energy landscape in the U.S. and abroad will be incredibly important as we source large amounts of clean energy in the face of grid expansion challenges and bottlenecks."
The firm builds "deeply modular" direct air capture (DAC) machines, which "use solid sorbents that soak up atmospheric CO2 when cooled and release concentrated CO2 when heated," as its website details. "The captured CO2 can then be permanently stored underground or used to make synthetic fuels, low-carbon concrete, carbon black, or other industrial products that require clean CO2."
Stressing the need to "decarbonize the atmosphere as quickly as possible," Chatterjee said Wednesday that "CarbonCapture's groundbreaking, modular direct air capture machines have put our country on the fast track to scale a proven solution at the speed and cost necessary to make a meaningful impact."
Food & Water Watch agrees that the warming world requires swift and sweeping action on planet-heating pollution. Along with advocating for a rapid and just global phaseout of fossil fuels, the group prioritizes "calling foul on fake solutions" to the climate emergency.
"The fossil fuel industries are eager to tout carbon waste sequestration and direct air capture because they bolster the dominance of dirty energy sources like oil and gas," Walsh told Common Dreams. "This is why they are called 'false solutions'—they delay the necessary actions to get off fossil fuels."
Citing an International Energy Agency analyst in an article about the "major hurdles" that remain as DAC ramps up, Yale Environment 360 reported last week that "about three-quarters of all globally captured CO2 (which comes mainly from industrial flue stacks) is currently being used for enhanced oil recovery," which involves injecting CO2 into wells to bury it and extract more oil.
As a pair of Walsh's colleagues detailed for Food & Water Watch's website last year, other issues with DAC include the technology's high energy needs, toxic solvents, and risky storage options.
"Carbon capture has a long history of failure in the real world, but these companies have had great success in securing billions in government handouts."
"Carbon capture has a long history of failure in the real world, but these companies have had great success in securing billions in government handouts," Walsh said. In terms of Chatterjee's appointment, he added that "this move is intended to make sure policymakers continue to make bad bets on carbon capture ever working."
As Story Brown pointed out, "Neil Chatterjee's prototypical spin of the revolving door, moving from pro-industry regulator to regulated industry, comes with added irony."
"As a regulator, he positioned himself as preferring market-based 'solutions' over government mandates, subsidies, and regulations," she explained. "But all that skepticism apparently vanished when he joined the carbon capture business, whose only hope of profitability comes from government subsidies like those in the Inflation Reduction Act."
Corless was among those who welcomed what Timecalled a "bonanza for the carbon capture industry" in the 2022 legislation. Shortly before President Joe Biden signed the bill, the CEO said that "it's going to make it easy for us to raise the capital to build the project earlier and to build it faster."
However, it's not just the government that is bankrolling CarbonCapture Inc. and similar ventures, as Story Brown noted.
"Neil Chatterjee hasn't left the lure of market magic behind," she said. "His firm has pre-sold millions in carbon removal credits so that energy-guzzling firms from Amazon to Aramco can greenwash their operations."
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'Landmark' Carbon Capture Credit Purchase by NextGen Denounced as Total 'Scam'
"Carbon offset markets are widely discredited. Their only benefit lies in enriching the middlemen charged with selling the lie."
Apr 26, 2023
A leading U.S. green group on Wednesday dismissed a major carbon offset deal as a "scam," while underscoring such schemes' inefficacy at reducing emissions.
NextGen—a joint venture between Swiss carbon finance consultancy South Pole and Japan's Mitsubishi Corporation—announced a "landmark" purchase of nearly 200,000 tons of carbon removal credits from three projects. These include a U.S. direct air capture project—a technology that extracts carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere—and a Finnish manufacturer of biochar, a black carbon substance derived from biomass.
NextGen chairman Philip Moss said the deal "provides an opportunity for the oil and gas sector to transition into cleaner activities."
While some scientists argue that CO2 extraction, either via natural or technological means, is needed in order to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, opponents call the technology a "false climate solution."
According to Food & Water Watch:
Carbon offset markets have been repeatedly exposed as fraudulent, ineffective schemes that do little to reduce emissions. Carbon dioxide removal is similarly proven to fail. Direct air capture produces between 2.2-3.5 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions for every ton captured; while an Illinois ethanol carbon capture facility often touted as proof of concept has increased emissions since installing the technology in 2017.
"Carbon offset markets are widely discredited. Their only benefit lies in enriching the middlemen charged with selling the lie—NextGen's scheme is no different," Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said in a statement. "Carbon capture is a costly and ineffective distraction from the real work of transitioning off dirty fossil and biofuels."
"Carbon capture is a costly and ineffective distraction from the real work of transitioning off dirty fossil and biofuels."
Nevertheless, in February, President Joe Biden's Energy Department announced more than $2.5 billion in funding for a pair of major carbon capture and storage projects, which it claims will "significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation and hard-to-abate industrial operations" as part of the "effort critical to addressing the climate crisis and meeting the president's goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050."
Walsh argued that the Biden administration's "foolhardy embrace of failed carbon removal technologies" is "to blame for the latest corporate gold rush to sell the carbon capture scam."
"Bogus carbon capture offsets are no solution to the climate crisis," he added.
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