It fails – too expensive, failed tech, and does not limit warming.

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.

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 megatons, is being captured for actual geological sequestration.[3] The great majority, as discussed below, is being used to produce more oil.

CCS pilot projects have repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered.

The Petra Nova carbon capture facility installed at a coal-fired power station near Houston in 2017 illustrates the failure of CCS to deliver meaningful emissions reductions and the folly of deploying CCS in service of fossil fuel extraction and use.

During its operation, the carbon capture system captured only 7 percent of the power plant’s total carbon dioxide 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 uneconomic. The CCS operation and the gas plant used to power it have been shut down indefinitely, leaving the coal-fired plant as emission-intensive as ever.[5]

The surest approach to avoiding climate catastrophe does not involve CCS.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or 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 limited 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 “concerns about storage safety and cost”[8] and the “non-negligible 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 International adopted a shared position statement that the largest network of climate organizations worldwide “does not consider currently 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 transitioning the transportation, industry and building sectors to 100 percent clean, renewable energy through rapid electrification and phaseout of fossil fuels, and enhancing 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 operate existing coal and gas facilities in many places.[13]

Similarly, plummeting costs are quickly making battery storage a cheaper option than new gas peaker plants for ensuring grid reliability.[14] The federal Energy Information Administration projects that renewables will account for 71 percent of new U.S. 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 ill-founded economically 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 greenhouse gas 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 summarized above observed, “Coal and gas power plants with integrated carbon capture and storage (CCS) are doubly mispriced (overvalued).”[19] With coal- and gas-fired power 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 construction costs and increase the cost of energy produced (known as levelized cost of energy) by up to 61 percent.[21]

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