A brief Chat about Carbon Capture.

The compelling case for capturing carbon emissions and burying them underground

Livermore, California Over my year of reporting on carbon-capture technology, I made it a habit to ask everyone I interviewed to suggest three others I should talk to next. The strategy yielded many useful leads, but one name got mentioned again and again. Julio Friedmann has worked in the private sector, spending five years at...

From article, (Julio Friedmann [who] has worked in the private sector, spending five years at ExxonMobil; in the research sector, most recently as the chief energy technologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and in the US government, as principal deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Fossil Energy during the Obama years [talks about Carbon Capture.])

From article, (Q: Is the technology ready?

There are plenty of people on the left and on the right that think this technology is not ready for prime time. That’s just hogwash. The first carbon-capture device was built in 1938. So it’s a common myth that needs to be debunked and dispelled. It is a proven, robust technology.

We are injecting [underground] tens of million of tons of CO2 every year by using CCS. We’ve been doing large-scale carbon capture and storage for over 20 years. There are a dozen companies that will sell you a unit with a performance guarantee. It’s not that the technology costs too much, but it’s that you can’t finance it.

Q: Why won’t anyone finance CCS projects?

To get one unit of carbon capture fit on a fossil-fuel power plant, it costs a lot of money. It’s not like wind or solar, where you can build small units. There is a big capital outlay at the front for CCS. So you’re committed to a billion dollars or more. That’s why it’s not something a lot of private investors are willing to take on.

f you went to a bank and you said you wanted to build wind turbines, they’ll lend you money. In 2014, the US Congress approved $44 billion in wind-production tax credits. The bank would say “we know how we’ll get their money back, so we’ll give you the loan.”

CCS needs that kind of policy support to create a market. If there is no market, the investment never comes.

From the US perspective, we now have two bills—one each in the house and in the senate. In both cases, the bills say there will be a performance tax credit for doing CCS. If those bills go through, they will be the biggest and clearest support for CCS. They will provide between $30 and $50 per metric ton of CO2 stored in tax credits. With that kind of pricing, a lot of CCS will get done immediately.

Q: What about geoengineering as a solution? If we don’t reduce emissions now, some experts say there are technologies that we could use to reduce the amount of solar heat the planet traps. That way we can keep global average temperatures from rising.
The goal is to keep global average temperatures below 2°C. And it’s looking like we won’t hit that goal. So, in a way, the Paris agreement has forced the geoengineering question: If we aren’t going to hit our temperature targets by managing emissions, then we have to meet our targets through geoengineering, such as solar-radiation management. It has accelerated the timeline along which policymakers have to think about these technologies. We need to look at questions not just about technologies, but about governance, economics, and social. And we need to do tests.

The fundamental issues around geoengineering have not changed. First, global governance is a mess. Second, the technology keeps getting cheaper and easier, which means someone’s going to try it at some point. I think about geoengineering the way I think about gastric bypass surgery. In an extreme case, it may be necessary. But also, I’m glad doctors did research on it before trying.)

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