CCS Fails – cheaper energy sources are preferable.

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.

In practice, however, CCS masks the harmful carbon emissions from the underlying source, enabling that source to continue operating rather than being replaced altogether, while creating additional risks, impacts, and costs associated with the CCS infrastructure itself. More- over, the injection of captured carbon into oil wells to enhance oil recovery — the most pervasive use of CCS today — exacerbates global warming by boosting oil production and prolonging the fossil fuel era.2

Large-Scale CCS is Neither Viable Nor Necessary

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 govern- ment subsidies to date, deployment of CCS at scale still faces insurmountable challenges of feasibility, effective- ness, and expense.

Existing CCS facilities capture less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions. The 28 CCS facilities currently operating globally have a capacity to capture only 0.1 percent of fossil fuel emissions, or 37 megatons of CO2 annually. Of that capacity, just 19 percent, or 7 mega- tons, is being captured for actual geological sequestra- tion.3 The vast majority, as discussed ahead, is being used to produce more oil.

During its operation, the CCS system only captured 7 percent of the power plant’s total CO emissions, well below the company’s promises to reduce CO2 emissions by 90 percent.4 The captured carbon from Petra Nova had been used for enhanced oil recovery, but the 2020 collapse in oil price and demand rendered this uneco- nomic. The CCS operation and the gas plant used to power it have been shut down indefinitely, leaving the coal-fired plant as emissions-intensive as ever.5

The surest approach to avoiding climate catastrophe does not involve CCS. According to the Intergovern- mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the emissions reduction pathway with the best chance of keeping warming at or below 1.5°C makes limited to no use of engineered carbon capture technologies. This pathway involves a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels along with limit- ed carbon removal by natural sources such as reforestation and enhanced soil carbon uptake.6 The IPCC points to “uncertainty in the future deployment of CCS,”7 and cautions against reliance on the technology, given “con- cerns about storage safety and cost”8 and the “non-neg- ligible risk of carbon dioxide leakage from geological storage and the carbon dioxide transport infrastructure.”9

In January 2021, the 1,500 member-organizations of Climate Action Network (CAN) International adopted a shared position statement that the largest network of climate organizations worldwide “does not consider cur- rently envisioned CCS applications as proven sustainable climate solutions.” The organizations warned that CCS “risks distracting from the need to take concerted action across multiple sectors in the near-term to dramatically reduce emissions.” Accordingly, CAN urged that

“[a]ll government subsidies, loans, grants, tax credit, incentives, and financial support for fossil fuels and technologies that use or otherwise support the continued use of fossil fuels, including CCS, should be phased out as soon as possible.”10

A 1.5°C pathway is possible without CCS. By transi- tioning the transportation, industry, and building sectors to 100 percent clean, renewable energy through rapid electrification and phase out of fossil fuels, and enhanc- ing natural carbon sequestration through improved land management and restoration, it is possible to keep warming at or below 1.5° C without CCS.11

Clean energy is also cheaper energy. Plummeting renewable energy costs are rapidly making electrification with clean sources like solar and wind less expensive than producing power with fossil fuels.12 A 2020 analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that solar and wind are already the cheapest energy sources for two- thirds of the world’s population. Rapidly declining costs make renewable energy cheaper than continuing to oper- ate existing coal and gas facilities in many places.13

Similarly, plummeting costs are quickly making battery storage a cheaper option for ensuring grid reliability than new gas peaker plants.14 The US Energy Information Ad- ministration (EIA) projects that renewables will account for 71 percent of new US electricity generating capacity in 2021.15

The failure to account for the energy transition’s market and technological disruptions to coal- and gas-fired power plants means not only that they are outcompeted by alternatives and systematically overvalued,16 but also that “the overwhelming majority of these conventional facilities will become financially unviable and their assets stranded over the next decade or so.”17 Tacking CCS onto these soon-to-be stranded power plants is as eco- nomically ill-founded as it is environmentally unsound.

From a purely economic perspective, CCS does not make sense. Economists and energy analysts note that CCS projects are “prohibitively expensive compared

to other GHG emissions mitigation options, such as renewable energy and energy storage technologies.”18 Adding CCS onto a fossil-fueled power plant inevitably makes operating the underlying source more expensive. As the authors of the energy transition study summa- rized above observed, “Coal and gas power plants with integrated carbon capture and storage (CCS) are doubly mispriced (overvalued).”19 With coal- and gas-fired pow- er stations already becoming more costly than renewable alternatives, adding CCS simply makes them even less economic and even less necessary.

A recent assessment of the economic viability of using CCS with gas-fired power plants demonstrates this reality, noting that mature carbon capture technologies are poorly suited to gas and pose an even larger energy penalty for fossil gas than for coal.20 For a new-build gas-fired plant, CCS could more than double the con- struction costs and increase the cost of energy produced (known as levelized cost of energy) by up to 61 per- cent.21

As a result, CCS is not economic for gas-fired power plants even when it takes full advantage of existing fed- eral subsidies, as discussed below, and when the captured carbon is used to produce more oil.22 The authors of the study proposed a solution of injecting even more federal funding into CCS.

The simpler, surer, and cheaper solution is to end this and similar subsidies for the fossil fuel economy and invest the savings in accelerating the transition to clean energy.