While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report to be released this evening is expected to show the need for far greater urgency in efforts to keep the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, and the severity of climate change impacts already being inflicted around the world, fossil-fuel industries will see the report as an opportunity, not a threat.
That’s because the stronger the case for climate action, the more fossil-fuel interests will push for carbon capture and storage (CCS) as requiring massive and urgent investment.
And who would get that investment? Why, fossil-fuel companies.
The outlines of the argument were demonstrated by long-time CCS spruiker and member for multinational coal companies, Joel Fitzgibbon, in an op-ed for The Australian Financial Review at the weekend. “Only by deploying CCS and other low-emission technologies can we hope to achieve our global emissions reduction ambitions,” he wrote.
That echoes the official line from the fossil-fuel-industry funded Global CCS Institute (established by the Rudd government; shamefully the CSIRO remains a member):
Implicit in the IPCC 1.5 SAR, somewhere between 350 and 1200 gigatonnes of CO2 will need to be captured and stored this century. Currently, some 40 megatonnes of CO2 are captured and stored annually. This must increase at least 100-fold by 2050 to meet the scenarios laid out by the IPCC. Clearly, a substantial increase in policy activity and private sector commitment is necessary to facilitate the massive capital investment required to build enough facilities capable of delivering these volumes.
What the spruikers don’t say is that CCS, even in its simplest and most business-as-usual form, doesn’t work. We’ve seen that at the disastrous Gorgon project, where Chevron hasn’t even come remotely close to meeting its commitment to sequester 80% of the CO2 extracted from offshore gas.
The problem for Fitzgibbon, the CCS institute and other spruikers of the CCS scam, is that Gorgon is the dead easy form of CCS, where fossil-fuel companies do something they have to do anyway — extract CO2 from natural gas, because otherwise they can’t liquefy it — and then pump it underground.
The harder form of CCS is extracting CO2 from emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, which is entirely non-viable as a large-scale technology. Just ask Mississippi Power, the fossil-fuel company that threw in the towel — years late and billions over budget — on a CCS system at its new Kemper power plant in 2017. Or NRG Energy, which shut its CCS gas-fired plant Petra Nova in Texas in late June. Or Sask Power, which operates a CCS-based plant in Canada and has fallen spectacularly short of its commitments to sequester carbon.
That won’t stop fossil-fuel companies — now the biggest advocates for CCS — continuing to push it as a workable technology and calling for government subsidies and regulatory free rides to help bring it to fruition — which may never happen, and is highly unlikely to happen in a timeframe that halts runaway climate change. But it provides a double benefit for fossil-fuel companies — taxpayer handouts, and delays in taking serious abatement action because we hope CCS will deliver us in the nick of time.
The more alarming outcomes of the latest IPCC report will simply encourage fossil-fuel companies — and their media cheerleaders — to demand money for a technology that doesn’t work at scale.
To illustrate how poor a policy option CCS would be, compare it with nuclear power. CCS and nuclear power have something in common: they both have a long history of massive delays and colossal cost overruns, so much so that they can only work effectively with some form of government support or guarantee. But nuclear power is at least a proven technology that reliably operates in a number of countries and forms a major power source in countries such as the UK, France, the US and Japan. The case for nuclear power is far more compelling than for CCS.
But both are far more expensive than renewables combined with battery storage, which will generate huge numbers of new jobs and investment. The technological solutions for zero-carbon energy production are available now. They don’t need billion-dollar handouts to fossil-fuel companies to be developed. And anyone claiming they do is scamming you.
CCS is a contrived fraud, earning heaps for crooked lobbying pushers. Nuclear is beyond us and we could only ever be exploited suckers buying from extorting retailers. We have tides, wind, sun, thermal, heaps of potential…so??
ENERGY GIANT CHEVRON has failed to capture and store the carbon emissions it promised to at its Gorgon liquefied gas facility in Western Australia.
“This admission from Chevron highlights once again that carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the fossil fuel sector is an expensive failure,” said the Climate Council’s Senior Researcher, Tim Baxter.
Gorgon’s CCS project is the biggest facility of its kind in the world. It is meant to capture and store four million tonnes of CO2 per year, which is 80 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions found in its reservoir.
“We are still waiting for Chevron to release the full figures, but we know from the company’s own admission that it has failed to meet its five year target,” said Mr Baxter.
“This result is no surprise. After decades of CCS research and billions of dollars of investment, there is little to show for it.
“Over the past decade, the costs of renewable energy like wind and solar have plummeted. Over the same period, CCS has remained extremely expensive. There are still no projects operating anywhere in the world that have delivered CCS on time, on budget, or in the quantities promised.
“CCS is simply an attempt to prolong the life of polluting fossil fuels which are driving climate change. We need to transition away from burning coal, oil and gas and instead power our economy with renewables and storage,” said Mr Baxter.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/carbon-capture-and-storage-failure-chevron-gorgon/
As Bernard rightly says, the Gorgon approach is actually the simple one… using known technology: acid gas removal at the inlet of the LNG plant, Liquefaction and underground injection, water wells to control the pressure. All these things are done in oil & gas plants around the world. But it’s a lot harder than it sounds, proven right here in Australia. Pulling CO2 out of flue gas is literally still at the university research stage.
Indeed, Crikey is a goldmine of information and this article no different.
In 2013 the Abbott government plucked Larry Marshall out of a crowded field of applicants for CSIRO chief executive. He has a physics degree but since the late 1980s has been a venture capitalist in California.
It shows.
After being appointed he told scientists they had a “duty” to be entrepreneurs and start companies, as he’d done. Around the same time he won the Australian Skeptics’ Bent Spoon award for pseudoscience, for speculating that water-divining might have scientific merit.
Independent Australaia: “CSIRO’s exceptional global reputation rests heavily on its non-commercial investigations of space and the atmosphere, ocean and landforms, ecosystems and other attributes of our region. To Australians this work is part of the public good, serving us all.
But a series of politically expedient decisions have put that notion under threat. Clinging to the neoliberal nonsense that market economics has the answer to everything, governments have behaved as if public good research is a burden to be got rid of.
For 25 years CSIRO funding has been cut back. It’s been told to get its money from corporate sources, but in the bizarre world of government finance, any success that it has in doing this is seen as reason for yet more funding cuts.
Once, scientists were put in charge of CSIRO, but no more.
[Larry Marshall] astonished the science world by baldly stating that we no longer need to measure or model climate and that climate data gathering, modelling and other positions would be cut to make way for new teams to work on adaptation solutions.
After thousands of climate scientists from 63 countries signed a letter to Malcolm Turnbull about the threat to critical data gathering and modelling posed by the Marshall plan, early this month a New York Times editorial deplored its impact on “arguably the greatest challenge facing the planet”.
The crazy saga of the great CSIRO sell-off March 2016 Independent Australia
CCS is the “thoughts and prayers” of the owners of the LNP, the fossil fuel and mining industries.
Pie in the sky.
Interestingly we are back where even Hockey refused to go
The head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Kobad Bhavnagri, said new coal was in fact the most expensive form of energy in the future. Trying to make it “clean coal” through carbon capture and storage is prohibitively expensive.
No wonder the coal lobby has already spent $21 million on misleading propaganda and political donations. Bhavnagri said no one in the energy sector was seriously looking at investing in coal. Only the coalminers. The miners are desperately trying to get the government to reverse 20 years of policy, re-enter the energy business and stump up billions that the private sector won’t.
Turnbull said he was technology neutral ….spineless piece of rubbish
The technology is so unlikely that the first Coalition government budget in 2014 gave up on it – Joe Hockey slashed $460 million from carbon capture and storage research.
Never ends.
2013 Coalition came to power on a massive murdoch campaign and a Peta Credlin lie for which she’s received a Queen’s bit of rubbish.
The Coalition immediately made sure there was no Minister for Science first time our nation didn’t have one since the 30s’. Abbott also had instructions from the IPA to privatise the CSIRO
Rodent Howard started the ball rolling.
In February 2006, the Howard Government appointed two coal and energy industry executives – Eileen Doyle and Peter Willcox – to the CSIRO board, leading to accusations that the CSIRO was becoming captured to by fossil fuel industry interests, thus compromising its independence.
Much CSIRO research is now funded by private enterprise, which has raised questions about corporate influence on the CSIRO’s previously independent research.
February 2007 the Canberra Times reported that
“the CSIRO has confirmed coal industry bodies have the power to suppress a new report questioning the cost and efficiency of clean-coal carbon capture technologies because they partly funded the research”.
Until mid-July 2006, Donna Staunton was the Executive Director of Communications for CSIRO and is also a member of the Executive team
Staunton was previously a vice president of Phillip Morris, the chief executive of the Tobacco Institute of Australia, and sat on the board of conservative Australian think tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).
The Liberal Party Associated Entity with charity tax deductible status, had a climate change lies section with the chief scrawler in charge of climate change lies Tim Wilson, who is now an MP. He has been a consistent critic of climate science, arguing that the link between increased greenhouse gas emissions and climate change has not been proven.
As a friend of mine said the question always is “Who benefits?”
The coal and gas lobby get to kick their CCS scam down the road whilst they just keep rolling in the muck they create.
Don’t forget the latest scam run by Morrison. The “valleys of hydrogen” that will make Australia the hydrogen producer of the world. Of course under Morrison’s plan that hydrogen is going to be 90% from fossil fuel with CCS BS to make it “green” (it’s actually called blue hydrogen). It”s now cheaper to get hydrogen from solar via electrolysis than from fossils with CCS and it’s already happening in some parts of Australia.
Rather than give even one more cent of money to the fossil industry that money should be directed to renewable technologies like advances in hydrogen efficiencies.