Carbon capture: the hopes, challenges and controversies | FT Film

[Music] is carbon capture a help or a hindrance from my point of view it's a little bit of column and a little bit of column b i don't think at this stage we really have a plan of getting to net zero without some role for carbon capture and storage there is this sense that for some industries like steel and cement it's going to be very difficult for them to get to absolute zero but what should the role of ccs be for the oil and gas sector for example is much harder to agree on long term you really need to change so many things about our system rather than using the same old existing fossil fuel sources of energy and then finding a really expensive solution to how to deal with their emissions we're starting from a place where there's already too much co2 in the atmosphere so you need negative emission technologies to remove that last piece and until we have scale of renewable this is an important element in decarbonising the use of oil and gas in many ways it can be a part of how we address the problem but it can't be a magic cure to climate change [Music] [Music] carbon capture carbon capture pump food carbon capture carbon technology the relatively new miracle of carbon capture and and storage there's a lot of talk about carbon capture right now from companies from governments there's been a lot more investment in this sector we saw the u. s allocate billions of dollars to ccs and give a tax credit to carbon capture and storage projects because the world hasn't reduced emissions 40 billion tons a year it means that the timeline for a tipping point in warming which is regarded as 1. 5 degrees is nearing and governments policymakers businesses are all really scrambling now that means they're turning to most obvious solutions there is some pushback to that though where people say look this is not a silver bullet and the number of ccs facilities that are actually operational is pretty small they don't capture in the grand scheme of things that much carbon in 2021 there's around 40 million tons of co2 captured by existing ccs projects if the world is to be on the right path for net zero that number would need to rise to around 1.

7 billion tons of co2 by around 20 30. so that's a 40x increase in just the next eight years to effectively capture carbon you have to get it from the source and so therefore you need to have the facility where the emission is coming from some of the biggest proponents and investors in ccf projects have been oil and gas companies it is the oil and gas industry which has the capability to actually find the stores for the co2 and to physically store it and most of the oil and gas companies including ecuador have been operating offshore for very many years so those capabilities together uh is is a big element of the ccs norway started with this already in the 1990s they've got a north sea oil and gas platform where they've been pumping co2 into the seabed since 1996. for the slate neural field and and snowy together we have avoided co2 emissions for 25 years of one to two million dollars per year so quite a bit of experience but then in 2007 8 they tried something that the prime minister then jen stoltenberg called norway's moon landing a full-scale carbon capture plant on a new combined heat and power plant on our west coast this has never been done before and we are poised to do it well unfortunately it didn't quite go as well as neil armstrong and they had to abandon it after spending billions and billions of kroner so they've got a lot of experience but it's just it's essentially uneconomical to do at any scale whether it's the the carbon capture scale or it's the transport scale and the storage scale all those are driven to lower economic costs by increasing the size the key question is how we make that economic and how you incentivize companies when it's an expensive process and there's no actual economic driver for them to do that once you capture the carbon what do you do with the carbon in theory in lots of projects you just bury it underground you put it under the sea and that's great but that's not a revenue source but if a use can be found for this co2 a commercial use that would also make the economics a lot more attractive carbon capture and storage is what it says on the tin it's a capture of the carbon and storing it underground then there is its sister which is carbon capture usage and storage dc us is where some of that captured carbon dioxide is actually reused in industries where carbon dioxide is absolutely crucial and where there isn't currently an answer for actually replacing its usage your soda is fizzy because of co2 that is stripped out of these uh industrial plants that can be used in products like fertilizer plastics and things that were really you know important to industry and that's a viable business model that's one that's you know can support itself and sell the co2 to an industrial user we saw last year when a fertilizer plant in the northeast of england was closed down which actually was a big producer carbon dioxide as well there was then sudden panic about a whole range of vital vital industries such as the food processing industry you know how they were going to get the co2 that's desperately needed in those industries but it still is tinkering at the edges it seems to me of a much bigger problem and it is not going to be the answer to the masses of carbon dioxide that are emitted from fossil fuel extraction in the first place or from the burning of other carbon producing fuels enhanced oil recovery has been one of the single biggest uses of captured co2 where you take pressurized co2 and you pump it back into old oil wells to increase the pressure inside the reserve and therefore dislodge the remaining hydrocarbon so ironically in many ways a technology that is used at the moment to try and kind of limit the worst effects of global warming to try and combat climate change was developed in the first place to produce more fossil fuels and that seems quite antithetical to how it's being talked about by governments or by the iea that's not really i think what most people think it should be used for or is being used for the environmental community is arguing that it's counterintuitive you're capturing carbon and then injecting it into a reservoir in order to produce more hydrocarbons and then burn it and create more carbon so what's the point how about don't dig that hydrocarbon up whatsoever don't burn it [Applause] the oil industry argues that enhanced oil recovery has been benefit because they are storing carbon oxy for over 50 years have been really the world's largest handler of co2 20 million tons a year in terms of volume and they argue that they have a unique skill set around ccs where they can really play a leading role in pushing these things forward a particularly interesting example is occidental petroleum which is seeking to use its expertise in that field to capture and store those emissions that are produced by the company's operations and its suppliers but also in theory enough carbon emissions to offset whatever oil was burned by its customers and the emissions that that created 90 of the carbon footprint of the big oil companies comes when their products are burnt so that's really changed the calculus for them and has meant they've had to rethink ccs as a technology and now exploring ways in which to really expand that at scale today we have chosen uh to partner with carbon engineering a great large scale technology for for direct air capture to create a true cost solution and that's the ability to take a million tons per plant directly out of the air we have a plan between 70 and 135 plants by 2035 which we believe is very important to address this problem i think the question is always how much trust do those oil companies have having been at the center of some of the biggest emissions over the last three decades and been at the center of a really contentious effort to push back in some cases against environmental strategies over the past 30 years and i think the worry is that if you overly focus on ccs and if you seem to have this quick fix do you just go first for that rather than changing your processes to make them less energy intensive or carbon intensive [Music] the key problem with carbon capture as many environmentalists see it is that fossil fuel producers can continue to operate as they are operating now and without having to overhaul the way they do things because any emissions that are produced can just be sucked back up environmentalists and climate change experts and scientists actually not to make them all sound like they're tree huggers believe that the first priority should be the reduction of carbon emissions in the atmosphere and i think that's what we need to really get across and what the big oil companies needs to probably understand is that if we don't reduce oil and gas production and consumption then we're not going to hit net zero 2050.

industry and the ia quite quickly and others will say that no matter what fossil fuels are going to be around for for decades to come and ccs could be a really critical way of decarbonizing this other people say we don't actually need that coal and gas full stop we can get to net zero without worrying about the fossil fuels and that side would argue that actually ccs is a bit of a distraction they're worried about cost should the money that's going towards carbon capture and storage actually be used to try and really accelerate even further offshore wind deployment or onshore wind deployment or solar or other clean energy technologies renewable is developed today at scale and we really believe in win but we need much larger scale of renewable and until we have that scale of renewable we would need ccs to bridge that [Music] you're not going to bring down emissions with ccs alone but i think ultimately what we should now recognize is even if we managed to cut emissions to to net zero by 2040 10 years early at that point we'd still have a huge amount of carbon in the atmosphere that we'd want to try and pull out negative emissions technology is any type of system that is reducing the overall co2 in the atmosphere so whether that's direct air capture for example take the co2 out pump it underground or other approaches such as bio energy capture and storage one of the biggest proposals for this is is in the uk at drax we have a publicly stated ambition to have 12 million tons of negative emissions before 2030 8 million of that would be here at drax power station and bex underpins that ambition drax having been once europe's biggest emitter it was a huge coal-fired power station has converted to biomass and it's now developing becks horrible word but basically means bio energy with carbon capture and storage so combining those means in theory it's carbon negative as you've got a neutral baseline and then you've got this thing removing more carbon so it becomes negative in theory if you start with a tree the tree is growing in the forest it absorbs co2 as it grows that co2 is stored in its wood that's turned into a wood pellet which is then burned the co2 is then captured and injected into the ground that whole process has resulted in principle in a net negative cn2 impact we need negative emissions in the uk the net zero 2050 strategy sets out the very clear 5 million ton negative emission number required by 2030 our project is perfectly shaped to fill that ambition you know it's probably the cheapest way you can get to upscale negative emissions with the least amount of work why wouldn't you bex and just uh biomass in general even before we get to vex has been hugely controversial some just think it's colorful carbon accounting at the crux what you have to know is whether the biomass energy that is produced is carbon neutral if you can prove that it is then bex can be a negative emissions technology but if you can't and until you can then we shouldn't put all of this money and time and effort into growing a beck's pipeline you do that on the expectation that it's going to be operational for decades and so doing that locks it into the system for decades one of the really big changes we've seen in the carbon capture space is the emergence of this idea of having hubs as they're usually called here in the u.