Fortune - 04.2020

62 FORTUNE APRIL 2020

among the surest signs that global capitalism

is undergoing a fundamental transformation

to adapt to a warming world. Whether the

metamorphosis will actually check climate

change is, alas, another question.

T

HE PROMISE and the diffi-

culty of large-scale CCS loom in

cement and steel over the out-

skirts of southwest Houston.

The W.A. Parish Generating

Station was the seventh-largest CO 2 emitter

in the U.S. in 2018. It also houses one of the

largest carbon-capture projects in the world.

As I approach Parish on a drizzly winter

morning, I try to wrap my head around the

notion that CCS might anchor a green future.

My first glimpse, from several miles away on

the highway, is of the plant’s four dominant

smokestacks. They tower some 500 feet,

dwarfing anything else on the horizon. When

I reach the entrance, where the red, white,

and blue sign boasts “Pride & Power,” I see a

black pile of coal so massive that two yellow

earth-moving machines crawling atop it,

grunting as they spread the solid fuel, look

from my vantage point like toy trucks. The

coal arrives from Wyoming, typically twice

daily, in trains about 120 cars long.

The carbon-capture project—dubbed

Petra Nova, Latin for “new rock”—starts with

a 15-foot-diameter pipe that sucks, from the

smokestack of one of Parish’s four coal-fired

power-generating units, some of the waste

gas it coughs out. CO 2 constitutes about 13%

of that waste gas, which whooshes through

the pipe and into a 300-foot-tall tower. That

tower is a vertical maze of tubes, inside

which the gas mixes with a chemical, amine,

that grabs the CO 2. As the rest of the gas

heads into the sky, the amine, in another

chemical reaction, releases the CO 2 , which

flows into huge compressors. Pressurized,

the CO 2 enters a pipeline, travels 81 miles

to an oilfield near Vanderbilt, Texas, and

is injected into the earth—with the aim of

helping produce a lot of sellable oil.

The carbon-capture machinery is working

as planned, says NRG, the power producer

that helped launch the project and owns Par-

ish. In 2017 and 2018, Petra Nova’s first two

full years of operation, it captured about 8%

of the approximately 32 million tons of CO 2 that the Parish

plant produced. The rest has risen into the atmosphere. But

that small victory was the objective, Judith Lagano, NRG’s

senior vice president of asset management, tells me during

a tour of the plant: “It’s doing what it was supposed to do.”

Financially, however, Petra Nova, whose $1 billion price

tag was defrayed by $195 million in federal grants, has

underperformed. Global oil prices and the quantity of oil

the CO 2 has wrung from the field near Vanderbilt have

fallen below expectations and triggered $209 million in

“impairment losses” for NRG in 2016 and 2017.

BURYING CLIMATE CHANGE

2

SO FAR, SLOW GOING

In the United States, total energy-related CO 2

emissions were 5.3 billion tons in 2018. But the U.S.

has developed only about 25 million metric tons

of CO 2 -storage capacity, according to a December

2019 study by the National Petroleum Council, a gov-

ernment advisory group, enough to bury less than

one-half of 1% of those emissions.

1

A GROWING SLICE OF THE PIE

Curbing climate change in line with United Nations

goals would require slashing global energy-related

CO 2 emissions, now about 33 billion tons a year, to

below 10 billion tons in 2050. CCS would have to

shoulder about 9% of the carbon-cutting load be-

tween now and 2050, and 28% of cuts in 2050 itself,

according to the International Energy Agency.

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) shows promise as

a weapon against climate change, but the technology has

barely begun to be deployed. Here, some facts to keep the

science in perspective.

4

BIG, DOWN UNDER

CCS began in 2019 at Gorgon, an Australian project

led by Chevron that’s capturing CO 2 from an under-

water natural-gas field and injecting it into a forma-

tion under an island. When ramped up, it will be one

of the world’s biggest CCS projects, injecting up to

4 million metric tons of CO 2 per year.

3

PLENTY OF ROOM

The U.S. has enough room in geologic formations

to store hundreds of years’ worth of emissions from

“stationary” sources like power plants and facto-

ries, according to the National Petroleum Council’s

report. Aging oilfields account for most current

capacity; the greater potential, scientists say, is in

underground formations onshore and offshore that

naturally hold salty water, not oil.

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