The UK is to provide ‘up to £20 billion funding for early deployment of Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS), to help meet the government’s climate commitments.’ Does this make any sense when progress on this new set of technologies has been so slow around the world? Some major projects have been abandoned and a recent study from Oxford University Smith Business School claimed that the economics was not attractive.
What is being talked up is not just carbon capture and storage to allow for continued use of fossil fuel, but also the use of biomass as a feedstock so that the overall process, with carbon storage, is carbon negative. The problem is that there are eco-issues with the use of biomass from forestry products, as well as issues with trying secure carbon storage sites on an indefinite basis- not least the cost.
One way in which the cost might be offset/avoided is to convert some of the captured CO2 into a usable synfuel- that’s the CCUS idea. But the conversion process needs hydrogen, and if you have a source of green hydrogen, then why not use that direct as a zero carbon fuel? Otherwise, if its fossil-derived hydrogen, then you are back to having positive carbon emissions again, made worse when the new synfuel is burnt.
Carbon removal from the atmosphere (so-called Direct Air Capture and Storage) has similar problems- you need energy to run the DACS process and if you go for DACUS you lose some or all of the carbon negativity. You could use a renewable source to run DACS, but it would arguably be more sensible just to use that green source direct. It’s the same for DACUS - unless that is there are some specific commercial end-use benefit from creating a new synfuel that off sets the cost. But otherwise ‘artificial sequestration’ like this seems unattractive.
If you want carbon removal then uses natural sequestration, trees and biomass, left to grow and to store carbon, without combustion. Some countries with large natural carbon sink potentials may see this as attractive, although there are limits to how much can be done this way. And really we should be reducing carbon emission at source, using renewables. Trying to duck out of that with artificial or even natural carbon removal does not sound a wise or viable long term option on a significant scale.
Indeed you could say the same of whole idea of ‘net zero’. Especially if it involves the use of carbon markets to put a value on carbon removal. We just need to head to zero. Carbon markets may play a role in stimulating that, but there is a risk that we can lose sight of the zero goal in complex net carbon accounting. Certainly it can get pretty dubious as evidently has happened with some carbon offsetting activities. In any case, although carbon credit trading may have made some market players rich, given that some countries have been unwilling to accept tight caps on carbon emissions, carbon markets generally haven’t arguably been very effective as a way to push emission down, for example in the EU.
Standing back to look at the various ways to reduce carbon in the air, it does seem rather inelegant to try to capture it from power station exhausts, and even worse trying to extract it from the air post-emission. Despite our profligate emissions, the amount of CO2 in the air is tiny (0.04%), far lower than in fossil fuelled powered station exhausts (up to15% if coal-fired, and 4% if gas-fired), so it would need a lot more energy and processing effort to extract it. Plants can do that for free, but take a lot of space and a long time. That’s fine, as far as it goes, i.e. slowly and with land use and eco-limits. But surely it’s better not to produce the CO2 in the first place- by reducing demand for energy and meeting the reduced demand using renewables?
Some say that it will be hard for us all to do that, and, as an emergency measure, we will have to resort to planet-wide ecosystem/geo-engineering adjustments - for example blocking out solar radiation by injecting aerosol droplets in the sky or even putting huge sunshades in orbit. Wouldn’t it be easier just to (carefully) use the free renewable energy the sun provides in its various forms? As long as we stay within the eco-carrying capacity of the planet.
Some ‘deep greens’ however say there are limits to all green tech, that require us to move away from growth in terms of consumption, and also population, although there are also debates about what de-growth really means, or indeed green growth, with some seeing technology as a solution, some as a dead end. This one will run and run....
Strategically, there are clearly plenty of key questions to explore. Crucially, what is stopping us from pushing renewables harder and faster? Arguable there is some media/agency bias- though hopefully it’s just the last gasp of the fossil and nuclear status quo. Certainly the push for carbon removal I looked at above may be seen as a tragic diversion from renewables. Same for increasingly high cost nuclear power.
What about social change? Most of us think that’s needed, but will even radical lifestyle changes be enough and be better than technical fixes, as some argue? For example, could we really avoid large-scale green techs like offshore wind farms and grid systems to balance them, via a shift to some sort of cosy frugal localism- what some have nicely depicted as ‘hobbit socialism’? Sadly, although big is not always beautiful, and the local use of (probably Chinese made) PV cells can help, not everywhere will be blessed with enough renewable sources around the clock and/or around the year. Local storage can help some places to be partly self-sufficient, but trading power will still be vital in most places. Or are we to destined to bite the nuclear bullet- with lots of (possibly Chinese made) micro/mini nukes supplying local grid power? Plenty to ponder.
I hear that there’s a UK conference being mooted at some point on all this, amongst other things exploring the merits and demerits of what Peter Harper (at Bath University) and Stephen Peake (at the OU) have called ‘emergency technocentrism’. Provocative stuff. Watch this space!
Comments
Post a Comment