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]]>We posed the five questions appearing below and attempted to answer most of them in Part 2.
In Part 3, we will endeavour to deal with the remaining issues not covered in the previous two segments and ask two additional questions:
For question 4 above, and these last two questions, the current answer for all is no. The global commitment, the technology and economic conditions are running counter to the execution of what we need to address global warming effectively.
If you are currently working in the fossil fuel industry, the latest Middle East conflict points to the critical value of the job you do and the products you produce for the global economy. Here in the third decade of the 21st century, the planet runs on your products, even though competition from renewable energy is rapidly on the rise.
Why is that? Modern economies are driven by growth. Developing Nations want what Developed Nations already have. That means the demand for more energy is accelerating. For fossil fuel companies, this “put the pedal to the metal mindset” is music to their ears. So, more oil and natural gas are needed. More coal is needed. More coal and gas-fired power plants are needed.
The Strait of Hormuz closing has produced a windfall for fossil fuel companies as geopolitics are raising the price for oil and natural gas. The closing has put a major chokepoint in place from which approximately a quarter of oil and natural gas is exported to world markets.
At the same time, national governments, climatologists and environmentalists are pointing to the growing global warming and ocean acidification crises. In an article I read this week, it stated that the first tipping point from burning fossil fuels has already been passed, describing the bleaching of 80% of warm-water coral reefs this year. Add to this the current predictions of a Pacific Ocean super El Niño this summer and 2026 being the warmest year on record. For Earth’s natural systems, it appears that global economic growth is turning into a disease unless we change how we grow.
Growth and prosperity are noble aspirations, but unless both can be achieved with environmental sustainability front and centre, they will lead to foreseeable, destructive consequences.
For fossil fuel providers, they envision carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as their future “get-out-of-jail” card. With it, they can continue to seek oil and natural gas and supply it to the world. Maybe the coal can go, but liquid fossil fuels will still power the planet.
This presupposes that CCS can absorb the greenhouse gas (GHG) fossil fuel industries produce, and create a net-zero, or even a negative-zero emissions future.
In December 2024, I wrote a blog post on global CCS capacity. That year, CCS capacity was 51 million tons, up 2 million from 2023. Total capacity projections showed growth to 435 million tons by 2030. At the time, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was advocating in its latest report for CCS levels to hit 900 million tons.
The 2025 Global Status of CCS Report, described as the flagship site for the technology, indicates 77 projects operating. That’s a 54% increase over 2024, with 47 under construction, 610 in development and 106 projects in the pipeline. Total CCS projects operational or in development have reached 734, up 17% over the previous year.
How much CO₂ capture capacity is now in place? Currently, CCS projects can capture 64 million tons. Based on projects in the pipeline, capture capacity will reach 337 million tons by 2030.
The above numbers sound encouraging until you account for the annual GHG emissions produced. Data from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) show current annual emissions between 37 and 42 billion tons of CO₂ or equivalent GHGs (methane and nitrous oxide).
Fossil fuel combustion is responsible for 89 to 90% of the total. That number stands at a record high and is not expected to go down soon. In fact, it’s going the other way with projections pointing to 50 to 56 billion tons of CO₂ or equivalent GHGs by 2030, still with most coming from fossil fuels.
The scale of CCS technology buildout is well beyond the current pace of project development as described above. What we would need is over 80,000 CCS working sites, each capturing 625,000 tons annually. The current average capacity of the 77 operational sites averages 649,350 tons. So the slightly smaller capacity fits with current CCS operations. Based on the current average cost per CCS project, the industry and government would need to invest between US$ 18 and 23 trillion to make this a reality.
The last question we asked was whether the conditions were favourable for carbon capture and removal today. With that comes the question of whether market mechanisms can facilitate the rapid deployment of CCS globally?
Clearly, based on rising temperatures, sea levels, and ocean acidification, the environmental conditions favour CCS. But does the market?
Attempts to price carbon have shown signs of life recently, even though a major player, Canada, has ended consumer pricing for CO₂.
Carbon pricing coverage around the planet continues to be patchy and widely variable. Current effective pricing comes from Europe: Sweden at €116 price per ton of CO₂, and the European Union at €100.
Elsewhere, however, market pricing is widely variable while low. For example, Mexico’s price is US$ 3, and China’s is $12 per ton of CO₂.
Current CCS operating projects put the needed price per ton of CO₂ at $290. As more sites are built, they will need pricing at $60 to $110 per ton of CO₂ or GHG equivalents. This price reflects the expected declining costs per project as CCS technologies scale up.
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]]>From an environmentalist perspective, there is significant pushback and skepticism. Environmentalists see CCS as a means by which industrial polluters get to continue to pump greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. They see CCS as an industry strategy rather than a climate solution, a delaying tactic to postpone the low-carbon economic transition. They point out the cost of existing CCS projects, the delays in implementation, and the amounts of captured carbon to date as being negligible compared to what gets pumped into the air every day.
What is the public stance? Younger people fascinated with technological progress are interested in seeing if CCS works. Low-income groups hope it will work because they are the most impacted by rising global atmospheric temperatures. City dwellers are also in the hopeful group for the same reasons.
The older the age group, the greater the opposition to CCS, with women more skeptical than men because of potential health risks. Farmers and rural populations are skeptical for other reasons, pointing to a likelihood that a CCS facility ends up being built in their backyard. Indigenous groups see CCS as endangering the environment and as an unproven technology that will cause more harm than good.
On the political side, if you are right of centre, you are probably more CCS-friendly. If you are left of centre, you are opposed. Betwixt and between is a muddle of confusion with some pro and some against.
In the past few weeks, all kinds of CCS-related news have appeared in the press.
CCS has been promoted by the fossil fuel industry as a way for life to continue as normal, giving us the means to have our cake and eat it too. The industry reality is that the current capacity and scale to grow it, despite billions of dollars already invested, are unable to get us even close to where we need to be to mitigate climate change. That’s why converting to low-emitting energy solutions and industrial processes is critical. The fossil fuel industry is greenwashing the public and the governments it seeks funding from for CCS project subsidies, grants, carbon credits and loans with its current propaganda.
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]]>Why then go to all this expense and trouble? Researchers from the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Stanford School of Engineering decided to test the efficacy of building and running carbon capture projects.
In their study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology this month, the authors question large-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as good investments, describing them as far more expensive and environmentally harmful than if governments and businesses invested in renewable and zero-emission energy sources for electricity, manufacturing, heating and cooling.
The research shows that renewable and zero-emission technologies cost a fraction of what would be expended by investments in CCS projects, whether direct air capture (DAC) or emissions captured at the source from smokestacks and manufacturing sites.
The research concludes that when a choice is between CCS technology back-ending fossil-fuel power generation versus building new renewables, including wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric power, the latter represents a better bang for the buck. Mark Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, states the following:
“If you spend $1 on carbon capture instead of on wind, water, and solar, you are increasing CO2, air pollution, energy requirements, energy costs, pipelines, and total social costs.”
As well, the study concludes it is a poor use of renewable energy technology to power CCS projects to continue to support the fossil fuel industry, preventing its demise.
Jacobson is the lead author of the study comparing annual energy costs, emissions, public health impacts and social costs in 149 countries over 25 years, between all-in-renewables and fossil fuels with CCS.
Running the numbers for the above two shows that countries eliminating fossil fuels and transitioning to renewable energy by 2050 reduce their energy demand by 54.4%, with energy costs declining by nearly 60%. In addition, eliminating fossil fuels leads to 5 million fewer deaths and 100 million fewer suffering from diseases attributed to carbon pollution. In sum, eliminating combustion, the source of pollution from fossil fuels, would reduce combined annual energy, health, and climate costs for countries deploying an all-in-renewables strategy by 91.8%.
Jacobson notes that there is no upside to continuing to burn fossil fuels to produce energy because even the most efficient method of removing CO2 from the air cannot eliminate the inefficiencies and damage caused by using coal, oil, and natural gas to produce energy. He concludes that, “It’s much cheaper and more efficient just to replace the fossil source with electricity or heat provided by a renewable source.”
So, as much as CCS and DAC are touted as environmental saviours in the fight to mitigate climate change, only eliminating combustion will remove the threat of global warming. What large-scale CCS and DAC do is help keep fossil fuel companies in business and their shareholders happy while the planet and humanity are victimized.
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]]>The post More Energy Headlines – Decarbonized Oil, New Distillation Materials, Natural Hydrogen, And Advances In CO2 Removal appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>Canada’s new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has included in the government’s goals the development of “decarbonized oil” projects. In previous roles, Carney has been an active environmentalist and has led business initiatives to address climate change. He was the United Nations’ climate change ambassador. That’s why the reference to decarbonized oil doesn’t sound genuine. It comes across as more of a marketing slogan and a gesture to Canada’s fossil fuel producers.
What does Carney mean? His decarbonized oil projects implement carbon reduction technologies during extraction, processing and transportation. In a news conference, Carney pointed to the example of the Pathways Alliance project. I have written several articles about Pathways and have watched how the oil sands operators talk the talk but seldom walk the walk.
Pathways is a proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) network of pipelines intended to remove tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from oil sands producers. The captured CO2 is to be transported to safe underground sites hundreds of kilometres away for permanent safe storage.
The members of Pathways believe, if the project is built, they would have the license to continue to grow their oil sands projects while they sequester the CO2. The International Energy Agency (IEA) disputes this claim, stating it is incompatible with mitigating climate change and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.
Commenting on Carney’s decarbonized oil remarks, University of British Columbia climate scientist Simon Donner, co-chair of the federal Net Zero Advisory Body, stated, “There is no such thing as decarbonized oil and gas. Oil contains carbon. It is high school chemistry. The government is going to embarrass itself by using such industry and marketing speak.”
There are ways to lower the carbon intensity for each barrel of heavy oil produced from oil sands bitumen. Carbon intensity reduction, however, is not decarbonized oil.
Carney aspires for Canada to be an energy superpower that will produce both conventional and renewable forms of energy, but decarbonized oil, as he describes it, is anything but a climate change mitigation solution.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) note that turning crude oil into gasoline, diesel and heating oil produces 6% of all global carbon emissions. That is because distilling crude, current methods require heat generated from burning fossil fuels.
MIT researchers have been looking at new technologies to lower emissions from oil refining operations. They have developed a membrane that efficiently separates the molecular components of crude without needing to heat it. The researchers claim this reduces the amount of energy needed for distillation by 90%.
Their discovery of a microporous polyimine membrane appears in the May 22, 2025, edition of the journal Science. The membrane is a modified version of one used in water desalination plants. It can be mass-produced.
Referring to the method for creating the membrane, Tae Hoon Lee, in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, and the lead author of the paper state, “The main advantage of interfacial polymerization is it’s already a well-established method to prepare membranes for water purification, so you can imagine just adopting these chemistries into existing scale of manufacturing lines.”
Finding natural hydrogen here on Earth has always been problematic. That’s because hydrogen is the lightest element in the periodic table and tends to bind with other elements.
On Earth, hydrogen binds with oxygen to make water (H2O). It also binds with carbon to form methane (CH4) and other hydrocarbons. It binds with nitrogen to make ammonia (NH3), with sulphur to make hydrogen sulphide (H2S), with chlorine to make hydrogen chloride (HCL), with fluorine to make hydrogen fluoride (HF), and it combines with metals such as Sodium (NaH), and Lithium (LiAIH4) to make metal hydrides.
Today, besides being a clean fuel, hydrogen is used to produce fertilizer and is seen as an alternative fuel for clean manufacturing and transportation in pursuit of a net-zero future. The problem is sourcing the gas. Most hydrogen is produced in fossil fuel distillation processes or by electrolyzers. The former produces gray hydrogen, which produces carbon emissions. The latter splits water to make green hydrogen if the electricity is sourced from renewables.
The latest discovery by scientists from Oxford University, Durham University and the University of Toronto provides a very different hydrogen source. It is in underground rock formations where natural hydrogen reservoirs accumulate. The discovery is described in the May 13, 2025, issue of the journal Nature Reviews: Earth & Environment.
How did the natural hydrogen reserves form? Earth’s Archaean crust developed between 4 and 2.5 billion years ago. Within both the continental and oceanic crusts, hydrogen has been accumulating from chemical interactions with minerals and water. How much? The researchers believe these natural hydrogen reservoirs contain enough of the gas to meet Earth’s energy needs for the next 170,000 years. That should be enough to keep the machinery going and the lights on without adding an ounce of carbon emissions to the atmosphere and ocean.
It seems MIT’s dabbling with membranes isn’t just yielding breakthroughs for crude oil distillation processes. A nanofiltration membrane developed at the school is making carbon capture six times more efficient and 20% less expensive using commercially available materials.
Today, CO2 capture applies several different methods:
DAC methods use solid or solution adsorbents to capture CO2. DAC’s cost per ton of captured CO2 currently is US$ 600. The new nanofiltration membrane brings that down to $450. The membrane isn’t limited to DAC. It can be used with point source capture as well and is non-toxic.
Kripa Varanasi, a professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and one of four who wrote the paper appearing in the May 20, 2025, edition of ACS Energy Letters, notes that the nanofilter can be further fine-tuned to bring the cost per captured ton to $200. At that price, it would make most carbon capture processes economically viable, particularly since industries are buying carbon credits exceeding $500 per ton today.
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]]>The COP30 meeting is in Belém, Brazil, where the purpose of the annual gathering will be restored to finding ways to reduce our global carbon footprint through technology, innovation and changing behaviour.
Missing in action at COP39 will be the United States under Donald Trump’s anti-climate and anti-science administration.
Also missing hopefully, will be most of the fossil fuel lobbyists who diminished COP29. To stop undue influence from the fossil fuel industry, COP30 has put new conflict-of-interest policies in place.
We have known for more than a century how chemistry influences climate determined by amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), water vapour (H2O), nitrous oxides (NO) and other greenhouse gasses (GHGs) in the atmosphere. The energy production that accompanied the mid-19th century Industrial Revolution introduced human-made GHGs into the mix, first in small increments, but later increasing in volume and at an accelerated rate. The atmosphere has responded by retaining more heat and is now contributing some of that to the global ocean. The seeds of the Industrial Revolution have spread to flourish on every continent except Antarctica. The unintended consequences of this spread are dire for our species and other life on Earth.
We began paying attention to the warming trend in the last few decades of the 20th century. Measures to contain the worst industrial emissions were enacted. We began to phase out the burning of the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, in Global North countries. Burning coal in the Global South was the cheapest way to produce energy for emerging economies.
The environmental movement eventually caught on but enthusiasm for personal sacrifice was not picked up by the majority. In the absence of winning the hearts and minds of the majority through implementing market mechanisms such as pricing and carbon credits, our ability to stop global warming has failed.
Since changing lifestyles and the sacrifices entailed are not happening today, we seek inventions and technologies to find climate change solutions. Technology comes with a price.
Rapid decarbonization is the purpose of the burgeoning carbon capture industry. Companies are looking at how to remove mainly CO2 from the air and water. The companies want to make it profitable. A new industry has been born, an offshoot of the energy and manufacturing industries. It is called Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS).
The Global CCS Institute (GCCSI) is a self-described international think tank and lobbyist for CCS. It has been at past COP meetings and will certainly be present at COP30.
Who does the GCCSI represent? To read the latest GCCSI report, access this link.
Currently, 74 CCS companies are developing or operating technologies to capture, transport and store CO2. Among them are fossil fuel and energy industry subsidiaries, power plant operators, and primary manufacturers of products like steel, aluminum and cement. The majority of deployed CCS technologies are add-ons to existing manufacturing plants. Other CCS operations include standalones that capture CO2 from ambient air.
What do CCS companies do with captured CO2? Some turn it into a feedstock for other industrial purposes. Some transport it by rail, truck or pipeline to be pumped into depleted oil and gas reservoirs or to be permanently stored in geologically stable underground rock formations like the Wallula Basalt Pilot Project in the state of Washington.
None of these CCS solutions comes cheap. Multiple millions of dollars have been invested. The result is that every ton of captured CO2 has a big price tag.
To invent cheaper solutions, universities are coming to the rescue, where academics are looking to mimic natural processes and use commonly found materials that have high adsorbent CO2 properties.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in 2015 developed a low-cost, energy-efficient CO2 capture technology using baking-soda-containing microcapsules injected into flue gas to adsorb the gas molecules. Currently, a UK company, CDRMax, is mimicking the Lawrence Livermore research by using a patented solvent containing sodium bicarbonate to capture CO2 from the flue gasses emitted by manufacturing and thermal power plants.
More recently, Stanford University chemists have developed a method to pull CO2 from the air using common minerals, water and heat. The journal Nature, in February 2025, published an article describing their discovery involving common silicate minerals and water to capture CO2 while producing bicarbonate and solid carbonate minerals. This method is a sped-up version of natural weathering processes. The lead author of the Nature article, Matthew Kanan, Professor of Chemistry at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, told the Stanford Report:
“The Earth has an inexhaustible supply of minerals that are capable of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but they just don’t react fast enough on their own to counteract human greenhouse gas emissions. Our work solves this problem in a way that we think is uniquely scalable.”
Kanan’s team has drawn on techniques used by the cement industry to invent their CCS solution, which requires less than half the energy of current direct air capture (DAC) technologies to sequester CO2. In a quick test of the method, the researchers exposed calcium silicate and magnesium oxide to water and CO2 and, in two hours, produced carbonate minerals with the CO2 sequestered and locked inside.
A similar accelerated weathering approach has been taken by a team at Ben Gurion University in Israel, led by Avner Gross, a PhD. They call their material “magic dust.” It is a natural mixture of volcanic ash and desert dust that can serve multiple purposes.
Magic dust captures CO2 through accelerated mineral weathering. It also captures CO2 when used as plant feed. How so? When dusted on seaweed, it accelerates growth and when the seaweed dies and sinks to the sea bed the CO2 within it is sequestered. When fed to crops it enhances growth while sequestering CO2 in the soil.
Magic dust is nanoparticle in size and has a porous structure to give it a high CO2 adsorptive capacity. It is non-toxic, low-cost and easy to produce, and as described above, very versatile.
Other uses include combining it with building materials to make them CO2 adsorptive, or adding it to industrial processes with similar sequestering results. Magic dust can capture CO2 molecules to turn the gas into solid carbonates. It can be added to existing DAC systems to enhance their CO2 capture capacity.
These are promising academic results that are much needed if we hope to achieve net-zero and negative-zero for CO2 emissions by the end of the 21st century.
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]]>In 2024, CCS’s global capacity reached 51 million, an increase of 2 million tons from 2023. From approval to construction CCS projects can take a half decade or more. What are the current numbers?
As geoengineering experiments go, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and burying it underground, appears less dangerous than options that involve dumping aerosols into the stratosphere, seeding oceans, and even launching Sun shield satellites into space. The first two have been tried in limited experiments. The last one has not.
Those who see putting CO2 underground as a waste of a resource have encouraged the development of a CCS offshoot, carbon capture utilization and storage or CCUS. Captured CO2 can be useful whether being injected into depleted oil and gas wells to rejuvenate them or turning the gas into products like carbon fibre or synthetic fuels. The current state of CCUS facilities is capturing 50 Megatons of CO2 annually with 700 projects in various stages of development.
At the University of California – Berkeley, advances in CO2 direct air capture (DAC) have led to the discovery of a new porous material called a covalent organic framework (COF) that efficiently removes the gas from the atmosphere. The material is inexpensive and a mere 200 grams can suck up as much CO2 in a year as a tree. As much as this material shows promise, we are probably a few years away from its large-scale deployment.
Current DAC projects number 18 with three removing more than 1,000 tons of the gas annually. Current plans include 130 DAC facilities under development, the largest capable of capturing 2 million tons of CO2 every year. For DAC to effectively help us achieve net zero by 2050, however, we will need an average of 32 new large-scale plants coming online annually between now and then.
Removing carbon from the air isn’t the only game in town. A new initiative is sucking carbon from the ocean. The rationale is to keep the ocean stable as the world’s largest natural global carbon sink. Seawater can hold 60 times more CO2 than air with almost 30% of human-generated CO2 ending up in the ocean every year. Over time, however, more CO2 than the ocean can handle will make it less efficient as a carbon sink. More CO2 in the ocean will mean seawater will become more acidic (CO2 in water produces carbonic acid) posing a threat to zooplankton, phytoplankton, crustaceans and many other creatures at the bottom of the food chain that support all marine life. Some scientists believe the ocean carbon sink could be jeopardized in time. Joint research from the University of Texas – Austin, Utah State and the University of Colorado reports that the ocean as a carbon sink will peak at the end of this century and by 2300 will be half as efficient.
Removing human-generated CO2 from seawater has inspired Singapore, to work with the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) in developing a geoengineering experiment with a new startup, Equatic, operating a small pilot project that has been successfully capturing 0.1 metric tons of CO2 daily since it began operations. Equatic-1 is its successor capable of capturing 1 metric ton daily. The captured CO2 is being injected into calcium and magnesium to create a solid material that will store the gas for a billion years.
The Equatic unit was to open this year but has not yet been commissioned. When operational in 2025 it will expand to 10 units with a capacity to remove 10 metric tons of CO2 daily. The goal is to remove 110,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. 200 scientists in September 2023, however, signed a letter questioning the potential risks to coral reefs and aquatic life that this technology could produce. The scientists requested more rigorous research and evaluation before Equatic continued to scale its Singapore operations.
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]]>This week’s stories include:
This month, the journal Nature describes a new material that can capture CO2. It is called a covalent organic framework (COF), and its hexagonal channel structure binds the gas to it. Developed at the University of California, Berkeley, it could become an important direct air capture (DAC) tool to reverse rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
States Omar Yaghi, Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, “We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO2. I am excited about it because there’s nothing like it out there in terms of performance. It breaks new ground in our efforts to address the climate problem.”
If put into existing carbon capture systems in refineries and power stations, COF materials weighing less than a quarter kilogram (0.5 pounds) would absorb 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of CO2 per year—as much CO2 as a mature tree sequesters.
Atmospheric levels of CO2 have surpassed 422 parts per million (ppm) this year. Capturing flue gas CO2 before it enters the atmosphere could slow the rise. The current technologies deployed at industrial and energy sites add extensive costs to these facilities. Short of shutting them down and rapidly building up renewable energy capacity and alternative manufacturing processes that don’t use fossil fuels, DAC technologies are seen as a panacea.
The Berkeley-developed COF material can be reused for 100 cycles without losing its CO2 absorption capacity. Further improvements could double the amount of CO2 the material captures.
If we want to get CO2 levels back to between 300 and 350 ppm then, sucking the gas out of the air may need us to deploy technology like this. How much it will cost to scale is not described in the UC Berkeley press release or the Nature article.
A cyanobacteria, a form of blue-green algae commonly found in freshwater, has been discovered at a marine volcanic seep and it appears to have a proven ability to sequester CO2 in large volumes. Called Chonkus, it was found near Sicily.
Its discovery is described in a paper appearing in the journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Chonkus was isolated from volcanic vents in a marine environment where dissolved CO2 made it a good hunting ground for discovering organisms that sequester carbon.
Max Shubert, a Ph.D. at the Wyss Institute, Harvard University, states, “Dissolved carbon is relatively dilute compared to all the other molecules in the ocean, and that limits the growth of photosynthetic organisms that live there. We decided to investigate what happens when you alleviate that limiting factor by going to a place with plenty of carbon, where some organisms could have evolved the ability to use it to galvanize their growth.”
Shubert describes Chonkus as having “several traits that could be useful to humans, including highly dense growth and a natural tendency to sink in water.” Water samples collected from CO2-rich volcanic seeps were flown back to Boston for analysis. The researchers then replicated the conditions off the Sicilian coast in the laboratory and were able to isolate UTEX 3222 which they later named Chonkus. Why that name? Because it grew fast and big having absorbed lots of CO2 and then sank to the bottom of sample tubes making it easy to harvest.
Chonkus’ beneficial characteristics could help in biomanufacturing. Other microbes with similar capabilities are being studied for carbon capture, restoring coral reefs and carbon upcycling to create sustainable products.
Canada has the oil sands, the single largest carbon pollution emitter in the country. Canada has committed to reducing its national carbon footprint to net zero by 2050 while at the same time continuing to exploit oil sands resources. It is quite the tightrope for the country and has produced a rocky marriage among oil sands operators, and federal and provincial governments.
Six Canadian oil sands producers, representing 95% of production formed the Pathways Alliance in 2021. These include Canadian Natural Resources, Cenovus Energy, Imperial Oil (a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil), ConocoPhillips Canada, MEG Energy, and Suncor Energy. The 2021 announcement described their intention to build a pipeline and carbon capture and storage network that would be made available to other oil producers and industries in Alberta and Saskatchewan to sequester CO2 emissions.
Since the announcement, the federal government has set national sectorial goals to reduce the country’s carbon emissions and passed anti-greenwashing provisions that have exposed the Pathways Alliance to criticism for its lack of commitment to put shovels in the ground.
What’s holding up the $16.5 billion project? Money. The Alliance seeks guaranteed public subsidies beyond existing tax credits and other incentives to cover built and operational costs for capturing and storing carbon emissions.
The latest small breakthrough, however, occurred with a recent face-to-face meeting involving members of the Alliance and senior federal government officials. The latter announced a plan to engage the Canada Growth Fund (CGF), a cleantech financing agency set up in 2022, to use some of its capitalized $15 billion to provide investment certainty for the project. Meetings are expected to continue with a hoped-for agreement early in 2025.
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]]>Today, ExxonMobil proudly describes how it operates the largest carbon dioxide (CO2) pipeline network in the United States with 69 offshore holdings for sequestration. Its total network length is over 2,000 kilometres (1,300 miles) with the bulk of it located in Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi. The current pipeline network features 15 offshore storage sites and can accommodate 100 million tons of CO2 annually.
In context, this makes ExxonMobil one of the leaders in carbon capture and storage (CCS). Its 2030 emission reduction plan states plans to reduce what it calls “corporate-wide greenhouse gas intensity” by 20 to 30% from 2016 levels. Other objectives include:
Back in 1982, Exxon researchers knew about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. They published a document describing the CO2 greenhouse effect. It concluded:
At the time, Exxon’s corporate management buried the document choosing an information strategy that favoured non-disclosure and a company-wide strategy to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change should others come up with similar evidence. Corporate management told its public relations teams to emphasize the scientific uncertainty of the estimates should the report see the light of day.
A visit to ExxonMobil’s website today to see the company’s messaging on climate solutions gives you an interesting vibe. The company describes itself as delivering “on both sides” of the energy equation “meeting society’s needs for energy…and reducing emissions.” It highlights $20 billion in investments between 2022 and 2027 to achieve lower emissions for its operations as well as those of other companies with which it deals.
A look at what the company describes as its essential work to advance carbon capture and storage as well as work on hydrogen and lower-emission fuels and you see the following:
ExxonMobil’s numerous carbon management projects include post-combustion carbon capture, direct air capture (DAC), carbon storage, and fuel cell development. What are the results of this flurry of activity and work? The company claims to have captured and stored more CO2 than its competitors. The total amounts to 120 million tons representing 40% of “all the anthropogenic CO2 that has ever been captured.”
What ExxonMobil doesn’t state is that half of this captured CO2 is sold to other fossil fuel operators to enhance oil recovery from old wells.
What it also doesn’t state is that the company continues to emit far more CO2 than what has been captured. This is data it keeps under wraps.
In recent publications, ExxonMobil has predicted that oil demand and CO2 emissions won’t peak until 2040. The date doesn’t align with the realities of anthropogenic climate change and the rate atmospheric and ocean temperatures have been rising.
How can you reconcile the company’s 120 million tons of CO2 captured against global annual emissions of 37.55 billion tons from all fossil fuel companies? If ExxonMobil is doing the best, what are the rest of them doing?
How do you reconcile Exxon’s spend of between $23 and $25 billion on new oil and gas projects in 2024 and its plans to spend up to $27 billion annually by 2027? How does that compare to the $20 billion in total the company has pledged for emission reductions?
Today, the 100 million barrels of oil produced daily, representing current global demand, puts 31.7 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Now look at ExxonMobil’s CO2 storage efforts to date at 120 million tons. An ovation of one-hand clapping is all the company deserves for having given the planet less than 4 days of climate change mitigation relief.
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]]>Porthos is not as ambitious as that which was first described in GATEWAY, but the completed project will be able to gather and store 2.5 Megatons of CO2 annually, last 15 years and top out at 37 Megatons sequestered beneath the seabed of the North Sea permanently. The compressor station and transport system infrastructure can be used and expanded over time to allow member European Union countries to use it for CO2 sequestration projects in the future.
The sequestration sites are empty or depleted natural gas fields three to four kilometres (1.9 to 2.5 miles) beneath the seabed. Construction began in April with plans to be operational by 2026. The name Porthos is an acronym which stands for The Port Of Rotterdam Transport Hub and Offshore Storage.
Why locate the hub in Rotterdam? The above map shows how central the port is to large industrial emitters. It is also a hub for North Sea oil and gas operations with a mature infrastructure and expertise to support pipelines to be filled with CO2 rather than oil or natural gas. Instead of onshoring those fossil fuels, the flow will be outbound with CO2 in the pipe going to an offshore North Sea platform before being pumped below the seabed.
Currently, 14% of The Netherlands’ total carbon emissions are produced by emitters within the immediate vicinity of Rotterdam. That’s why picking it as a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) hub seems like the fastest way to reduce the country and surrounding region’s carbon footprint at a relatively low cost. The port hopes to reduce its carbon emissions by 10% annually once the project is completed.
What’s involved? The project requires new pipelines and a feeder network of smaller ones coming from industrial emission sources. The project’s infrastructure involves drilling under the seawall and building a network to cross several waterways, rail lines and roads in the port area. The CO2 will be transported from emission sources to the onshore compressor station and from there through a pipeline to a platform 20 kilometres (12 miles) off the Dutch coast. It will then be pumped underground.
The project is a partnership involving the Port of Rotterdam Authority, Gasunie, EBN, Royal Dutch Shell, Air Liquide, and ExxonMobil. Total cost is estimated to be €1.3 billion (almost US $1.4 billion).
The carbon storage site is a sandstone formation that used to be saturated with natural gas trapped under an impermeable layer of cap rock. When the field was being operated to extract natural gas, pressures within the sandstone layer declined over time. The CO2 injection will restore the original pressure within the sandstone, which will be monitored to ensure it never exceeds levels recorded when the natural gas extraction first started. Besides the construction of the onshore pipelines and compressor infrastructure, some upgrades are required for the offshore pipe to the platform and to the casing containing the pipe that will go below the seabed. The sequestration field will be deemed full once historical pressures are restored by the CO2 being injected into the site. At that point, the pipe will be sealed.
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]]>One recent study pegged that a maximum warming response from an emission source takes between 6.6 and 30.7 years.
If true, it means the consequences of emitting CO2 or CH4 can be measured in the short term, and fully felt in terms of atmospheric warming within the generation responsible for it. This means that tracing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to an emitter should be possible for legal purposes. It also means that the emissions window is very short in terms of doing measurable climate change damage. Finally, for those seeking climate change mitigation, it means global warming counter strategies can be implemented much faster and achieve near-immediate results.
A case example is worth considering. When a coal-burning thermal power plant emits CO2 and other GHGs, the local increase in atmospheric levels is abrupt. Then the GHGs get diffused with carbon gasses getting absorbed by local forests, soil, the nearby ocean and any other natural carbon sinks within the vicinity. That means the immediate spike in GHGs slowly declines. The warming caused by the increased GHGs and their radiative forcing is, as a result, delayed. But natural carbon sinks can only absorb carbon emissions for so long. Even the ocean, the largest carbon sink on the planet, has its limits.
Another factor to consider is the size of the GHG emission pulse coming from that plant or factory. The larger the amount of GHGs, the slower the uptake by natural carbon sinks. That means the bigger the GHG radiative forcing on the atmosphere which, of course, knows no boundaries. That means the GHG radiative contribution gets distributed across the globe, further complicating the ability to measure single sources of these emissions and their cumulative impact over time.
One thing, however, is certain. When a power plant, factory, oil refinery, or other polluting source adds GHGs to the atmosphere, the warming effect can be quick, something not fully described in the literature looking at anthropogenic causes for global warming.
One study I looked at calculated that 93% of peak warming from a new emission source can be realized in 10 years. Does that mean an immediate GHG emissions reduction can determine within a very small time window, the future level of atmospheric warming? If so, then the emission reductions we do today can immediately benefit the planet in decades, not centuries.
If we were to implement carbon capture technology to the maximum, could we reverse global warming? According to a study done by Wood Mackenzie, to stop temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) we would need to capture 7 billion tons of CO2 and other GHGs per year going forward. But current and planned carbon capture technology, if everything gets built, doesn’t come close to that number. The planned global carbon capture capacity on the books amounts to 1.4 billion tons sequestered annually, a far cry from 7 billion, and likely to see global atmospheric temperatures 2.5 Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit) higher than today by 2050.
At the upcoming COP28, in the United Arab Emirates, the United Nations annual gathering will include a great deal of discussion by fossil fuel companies about their commitment to implementing carbon removal technologies. Their credibility should be questioned considering the number of carbon capture projects partially funded by local government partners that these companies have abandoned in the past.
In Canada, the Pathways Alliance represents a partnership of major oil sands producers who express a commitment to reach net-zero GHG emissions from operations through carbon capture and storage. The Pathways fact sheets describe capturing CO2 from more than 20 oil sands facilities and transporting it over a 400-kilometre (almost 250-mile) pipeline to deposit it in a geologically stable underground formation where it will be permanently sequestered.
How much have the partners spent on the project so far? As of March of this year, about $10 million. How much do they estimate the project will cost? $16.5 billion which is not small change. So how much are the partners committed to putting their money into the project? It looks like about $7.6 billion or 46% of the total cost. Where is the rest of the money to come from? Government. If true to form as we have seen in many past carbon capture projects, will the partners bail as the costs mount well beyond project estimates? My guess is highly likely.
And should the Pathways Alliance complete the project, how many tons of GHGs will be removed annually? Around 12 million tons in total. Compare that to the 70 million tons the current oil sands projects produce annually and it amounts to a mere 17.1% of the total.
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