Carbon capture is a shitty solution to climate change, but not a false one

The inconvenient truth is that we will miss our climate goals without CCS, even if we advance renewables and electrified alternatives as fast as humanly possible.

Last week, ProPublica published an article highlighting many of the challenges with carbon capture. The article and the resulting social media hubbub left me with a feeling of incredulous frustration, similar to watching your home team spike the football on the one yard line. To the extent that any one piece of journalism can push us closer to a world without climate change, I believe this article does the opposite.

Why I believe this article misses the mark isn’t because I think CCS is great. I don’t. I think it is inelegant, unexciting, and challenging. CCS is capital intensive and always adds cost for consumers; unlike renewables or electrification, its “green premium” never goes away. CCS creates real (albeit readily manageable) environmental, health, and safety risks — above and beyond the existing real (albeit readily manageable) environmental, health, and safety risks already associated with most industrial activity today. Swapping our incumbent emission-intensive energy and industrial processes with renewable and electrified alternatives should always be “Plan A” for climate.

But just because carbon capture is a shitty climate solution doesn’t make it a “false” one. And the preponderance of evidence shows that CCS does, in fact, work just fine at the one and only thing it is designed to do: control CO2 pollution from power and industrial stationary emissions sources. CO2 storage works: 380Mt+ have been stored in a verified way since 1996. CO2 transportation works: 5,000 miles of pipelines have been operating in the US since the 1970s, with a similar safety record to the 100,000+ miles of oil and gas pipelines. CO2 capture works: there are now dozens of operating pilots and a scattering of commercial facilities in power, cement, and other lower-concentration industrial sources.

And in many cases, CCS works where there is no plausible alternative to decarbonization today, particularly in heavy industrial sectors. I am confident that we can find cost-effective replacements to incumbent processes across cement, steel, and petrochemicals within a few decades. But today, I think attempting to shut down these industries or make them prohibitively expensive until replacements come down the cost curve and can compete with CCS as a decarbonization solution is deeply unjust to billions of people that don’t enjoy a standard of living anywhere close to that enjoyed by the wealthiest Global Northerners that populate the most vocal opposition to CCS. We don’t need CCS to perpetuate “sin” industries like cigarettes or gambling, we need it to decarbonize the commodities at the heart of modern society.

I’m not trying to argue that CCS is a “practical” solution to emissions reductions, and renewable and electric alternatives are “impractical.” I’m trying to honestly acknowledge where CCS is the only solution to certain “hard to abate” sectors of the economy. Our choice today in these sectors isn’t CCS or [fill in the blank renewable or electric alternative], it is CCS or continued emissions, likely for decades. Letting these industries continue to emit until alternatives are available is like an adjustable rate mortgage. It might sound like a good deal up front, but we might not be able to afford the newly developed alternatives given our need to focus resources on adaptation and climate damages that could otherwise have been avoided.

I also don’t see evidence today to show that large companies (both energy and industrial) are using CCS as an excuse to keep operating in a climate constrained world. Yes, fossil fuel companies are big fans of corporate welfare when it comes to CCS projects: grants, subsidies, etc. But they are quite consistently opposed to any mandates that make them pay for CCS (see here in the US and here in Europe). Fossil fuel companies just assert that there is no way to control emissions from their processes economically, and that they are essential for society, so we have to let them keep on emitting.

And the reason that we are so woefully behind on industrial sector decarbonization is not because governments are “relying heavily” on CCS as the ProPublica article claims, but because governments are doing practically nothing to support it. Had we passed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the US with its implicit carbon price and massive subsidies for CCS, then we would have been relying heavily on CCS. I think it is crazy to look at today’s lack of GHG emissions regulations and tax credits that are too low to make industrial CCS projects economic and think that we are “relying heavily” on CCS for anything…

And I also think there is no evidence that we have to choose between near-term CCS deployment and incentives for renewable and electric alternatives. We can have both. And having both is often necessary to having any at all, as Sen. Manchin’s support for the Inflation Reduction Act recently showed.

This is why articles like the ProPublica piece are so frustrating: they let fossil fuel companies and governments around the world off the hook by parroting industry talking points about the futility and/or expense of decarbonization.

I think the core of why CCS is such a shitty climate solution is that it reveals, in the starkest possible terms, that there is no free lunch when it comes to climate change. Someone has to pay. If we do nothing until emission-free alternatives are readily available in a few decades, future generations pay through climate damages. If we subsidize CCS, taxpayers pay. If we mandate that industry adopt CCS, it is shareholders and consumers who pay.

Looking at this picture lucidly might not be fun, but it is our responsibility. Without better climate journalism explaining the nuances of CCS more honestly, we risk not having the broader societal conversation needed to figure out how to pay for and regulate CCS in as rapid, safe, and equitable a way as possible, both for present and future generations.