CCS fails.

Our overall policy finding is that the scientific literature does not support the use of public funds to subsidize the commercial development and deployment of ICR, especially those methods that have been shown to emit more CO2 than they sequester, thereby adding to the existing stock of atmospheric CO2. In specific, these methods are (1) any process in which captured CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR); and (2) direct air capture (DAC) when fossil fuel=powered. Furthermore, the current ICR path disregards known risks of chemically intensive, industrial carbon removal, and the adverse side effects and subsurface storage uncertainty at scale.

It is troubling that the biophysical issues of operating ICR at scale are insufficiently addressed or analyzed in the ICR literature. Legislators, too, have neglected to address the biophysical requirements for and consequences of operating ICR at climate-significant scale. As DAC increasingly takes prominence among carbon removal advocates, it is problematic that the issues of DAC energy consumption are short shifted. Scientific and technical papers increasingly acknowledge that fossil fuel-powered DAC is thermodynamically counterproductive, yet these same papers fail to tackle the consequential question of whether renewable energy should be funneled to DAC rather than used to directly supply energy for buildings and transport. Virtually ignored in legislation, and unacknowledged in many reports advocating CCS/CCUS and DAC, are the massive land requirements for DAC operation as well as land requirements (acquisition and occupancy) for pipelines for CO2 transport. Also slighted or ignored in both policymaking and most of the literature are other biophysical costs like the prodigious amount of chemicals needed for direct air capture (DAC) to operate at scale. In addition, one must consider the adverse biophysical impacts of massive CO2 transport and storage operations and infrastructure, including potential fugitive emissions, groundwater contamination, air pollution, and earthquakes. Lastly, both legislation and most of the literature ignore the “wartime level of effort” that would be required to scale-up to a climate-significant level of operation.

Our review of legislation, policy actions, and policy-oriented reports shows that government decisions on carbon removal are largely driven by the question of commercial viability. Public policy decisions are being finance-driven, not science-driven. The market frame is pervasive even though, as many studies show—and almost all acknowledge—no viable market exists for the amount of CO2 that must be removed and sequestered in order to have climate-significant impact. Although clothed in the mantle of the market, studies call for government subsidy. Also illogically, papers advocating CO2 “utilization” frequently employ a partial LCA that ignores emissions from the commercial uses to which captured CO2 is put. The history of government subsidies for renewable energy development is frequently advanced as the rationale for why government should subsidize the private development of industrial carbon removal. Early-stage subsidies built the platform for later-stage market success of solar and wind, and, it is argued, the same should be done for DAC. This argument is faulty. Unlike energy generated from solar or wind, for which there is a market, there is not, and cannot be, a “market” for burying CO2. (The dubiousness of an effective market for “carbon credits” has been widely documented; regardless, that is not the same thing as a market for captured carbon.) Paying the cost of CO2 subsurface storage is a non-market transaction. There is no “customer;” there is only the single payor—government—which pays for the service from the collective resources of the policy (Studenski 1939; Ranson and Stewart 1989; Stretton and Orchard 1994; Sekera 2016).