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Carbon capture and storage is an old technology, first commercialized in the 1970s. Back then it was called enhanced oil recovery, because the carbon dioxide recovered from oil and gas production was injected into depleted oil and gas reservoirs to re-pressurize them and extract more hydrocarbons.

As the climate change movement gained momentum, the oil and gas industry wisely rebranded enhanced oil recovery as a “climate-friendly” process with a new name: carbon capture utilization and storage. Today, over 70 percent of carbon capture projects are, in fact, enhanced oil recovery projects used to produce more oil and/or gas, resulting in yet more greenhouse gas emissions.

The unproven scalability of CCS technologies and their prohibitive costs mean they cannot play any significant role in the rapid reduction of global emissions necessary to limit warming to 1.5 C. Despite the existence of the technology for decades and billions of dollars in government subsidies to date, deployment of CCS at scale still faces insurmountable challenges of feasibility, effectiveness and expense.

Existing CCS facilities capture less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions.

CCS and CCUS refer to processes that collect or “capture” carbon dioxide generated by high-emitting activities — such as coal- and gas-fired power production or plastics manufacturing — and then transport those captured emissions to sites where they are either used for industrial processes or stored underground.1 2

CCS does not remove carbon from the atmosphere, although it is often erroneously conflated with “CO2 removal” or “negative emission” technology. At best, CCS prevents some emissions caused by the combustion of carbon-based fuels from reaching the atmosphere — provided that the captured gases are not later released.

CCS can increase the water requirements of a power plant by anywhere from 56% to 90%. Together, CO2 and water form carbonic acid, which can leach toxic metals out of rocks. CO2 seeping into water supplies from deep underground has been shown to make water dangerous to drink. Water that has been in contact with CO2 can leach arsenic, uranium, radium, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury and selenium into the water at levels that exceed federal drinking water standards. In short, CO2 seeping into water can make it dangerous to drink for humans and animals.

Ultimately, CCS technology is a false climate solution that simply doesn’t work. It will only make harmful emissions worse, straining the health of overburdened communities and delaying our progress toward meaningful climate progress.

At every stage of the CCS process — from capture to transport to storage — deadly risks abound, according to hundreds of scientists.

CCS equipment to capture CO2 from the smokestack of a power plant requires energy to operate. To produce this energy, the power plant must burn 10% to 40% more fuel than a similar plant without CCS. (Scientists call this the “energy penalty” for using CCS.) Depending on the specific power plant, burning this additional fuel can release even more deadly toxic pollution — sulfur oxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx), arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and ultra-fine particles (PM2.5). These toxicants are associated with many different illnesses, including heart attacks, cancer, asthma, low birth weight, birth defects, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and brain damage in children. As epidemiologist and toxicologist Devra Davis and others have said, “Reductions in burning of fossil fuels can yield powerful, immediate benefits to public health by reducing the adverse effects of local air pollution.” Some toxicants emitted by fossil fuel used for CCS processes, such as benzene, ethylbenzene, and n-hexane, are listed as reproductive or developmental toxicants and carcinogens under Prop 65 and thus are recognized as such by the State of California.

No, CCS does not alleviate harmful air pollutants, and may actually lead to additional emissions at the point of capture. Because of carbon capture’s energy penalty, burning fossil fuels to power the process increases pollutant emissions on site. Moreover, CCS increases the upstream impacts of fossil fuel production and refining in proportion to the additional energy consumed. The use of amine-based chemicals (such as monoethanolamine (MEA)) for CCS can lead to significant releases of ammonia as well. And, because CCS relies on underlying facilities by design, CCS retrofits risk exacerbating pollution and environmental injustice in communities already burdened by existing polluting facilities. This is in part why the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council flagged CCS; carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS); and direct air capture (DAC) as examples of projects that will not benefit a community.

While organizations like the IPCC indicate the need for significant amounts of carbon removal to meet our climate goals, care must be taken to ensure that ramping up DAC does not distract from essential attention and investment in other mitigation measures, especially to reduce fossil fuel use. Scientists indicate we will need both faster emissions reduction and carbon removal, and the amount of carbon removal needed is inversely proportional to how deeply we are able to cut emissions.

Strong policy and private sector guardrails are needed to ensure countries and companies do not over-rely on carbon removal at the expense of emissions reductions. For example, the Science Based Target initiative’s recent net-zero guidance requires companies to meet their climate targets by reducing more than 90% of their own emissions and using carbon removal to compensate for only the remaining 5-10% that they cannot directly mitigate.

We are researchers who study how marine life, chemistry and the climate interact, and after examining the processes by which coastal habitats draw down (and release) planet-warming gases, we’re not convinced. Whether the climate benefits from restoring these habitats – by planting mangrove trees, for example – is far from certain, and there’s a real risk that the scale at which they can mitigate emissions has been massively oversold.

Our new analysis found several reasons why it is extremely difficult to work out a reliable figure for carbon accumulation by coastal ecosystems under current conditions. So we have a very shaky basis for calculating the future carbon offsets that restoration projects might provide over the next 50 to 100 years.

Those promoting the biomass fuel and energy juggernaut suggest that burning wood is “clean energy “and carbon neutral. However, biofuels and biomass energy are not clean, not carbon neutral, and not sustainable.

For instance, the City of Prineville, Oregon, promotes the construction of a 20 MW biomass burner. In their promotional literature, the city says: “The City and County will utilize the PREP to reduce the risk of severe wildfires, reinvent jobs in the natural resources/forest products industries, diversify energy supplies, reduce CO2 emissions, and reinvigorate the community and local economy, all while offering a clean, renewable energy source.”

Thick dust has been filling the air and settling on homes in Debra David’s neighborhood of Hamlet, North Carolina, ever since a wood pellet plant started operating nearby in 2019.

The 64-year-old said the pollution is badly affecting the health of the population, which has already been hit hard by Covid.

Her reaction is in no small part because Gear knows the public health implications of biomass: Wood pellet processing generates dust that travels to nearby homes, carrying hazardous pollutants that can worsen respiratory and other health issues.

Spectrum plans to start operations on two neighboring polluted properties, including the site of a now defunct sawmill called Del-Cook. Once a big employer in town, Del-Cook looms large in the memory of Adel’s Black and Latino communities. Census data shows the population surrounding the site is 77 percent people of color and they live within one mile of the property, which is so riddled with contaminants, it was designated a toxic brownfield. Cancer has already taken a staggering toll on the neighborhood.

At last year's Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don't yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry's optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may permit us to keep climate change below two degrees Celsius. They rely heavily on technologies that don't yet exist, such as ways to store carbon in the ground safely, permanently and affordably.

Stop and think about this for a moment. Science—that is to say, Euro-American science—has long been held as our model for rationality. Scientists frequently accuse those who reject their findings of being irrational. Yet depending on technologies that do not yet exist is irrational, a kind of magical thinking. That is a developmental stage kids are expected to outgrow. Imagine if I said I planned to build a home with materials that had not yet been invented or build a civilization on Mars without first figuring out how to get even one human being there. You'd likely consider me irrational, perhaps delusional. Yet this kind of thinking pervades plans for future decarbonization.

In a much-anticipated report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the world will need to take dramatic and drastic steps to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change.

Featured prominently in the report is a discussion of a range of techniques for removing carbon dioxide from the air, called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies or negative emissions technologies (NETs). The IPCC said (PDF) the world would need to rely significantly on these techniques to avoid increasing Earth’s temperatures above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels.

A synthetic tree could be planted anywhere. A small one could sit like a TV on the lawn to balance out the CO2 emitted by one person or family. But more practically, said Dr Lackner, a device the size of a barn would sit in the open air, near repositories for easy transportation and storage of carbon. He estimated that 250,000 synthetic trees worldwide would be needed to soak up the 22 billion tonnes of CO2 produced annually.

In the fight against climate change, trees are an ally. They suck in carbon dioxide, reducing the harmful greenhouse gases. But there’s a problem: we’re asking them to work overtime.

Trees can’t absorb enough of the carbon dioxide humanity is throwing at them unless we turn every inch of available land into a dense forest, according to Christophe Jospe, chief strategist at Arizona State’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions.

When sunlight strikes the Earth’s atmosphere, around 30% of it is reflected back out to space, and 70% is incorporated into the climate’s energy system. The Earth radiates some of this absorbed heat out to space, but greenhouse gases in the atmosphere prevent it from escaping. Greenhouse gases are necessary to keep the planet warm enough for living things, but very high concentrations are increasing global temperatures beyond the normal range (Figure 1). Although the best way to slow climate change is to reduce greenhouse emissions by switching to clean energy sources like solar, wind, water, and nuclear energy, the CO2 already in the atmosphere can persist and continue to exert warming effects for centuries. Geoengineering, the large-scale modification of Earth’s climate, is worth exploring because countries have been cutting their emissions too slowly to make any near-term impact on climate change.

Giving Earth Some Shade

Enhanced weathering ramps up this process. Pulverising rocks bypasses the slow weathering action, and spreading the resulting powder on large areas of agricultural land makes use of microbes in the soil to speed up the chemical reactions. At the same time, adding minerals to the soil boosts nutrient levels in the soil, providing a benefit for crops. The powder can also be spread directly onto the ocean surface.

One of the by-products of this process is to make water more alkaline, thus enhanced weathering has an additional benefit of partially counteracting ocean acidification.

The world has moved so slowly over the last 40 years to rein in greenhouse gases that scientists are now finding that cutting the use of fossil fuels alone may not be enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The world is on track for increasingly destructive heat waves, floods and storms. That means heat-trapping gases may also need to be pulled out of the atmosphere.

It's known as "carbon dioxide removal." In the latest international climate assessment, scientists found that using it will be "unavoidable" if countries are going to meet their pledges to keep average global temperatures from rising to ever-harmful levels.

On energy issues, as with so much else, Democrats and Republicans seem to disagree about almost everything these days. Republicans support the Keystone XL pipeline and want to end the ban on crude oil exports, positions that most Democrats oppose. Democrats favor long-term extensions of tax incentives for renewable energy and Environmental Protection Agency regulations on greenhouse gases, positions most Republicans oppose.

Yet, amid the bickering, one of America’s most promising and potentially transformative energy technologies remains a policy and political orphan, even as it demonstrates unique energy, economic and emissions benefits.

Although oil and gas production has incompatibility with green and low-carbon development, synergy can be accomplished via technical advancement and scientific innovation. With the rapid development and large-scale application of carbon emission reduction technologies such as CCS and CCUS, the oil and gas industry will certainly be able to move toward a green future of low-carbon, efficient, and sustainable development while ensuring the safe supply of oil and gas.

In the oil and gas industry, CCUS provides more advantages than CCS. In applications, CCUS is a well-established system technology, with three parts: CO2 capture, utilization, and storage.