Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
5/1/2015
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — The solution to battling climate change will be based in science and for that reason the discussion surrounding the issue must be shifted away from the ideological form it has taken and back to a technical platform, former Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal said here this week at the 14th Annual Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Conference. In order for the United States to seriously address climate change, technologies like carbon capture, utilization and storage, which may not look as appealing to those on the political end of the fight, must be embraced, Freudenthal said. “It seems to me that what we’ve turned it into is an ideological issue as opposed to a scientific and technological issue,” Freudenthal said.
Freudenthal said that policy in the United States does not reflect a logical stance on what must be done to address the issue of climate change and what technologies can deliver on national and international climate goals. “The United States in particular is essentially obsessed with a one legged stool on how to manage climate change and carbon,” he said. “That one leg of that stool is to say that we do everything with renewables and we’re essentially going to do away with anything that produces carbon.” This narrow focus on trying to fast-track a move away from fossil fuels neglects important issues such as how to manage, utilize or store carbon, Freudenthal said.
Energy policy which attempts to shift the nation’s energy mix entirely to renewables could result in a potentially disastrous lack of funding and resources for fossil energy-related research, Freudenthal said. “When people say in 10 years or 20 years we can be 100 percent renewables, it’s not mathematically possible. It’s not going to happen. Yet, you hear serious people in serious positions make those kind of projections so I would argue that there has to be some point at which the conversation is engaged and it’s going to require both the scientific and technological community to engage in that conversation.” Freudenthal said, calling on those in the energy technology industry to become more active participants in policy discussion.
Low Oil Prices Working Against CCS Deployment
In the United States, where the use of captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery has been seen as a key factor in offsetting the cost of CO2 capture, low oil prices have slowed the deployment of the technology, Freudenthal said. “People who’ve got a deep wallet are prepared to talk about how much further they can go [with EOR], but they’re really betting on higher prices. At current oil and gas prices you’re going to be hard pressed to make CO2 capture even remotely profitable,” Freudenthal said. “I think that that hope that we all had a few years ago that enhanced oil recovery would serve as sort of the money pot for underwriting a lot of the work on the carbon capture and utilization, I think that in fairness you have to say that at least in the near term, that is not as likely as it used to be.”
