26 BriefingNegative emissions The EconomistDecember 7th 2019
(^2) The fact that oilfields in Texas regularly
use eorhas made the state a popular site
for companies trying out new approaches
to carbon capture. A startup called net
Power has built a new sort of gas-fired pow-
er plant on the outskirts of Houston. Most
such plants burn natural gas in air to heat
water to make steam to drive a turbine. The
netPower plant burns natural gas in pure
oxygen to create a stream of hot CO 2 which
drives the turbine directly—and which, be-
ing pure, needs no further filtering in order
to be used for eor.
Also in Texas, Occidental Petroleum is
developing a plant with Carbon Engineer-
ing, a Canadian firm which seeks to pull
CO 2 straight out of the air, a process called
direct air capture. Because CO 2 is present in
air only at a very low concentration
(0.04%) dacis a very demanding business.
But oil recovered through eorthat uses at-
mospheric CO 2 can earn handsome credits
under California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Stan-
dards cap and trade programme. The
scheme aims to be pumping 500,000
tonnes of CO 2 captured from the air into
Occidental’s nearly depleted wells by 2022.
Not all the CO 2 pumped into the ground
by oil companies is used for eor. Equinor,
formerly Statoil, a Norwegian oil company,
has long pumped CO 2 into a spent field in
the North Sea, both to prove the technology
and to avoid the stiff carbon tax which Nor-
way levies on emissions from the hydro-
carbon industry. As a condition on its lease
to develop the Gorgon natural-gas field off
the coast of Australia, Chevron was re-
quired to strip the CO 2 out of the gas and
store it. The resultant project is, at 4m
tonnes a year, bigger than any other not
used for eor, and the world’s only ccsfacil-
ity that could handle emissions on the
scale of those from Drax.
In Europe, the idea has caught on that
the costs of operating big CO 2 reservoirs
like Gorgon’s will need to be shared be-
tween many carbon sources. This is
prompting a trend towards clusters that
could share the storage infrastructure.
Equinor, Shell and Total, two more oil com-
panies, are proposing to turn ccsinto a ser-
vice industry in Norway. For a fee they will
collect CO 2 from its producers and ship it to
Bergen before pushing it out through a
pipeline to offshore injection points. In
September, Equinor announced that it had
seven potential customers, including Air
Liquide, an industrial gas provider, and
Acelor Mittal, a steelmaker.
Return to sender
Similar projects for filling up the emptied
gasfields of the North Sea are seeking gov-
ernment support in the Netherlands,
where Rotterdam’s port authority is cham-
pioning the idea, and in Britain, where the
main movers are heavy industries in the
north, including Drax.
This is part of what thegccsisays is a
steady increase in projects to capture and
store, or use, CO 2. But the trend needs to be
treated with caution. First and foremost,
global carbon capture is still measured in
the tens of millions of tonnes, not the bil-
lions of tonnes that matter to the climate.
What the Gorgon project stores in a year,
the world emits in an hour.
Second, the public support the sector
has received in the past has often proved
fickle or poorly designed. In 2012, the Brit-
ish government promised £1bn in funding
for ccs, only to pull the plug in 2015. Two
projects which had been competing for the
money, a Scottish one that would have
trapped CO 2 at an existing gas plant and one
in Yorkshire which planned to build a new
coal-fired power station with ccs, were
both scrapped. This history makes the
£800m for ccs that Boris Johnson, the
prime minister, has promised as part of the
current election campaign even less con-
vincing than most such pledges.
But there are some reasons for opti-
mism. In 2008 America enacted a tax cred-
it, 45q, that was to reward the first 75m
tonnes of CO 2 sequestered through ccs.
Unfortunately, not knowing from the out-
set whether a given project would end up
emitting the lucrative 74th-millionth
tonne or the otiose 76th-millionth tonne
tempered investor enthusiasm. Last year
45 qwas amended. Instead of a 75m tonne
cap, there is now a time limit: all projects
that are up and running before January 1st
2024 will be eligible. This has created a
flurry of activity.
The European Union has also recently
announced financial support for ccs, in
the form of a roughly €10bn innovation
fund aimed at ccs, renewables and energy
storage. The first call for projects goes out
in 2020. Christian Holzleitner, head of the
eu’s Directorate-General for Climate Ac-
tion, emphasises that the fund’s purpose is
not to decarbonise fossil-fuel energy, but
rather to focus on ccsdevelopment for the
difficult-to-decarbonise industries such as
steel and cement. With renewables on a
roll, that makes a lot of sense.
Tax breaks, experimental capture
plants, new fangled ways of producing
electricity and talk of infrastructure hubs
amount to an encouraging buzz, but not yet
much more. A ccsindustry capable of pro-
ducing lots of beccsplants remains a long
way off, as does the infrastructure for gath-
ering sustainably sourced biomass for use
in them. Carbon Engineering and its rival
daccompanies, such as Climeworks and
Skytree, remain very expensive ways of get-
ting pure CO 2. If they can find new markets
and push their costs down both by learning
better tricks and through economies of
scale, they may yet be part of the solution.
But for now, it looks like most of the CO 2 be-
ing pumped into the atmosphere will stay
Wood that it were so simple there for a very long time. 7
Minimum
capture
capacity
Tonnes of CO2
per year, m
Under construction
8
1
Operating In development
Source: Global CCS Institute
Few and far between
Large-scale carbon capture, utilisation
and storage facilities, October 2019