Carbon capture is a critical decarbonisation strategy in most mitigation pathways, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The International Energy Agency highlights the important role for the technology in achieving net-zero emissions, especially from heavy industry. The European Commission says that carbon capture technologies are “indispensable” to the achievement of climate neutrality.
Yet these conclusions have been arrogantly dismissed by an American NGO that assumes it knows better than the world’s leading scientists on climate change. It condemns the technology in its entirety for uses for which proponents in Europe hardly make a mention. It ignores the roles that CCS can play in curbing global warming for which there are no alternatives.
Oil Change International promotes the use of clean energy and an end to subsidies for fossil fuels. These are goals that have the support of the European Union and must be welcome. But the lack of objectivity and perspective in its ‘Funding Failure’ attack on carbon capture published last month gives environmentalists a bad name.
In a Trump-like distortion of the truth it selectively claims that the IPCC says that carbon capture is one of the most expensive and least effective emission mitigation options available, hiding the reality that the IPCC is strongly supportive of CCS.
It claims that carbon capture projects consistently fail, but in Europe, Norway’s Sleipner and Snohvit projects continue to capture and store some 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually after nearly 30 years in use.
The NGO asserts that capture rates rarely achieve 80 per cent and never the 95 per cent frequently claimed, but with many companies now competing to supply capture plants, we can expect the market to address this issue. Industry emitters paying hundreds of millions of euros for capture equipment will insist that it meets the contracted requirements.
The European Commission, in its recent Communication on Industrial Carbon Management, makes clear that carbon capture is needed to curb emissions released not from energy use but from the production process in hard-to-abate industry sectors like cement. It says that the achievement of net-zero will also require the concentration of CO2 already in the atmosphere to be reduced, which only carbon capture can accomplish. It recognises that captured CO2 can be used in some processes to replace fossil fuels as an industrial feedstock.
None of these critical roles for carbon capture are addressed in Oil Change International’s report. It sees carbon capture solely as a “dangerous distraction”, promoted by fossil fuel companies to perpetuate their activities. It condemns the use of CO2 to secure enhanced oil recovery, which is major in the USA but hardly practised within the EU, and it suggests that carbon capture should be considered merely as greenwash promoted by the oil and gas lobby to divert attention from investment priorities that contradict climate policy needs.
To be clear, CCS Europe also condemns CCS being embraced as a greenwashing tool. Our founding principle is to deploy the technology to curb CO2 emissions from energy-intensive and industrial sources that are all-but impossible to decarbonise by other means. None of our members will disagree with the criticisms voiced by the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Dr Fatih Birol – hardly renowned as a green guru – who pointed out last year that the oil and gas sector was investing only 2.5% of their total capital spending on clean energy. Business as usual for the sector was neither socially nor environmentally acceptable, he insisted.
Subsidies paid for carbon capture development attract the particular condemnation of Oil Change International, with the NGO claiming that the EU has spent $3.6 billion on support for the technology over a period of decades. To which the response must be “is that all?” The sole purpose of carbon capture is to combat climate change, and until the cost of emissions allowances increases considerably above present levels there is no business case to justify investment without public sector support. If carbon capture is truly “indispensable”, and creates huge opportunities for European equipment manufacturers, why has its development not been awarded greater support?
How many times has it been said that fighting climate change requires the use of all the tools we have available? Achieving net-zero cannot be accomplished simply by making extensive use of clean energy. Renewable energy alone will not curb industry’s process emissions or take CO2 out of the atmosphere. Extensive carbon capture deployment is essential, and the simplistic polemic produced by Oil Change International insults the intelligence of everyone who seeks to address the issues in their whole.
If, like us, you're tired of misinformation around CCS becoming the norm, support our call for a dedicated CCS Envoy. Among others, the Envoy will be responsible for raising public awareness on the TRUE impact that CCS can have to make sure climate change does not get the better of us.