Carbon capture and storage will be key to the success of the Paris Agreement on climate change, but widespread deployment of the technologies is by no means a done deal, the Global CCS Institute said on Tuesday.
“It’s certainly not inevitable. It’s not a sure thing that carbon capture will take its place alongside wind, solar, nuclear, and energy efficiency in transitioning to a low-carbon economy,” Jeff Erikson, Global CCS Institute general manager for the Americas, said in Washington, D.C., during the rollout of the organization’s Global Status of CCS 2016 report.
Governmental “policy parity” for CCS alongside renewable sources of energy, as well as buy-in from the private sector, will be necessary if the technology is going to succeed, the report says.
While a number of milestones for the technology were reached this year, or are on the horizon, momentum has decreased, the report says. Financing has tightened in crucial regions such as China and Europe, and global carbon capture capacity from large-scale projects appears set to slow drastically from 2017 to 2022, said the institute, a CCS advocacy organization with dozens of members including ExxonMobil; Shell; mining giant BHP Billiton; and the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and other nations.
“Complacency in providing sufficient support for the deployment of CCS will substantially reduce the ability of world economies to limit global emissions to levels consistent with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement,” the Global CCS Institute report says.
More than 100 nations have formally joined the Paris Agreement, which was adopted in December 2015 and entered into force on Nov. 4. Each government made commitments to support the accord’s target of capping global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius, including reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
There are currently 38 large-scale CCS projects operating, being built, or in some form of development globally, the institute said. Total carbon capture capacity worldwide of sites that are operational or being built today is roughly 40 million tons annually. But that must increase to 4 billion tons per year no later than 2040 to meet the 2-degree target, according to the report.
Erikson cited a number of other figures in making his case for carbon capture and storage. For example, the International Energy Agency says 75 percent of primary worldwide energy demand will still come from fossil fuels as of 2040. Erikson acknowledged that some believe the transformation to other energy forms will happen much more quickly. “My response to that is, even if the IEA is wrong by half, we’re talking about 35 to 40 percent of emissions coming from fossil fuels, that’s still just way too much to ignore,” he said.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also determined that the cost of meeting the 2-degree target would spike by 138 percent without CCS, Erikson noted.
There is cause for optimism and worry on the future of CCS as the United States transitions to the presidency of Donald Trump, who has described climate change as a hoax, said speakers at Tuesday’s event. Carbon capture does not have the broad coalition of advocates that have formed around renewable energy sources, and it has received only $20 billion of the $2.5 trillion spent on clean energy since 2006, Erikson said. While President-elect Donald Trump has promised to revive the coal industry, he has not addressed the matter of carbon capture.
But there has been great progress in CCS technology in recent years, and major demonstration projects have proven the systems work and can be scaled to meet the need, said David Mohler, deputy assistant energy secretary for clean coal and carbon management. The focus now must be on cost and value – two concerns that are likely to be of interest to the Trump administration, he said.
Mohler said his DOE team in late 2015 and early 2016 looked at its entire carbon capture research and development portfolio to see what work should be accelerated and what work should be set aside to ensure the best use of available resources.
“We’ve told that story across the DOE, and we’ve also told a lot of it in many different ways on Capitol Hill,” Mohler said. “What I believe is that we have a built-in group of people who understand what these technologies are about, understand why they’re important, … and while there will certainly have to be some political adjustments, they’ll continue that understanding and continue that support.”
Corporate executives understand that limiting climate change is good for their business, Erikson said.
For carbon capture and storage to advance, its proponents need to pick winning technologies, and fast, Mohler said. The focus needs increasingly to be on innovation and utilization, and on securing policy support and working out the economics, he added, expressing confidence that this all can happen: “The future of carbon capture will be sustained.”
The Global CCS Institute report notes a number of recent or upcoming milestones in the technology, including: the launch this month of the world’s first CCS project on a commercial steel plant, in the United Arab Emirates; the upcoming full operations of the Kemper County Energy Facility CCS project in Mississippi and the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project in Texas; and the anticipated 2017 launch of the Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project, offshore of Australia.
