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.

1. In Canada this week, the Prime Minister put out a list of strategic projects to fast-track. One of them was the Pathways Alliance, the oil sands operators’ proposed US$15 billion solution to capture and store carbon dioxide (CO2) underground. In the latest news coming from this consortium of companies, it notes that CCS projects in Canada have already securely stored over 50 million tons of CO2.
2. The Carbon Herald, an online industry news source, recently reported that the Dutch portion of the North Sea’s seabed has the capacity to store as much as 3 billion tons of CO2, using empty reservoirs where there are no longer recoverable quantities of natural gas (CH4), and deep underground aquifers. The industry has identified almost 200 offshore gas fields with as many as 130 capable of being converted for CO2 storage.
3. The United Kingdom has estimated that its continental shelf, both on the North and Irish Seas, may be able to hold 78 billion tons of CO2 in now depleted oil fields and seabed underground aquifers. In April 2025, the UK government and Eni, the Italian fossil fuel company, gave approval to a 61-kilometre (38-mile) carbon capture pipeline to transport CO2 from the Liverpool-Manchester region to store the gas permanently beneath the seabed in Liverpool Bay. When operational, it will store 4.5 million tons of CO2 annually with plans to scale to 10 million by 2030. The project build and ongoing support has been costed at £22 billion (US$29.2 billion).
4. At the University of Sharjah, researchers are using shrimp exoskeleton and intestinal waste produced by the seafood industry to capture CO2. Their results are published in the journal Nanoscale, and describe the process of pyrolysis of shrimp waste to produce biochar, followed by acid treatment, chemical activation and ball milling. The resulting activated carbon exhibits strong performance and long-term stability across multiple CO2 capture and release cycles. Can other seafood waste be used? It appears that lobster and crab waste can equally serve as a medium for creating the biochar. The industry produces up to 8 million tons annually, with most of the waste disposed of in landfills or dumped in the ocean, where it is an environmental pollutant.
5. Seabound, a UK company founded in 2021, is approaching CCS in a novel fashion. It is deploying onboard CCS container technology on cargo ships to decarbonize marine shipping by capturing up to 95% of CO2 and 98% of sulphur emissions emitted from ship smokestacks. The technology comes in a container and is proprietary, using a calcium looping system that stores captured greenhouse gases onboard and then offloads them. The current destination for the captured gas is a cement plant in Brevik, Norway, which currently uses the CO2 in its processes to make net-zero concrete.
6. At Harvard University, researchers have invented a method that uses special organic molecules in the presence of sunlight to capture and release CO2 from ambient air, potentially a more efficient and cheaper way for direct air capture (DAC) than what is presently on the market from companies like Canada’s Carbon Engineering, recently acquired by Occidental Petroleum, and Switzerland’s Climeworks. The method developed is far more energy efficient and scalable. The key to the technology is the specially designed complex organic molecules called photobases. When exposed to sunlight, they produce hydroxide ions, changing their chemistry to become a CO2 adsorbent. With light as the trigger, there could be no limit to the amount of CO2 this discovery could capture. Then the only problem is where to release the gas.
7. There are a growing number of DAC companies as of 2025. These include the aforementioned Carbon Engineering and Climeworks, as well as Aerbon, KORALL and UseNexus (Sweden), NuAria, Sora Fuel and South Ocean Air (US), fortyfour (Switzerland), Yama (France), Atalanta Climate (Canada), and Yellow Duck (Japan). Not to get too excited, but the Climeworks Orca plant in Iceland, since it began operation, has only captured 1,000 tons of CO2 annually, although its rated capacity is 4,000 tons. Climeworks’ second plant, called Mammoth, which started operations last year, is rated to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 annually. Other operational DAC plans, of which there are 84, have a combined capacity to capture 569,000 tons of CO2 annually. Compare these paltry numbers to the 37.4 billion tons humans emit annually into the atmosphere.
8. Finally, a new study in Nature questions just how much CO2 can be safely stored using CCS technologies, noting that the capacity is 10 times smaller than previous estimates. The total works out to 1.46 trillion tons, much lower than the 10 to 40 trillion that previous studies have cited. The article states that to meet the Paris climate agreement target, CO2 storage needs to rise to 8.7 billion tons by 2050, or more than 175 times more than our current or planned capacity. So why the discrepancy?  The study points to previous studies not filtering out uncertain geological formations that could leak, trigger earthquakes or contaminate groundwater.  Hence, the much smaller number.

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.

The post Stories From The World Of Carbon Capture – The Ups And Downsides appeared first on Techso Mogro.

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.

The post A Carbon Sequestration Project Conceived Of In 2016 Is Finally On The Rails appeared first on Techso Mogro.

What is CCS? It is the capture and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) through a process that separates the gas from industrial and energy-related sources and transports it to a location for long-term storage so that it is permanently removed from the atmosphere.

CCS projects have been on the increase very recently. This year Occidental Petroleum in partnership with Carbon Engineering, a direct-air capture CO2 technology announced plans to build and deploy between 70 and 135 carbon capture plants each with the capacity to capture a megaton of the greenhouse gas annually.

Projected growth in planned carbon capture projects and operations grew in the past year from 169 million tons per annum (MTPA) to 244 MTPA with 30 facilities currently operating, 11 under construction, and 153 planned.

Jarad Daniels, CEO of the Global CCS Institute, believes this is only the beginning of an accelerating rate of investment in projects aimed at drawing down carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. He sees CCS as the Swiss Army knife of climate mitigation. “It will continue to play multiple, unique roles in decarbonizing the global economy. Many essential industries like cement and chemical production have no viable path for deep decarbonization other than CCS.”

Although this statement shows a bias in favour of CCS, cement and chemical products are developing new zero-emission electricity and green hydrogen manufacturing processes that would eliminate the need. There is no doubt, however, that for the fossil fuel industry to continue to produce its products, CCS is likely its only way out.

The U.S. isn’t the only government that is turning to CCS as what is in effect a geoengineering mitigation strategy. Its Inflation Reduction Act provides tax credits to increase deployment thirteenfold between now and 2030. The goal is to sequester 110 MTPAs by that date.

Other governments include:

• Canada has recently introduced a CCS tax credit in this year’s budget.
• Denmark has budgeted €5 billion over the next decade.
• The Netherlands has put €13 billion into CCS subsidies.
• Poland, Bulgaria, and Finland have all recently introduced CCS to encourage domestic projects.
• Thailand announced its first CCS project.
• China has its first million-ton project in operation.
• Australia has announced new projects in three of its states and the Northern Territory.
• The Middle East and North Africa are also budgeting for CCS.

All of these governments are offering public money to foster CCS projects that will be partially funded with private capital. This is an old and failed financial model that in the past has seen governments throw money at companies only to see them pull out claiming the technology was too expensive to implement.

But there is an increasing sense of urgency to make policies and announcements in the run-up to COP 27 which begins in a few weeks with Egypt as the host country.

But for CCS to be impactful, the numbers described here are far too low. Why? Because an inventory of industrial CO2 emitters summarized in the most recent IPCC report on CCS states there are 7,887 sites around the world emitting 13.466 billion tons of CO2 around the planet today. These include power providers, cement companies, petrochemical and other refineries, iron and steel manufacturers, and oil and gas processing sites. Getting to net zero to keep atmospheric warming to no more than 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) requires that all these locations capture emissions through CCS add-ons, or by redesigning manufacturing processes. It means finding the pore space which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. And it means building or commandeering existing pipelines to repurpose them for transporting CO2 to these pore spaces. We are talking tens of trillions of dollars that will have to be spent to fulfil the Swiss army knife prediction Jarad Daniels earlier described.

The post Carbon Capture Gaining Traction With The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act appeared first on Techso Mogro.

There are five categories of carbon capture.

The first is relying on natural processes with an assist from us to do much of the heavy lifting. We are talking about:

• Afforestation and reforestation (the planting of billions of trees),
• Restoration of wetlands, peat, and soil on land,
• Increasing seagrass and kelp forests in oceans.

The second method is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). This involves capturing CO2 from industrial emissions and piping the gas in concentrated or liquid form into underground stable rock formations where it will remain permanently. In Iceland, pumping captured CO2 into basalt and sandstone is leading to metamorphosis as the carbon alters the rock chemistry turning it into limestone.

The third is the preferred method the fossil fuel industry wants governments to buy into and help fund and subsidize. This is carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), described by the industry as the necessary catalyst for us to achieve net-zero emissions from energy producers by 2050. CCUS is all about using captured CO2 to enhance recovery from mature oil wells to extend their lives. The revenue earned, the industry says will help it to fund further development of carbon capture technologies without asking for even more financial assistance from governments.

A variation on number three is to use captured carbon in other manufacturing processes. Several companies have developed new types of cement with embedded carbon. See content on this site about CarbonCure, a Canadian company that is purchasing captured carbon from industrial sources and putting it into its concrete products. And captured carbon is even being made into aviation fuel, see Dimensional Energy, an Ithaca, New York-based company, that may soon provide the fuel that rockets use to get us to space.

The fourth category for carbon is grabbing CO2 directly from the air. Direct Air Capture (DAC) has made considerable advances in the last decade led by companies like Carbon Engineering, also Canadian in origin. The challenge for DAC is to scale the technology to a point where costs for capturing a ton of CO2 converted into usable zero-emission products like fuels are viable.

A fifth category is using the ocean which is currently the largest natural carbon sink on the planet. But advocates of geoengineering are suggesting there could be other ways for the oceans to absorb more CO2 with little consequence to the ecological balance of marine environments.

We have already mentioned the cultivation of seagrass and kelp forests. But other solutions that are chemical have also been suggested. The challenge is that any solution has to pass muster with the entire human community because the oceans of the world are defined as are a global commons and subject to international law. Having said that, carbon capture is not covered very well under existing international statutes.

That’s led to unauthorized experiments such as one done by an American businessman, Russ George, who in July 2012 dumped 100 tons of iron sulphate off the Pacific coast of British Columbia to cause a temporary algae bloom. George believed his experiment using iron would help to capture CO2. Called ocean fertilization, it has been replicated by others not only using iron but also crushed limestone.

Then there are geoengineering advocates who propose pumping captured CO2 into the deep ocean where the enormous pressure exerted on it by the water canopy above would hold it in place. The first article I ever read proposing this as a solution appeared in 2009 in the journal Energy Procedia. It described deep ocean disposal of captured CO2 below 3,000 metres (almost 10,000 feet) in depth and defined it as a temporary storage solution that could work for an estimated 30 to 500 years. Fortunately, no actual experiment has occurred so far because, in my mind, the unintended consequences of adopting such a strategy are incalculable.

So there you have it. Carbon capture advocates remain very much alive and well here in the third decade of the 21st century as we try and find our way to overcome global warming. One thing is certain, other than natural carbon capture, the solutions we are working on don’t come cheap.

The post Capturing Carbon Continues to be Controversial appeared first on Techso Mogro.

The Premier has also used $3.5 million in public funds to launch an inquiry to seek who is behind anti-Alberta oil-sands “propaganda.” Kenney wanted to find evidence of foreign influence in the anti-pipeline and anti-oil sands opposition. His inquiry has turned up empty.

In fact, both investments at the taxpayers’ expense have turned into dust and left Albertans holding a bag of nothing.

But now, the Premier has suddenly discovered climate change and its association with greenhouse gases. To solve the challenge he has settled on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and the funding of projects that can offset emissions that would allow Alberta to continue to harvest the oil sands. This isn’t something new. It just seems to be new to Kenney. After all, Alberta has committed $1.24 billion through 2025 to two older CCS projects: Shell’s Quest, and the Alberta Carbon Trunk Link (ACTL). Both projects received government investment from a previous provincial administration under the New Democratic Party (a democratic socialist party). Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP) had inherited them as legacy projects.

What are they?

• Quest was designed to capture over 1 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually from an oil sands upgrader which represented about 35% of the site’s carbon emissions. It achieved that milestone in the past few years.
• ACTL was a 240 kilometer (approximately 150 miles) pipeline designed to capture, transport, and store up to 14.6 million tons of CO2 annually from two sites in the province with the opportunity to add more emitters over time. It has yet to achieve its CO2 reduction goals.

Both projects when fully operational will capture and store 15.6 million tons of CO2 annually which, according to an Alberta government website on oil sands operations represents only 20% of the oil sands’ total emissions per year.

Alberta has fomented against a federal government policy to put a nationwide price on carbon in the form of a levy per ton. Alberta, rather than coming up with its own carbon pricing scheme has taken the federal government to court to fight the levy which currently amounts to $30 per ton and will incrementally grow to $170 by 2030.

Alberta has been content with a modest sector-based initiative to reduce emissions while pushing a narrative about decreased carbon intensity per barrel of harvested oil sands. None of these policies is equivalent to the federal carbon levy.

It is understandable that without an alternative economic plan Alberta wants to sustain its oil sands operations which are deemed critical to the province’s financial viability. It knows that its court challenge will likely fail.

Is that why Kenney has taken a new tack?

This week’s $30 billion carbon reduction announcement aimed at building a number of CCS and CCUS (carbon capture utilization and storage) projects in Alberta comes with a big ask. The money isn’t coming from the province. It wants the federal government to fork it over with the promise to produce a 30 million ton reduction in CO2 emissions annually by 2030 (just a little over 40% of the current total annual emissions). And Alberta wants the money in annual chunks of $2 to 3 billion.

What is so disturbing about this ask is how sadly out-of-date Alberta has become. Since the first decade of this century, there have been CCS and CCUS projects being talked about. Some have been proposed by industry and started, and then stopped. Others have been critiqued by the academic community as counterproductive to solving the carbon problem. Quite a few have been abandoned by the industry and left for governments to bail out the project.

Before the Paris Climate Conference in 2015, I wrote about the state of the CCS market. The number of projects that had died had vastly outnumbered those completed. And the latter had only made it because of those government bailouts and investments with an industry partner scaling back its financial participation.

So what appears to be happening here is that Alberta has rediscovered CCS and CCUS as a new religion to save the oil sands, and is asking the Canadian federal government to distribute the alms. Stated Alberta’s Energy Minister during this week’s announcement, “We want the federal government to step up…Carbon capture and CCUS have a long lead time, it can take 4 to 5 years to get to the point where they’re even under construction. So if we want to meet our targets for 2030 and beyond, we have to get moving on them now or yesterday.” So where was the Alberta government and the current UCP’s thinking a decade ago considering the lead times?

Will Kenney’s ask fall on receptive ears? It may very well because the new U.S. federal administration and that in Canada are both committed to reducing atmospheric CO2 to net-zero by 2050. In yesterday’s Financial Post, it states that Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Johnathan Wilkinson, had meetings with the U.S. Special Presidential Climate Envoy, John Kerry, to discuss climate change cooperation between the two national governments. The current goal is for a coherent policy to be in place by April 22 at an upcoming Earth Day Summit which has been called for by President Biden.

Meanwhile, the Canadian federal government and Alberta have committed jointly to advance CCS and CCUS technology because of their job-creating potential as well as the benefit of overall emission reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gases. A technology, once largely ignored, now is being seen as an opportunity to create a global competitive advantage for the country and the province.

President Biden, too, has hitched his climate change ambitions to the potential for massive levels of new job creation. The President has set a goal for the U.S. energy industry to be 100% clean by 2050. He wants to upgrade buildings and homes, create millions of new jobs, curb greenhouse gas emissions, and take a global leadership role in combating climate change. And if the opportunities in the U.S. can lead to Canadians exporting CCS and CCUS technology to the U.S. and other countries, then Canada too will reap similar benefits.

So maybe Kenney’s timing is propitious even though his “come to Jesus” moment is a Johnny-come-lately reaction.

The post To Save the Oil Sands Alberta Wants $30 Billion for Carbon Capture Projects appeared first on Techso Mogro.

On the XPrize website it describes the problem in stark terms:

“The world’s leading scientists estimate that we may need to remove as much as 6 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2030, and 10 gigatons per year by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change. For humanity to reach the Paris Agreements goal of limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to no more than 1.5˚(C) of pre-industrial levels, or even 2˚(C), we need bold, radical tech innovation and scale up that goes beyond limiting CO2 emissions, but actually removes CO2 already in the air and oceans. If humanity continues on a business-as-usual path, the global average temperature could increase 6˚(C) by the year 2100.”

Entrants have four years to demonstrate their carbon-negative solutions whether coming from nature, or through the application of technology. The competition guidelines are to be announced on Earth Day, April 22, 2021, with the closing date for submissions four years hence on Earth Day 2025.

To win the demonstrated solution must be scalable to 10 Gigatons per year CO2 removal by 2050. The initial demonstration should be capable of removing a ton daily. Cost per ton for removal will be one consideration by the judges in determining the winner. Another will be the length of time the CO2 will remain sequestered with a minimum goal of 100 years.

Winnings will be distributed as follows:

1. After 18 months, the judges will select 15 teams who will each receive a $1 million milestone prize.
2. Also after 18 months, 25 $200,000 scholarships will be awarded to selected student teams entered in the competition.
3. The remaining $80 million will be divided among the top three submissions with first prize awarded $50 million, second, $20 million, and third, $10 million.

CO2 isn’t the only greenhouse gas that contributes to atmospheric warming. After all methane, water vapour, nitrous, and sulfur dioxide are other contributors that raise the global temperature. Methane, for example, is far more destructive but short-lived. Methane spikes have recently been noted as pushing up the atmosphere’s temperature albeit temporarily. That is not the cae for CO2 which lingers in the atmosphere for multiple millennia if not absorbed by natural sequestering processes such as the ocean, land, carbonate rocks, and plants.

Capturing CO2 by technological means is seen by many in the academic community as a fast way to help nature bring carbon in the atmosphere into balance at levels that don’t cause global temperatures to rise to a point that threatens our existence.

Capturing CO2 from industrial sources at the emission point is viable today. Scrubbers added to smokestacks, an older technology has been used to filter out smog-causing nitrous and sulfur dioxides from coal-fired thermal power plants. But adding CO2 extraction to scrubbers is something already happening. One such facility is located near Estevan, Saskatchewan, which has been operating a working carbon capture technology since 2014 at the SaskPower Boundary Dam coal-fired power station. This system has the potential to capture up to one million tons of CO2 when operating at full capacity. It works using solvents added to the smokestack scrubbers which capture the CO2. The gas is then compressed and pumped through pipelines into a stable sandstone formation 3.4 kilometers (2.1 miles) underground.

Another carbon capture working example is Quest, a Royal Dutch Shell project attached to an Athabasca Oil Sands Project near Edmonton, Alberta. Quest has the capacity to capture and store one million tons of CO2 annually. It captures the gas from upgrader operations and then compresses it before injecting into an underground saline reservoir two kilometers (1.25 miles) below the surface.

Then there is Carbon Engineering whose technology usees giant fans to draw in surrounding air which passes over thin plastic membranes coated with a non-toxic potassium hydroxide solution which chemically binds with the CO2 turning it into a carbonate salt. Additional chemical processes separate the salt from the solution which is then recycled. The salt is pelletized and heated to release the CO2 back into a gas which is then compressed and either piped underground or sent to industrial application users.

It will be interesting to see if the designers of these three projects enter the XPrize contest.

But wait. The Musk XPrize isn’t the only one aimed at extracting CO2. The NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize which was launched in 2015 is just coming to an end. This four-and-a-half-year competition has three Canadian entries among the 10 finalists. Submissions were due in December 2020. Each of the finalists received a share of a $5 million milestone prize. The grand prize involves two industrial streams: one focused on extracting CO2 from coal-fired power plants, and the second from natural-gas power plants. The CO2 extracted must be converted into products such as carbon fiber, or carbon-infused concrete. Each of the two grand prizes, is worth $7.5 million. We should hear from the judges shortly.

What makes this latest carbon capture XPrize stand out is the amount that Musk is offering the winners. No previous XPrize has reached a $100 million plateau. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that if it were to happen it would be something involving Elon Musk who takes big risks, and makes grand promises, and delivers.

The post Elon Musk Funds XPrize to Tackle Carbon Removal appeared first on Techso Mogro.

Can we stuff 2,700 Gigatons of carbon dioxide into the ground permanently over the next 80 years? According to the study’s authors, Christopher Zahasky, and Samuel Krevor who collaborated on the study when both were at Imperial College, that’s the number we have to hit, and the sooner the better. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its annual reports has made CCS technology one of the tools in the global arsenal to mitigate climate change. And yet it appears to be the one least discussed by environmentalists and climate scientists when talking about combating global warming.

The 2,700 Gigaton number is seen as controversial as well. Many in academia think it is far too low and note that the Earth’s capacity to store carbon underground is almost four times that. So where is all this space underground? Currently, large-scale CCS facilities are putting away 37.8 million tons annually (2019 figures) or 0.0378 Gigatons. That means we, collectively, would have to increase CCS capacity by a factor of over 71 thousand to reach 2,700 Gigatons, or if the pessimists are right by a factor of over 264,000 to meet IPCC targets.

As of late 2019 there were 19 large-scale CCS projects in operation around the world. The costs associated with their build and operation have been high which has been a barrier to wider adoption of the technology. And then there is the issue of underground capacity that can serve to ensure the CO2 remains permanently sequestered.

An article published in 2018 in the journal Nature Communications provides a storage security calculator and estimates the geological capacity for subsurface storage of CO2 with a probability of leakage of less than 0.0008% per year, and 98% retention of the injected gas for 10,000 years. The article has a caveat, however, that we have no experience to fall back on when determining the long-term behaviour of subsurface CO2. So in other words, sequestering CO2 permanently, something nature has achieved in the past, isn’t necessarily something we humans can do equally well. Nature has done it through the creation of coal, oil, and natural gas deposits buried for hundreds of millions of years as the Earth geologically evolved. But even nature’s sequestration hasn’t been permanent. After all, that’s how we humans first discovered the energy value of fossil fuels, first through the discovery of upwellings of oil and gas from cracks and seams in subsurface stratigraphy.

The current trajectory of 8.6% isn’t too far off from where Zahasky and Krevor believe is the optimal target to achieve enough sequestration to contribute to a larger climate mitigation strategy. States Zahasky, “Even the most ambitious scenarios are unlikely to need more than 2,700 Gigatons of CO2 storage resource globally, much less than the 10,000 Gigatons of storage resource that leading reports suggest is possible. Our study shows that if climate change targets are not met by 2100, it won’t be for a lack of carbon capture and storage space.”

Krevor notes that he and Zahasky wanted to focus on what was needed in storage capacity, not the amount of subsurface sequestration possible. Coming up with a number a little more than one-quarter of what was previously thought the requirement means the search for CCS reservoirs will be far less taxing, and that storage can happen much sooner to help meet IPCC mitigation scenarios. States Krevor, “Our analysis shows good news for CCS if we keep up with this trajectory – but there are many other factors in mitigating climate change and its catastrophic effects, like using cleaner energy and transport as well as significantly increasing the efficiency of energy use.”

The post Storing Carbon Dioxide Growing 8.6% Annually – Is it Enough to Keep Global Temperatures from Rising Beyond 2.0 Celsius? appeared first on Techso Mogro.

The following is a list of some of the CCS projects not defined as test, pilot or study.

• In 2000 a coal gasification process was implemented at Great Plains Synfuels Plant in North Dakota. It has captured around 35 million tons of CO2 since operations began using the gas in enhanced oil recovery operations.
• Since 2008 the Snohvit Storage facility has been capturing CO2 from liquid natural gas facilities in northern Norway and injecting it into offshore storage. 4 million tons has been captured to-date.
• The Chongqing Hechuan coal-fired power plant since 2010 has been capturing 10,000 tons of CO2 annually from the flue gas stream for liquefication and use as an industrial gas.
• In 2013 Air Products in Port Arthur, Texas began capturing CO2 from two steam methane reformers and transporting the gas to existing production fields for enhanced oil recovery.
• In 2013 the Coffeyville Gasification Plant in Kansas began capturing 1 megaton of CO2 per year from fertilizer production and piping it to fields in Oklahoma for enhanced oil recovery.
• In 2013 Petrobras began capturing CO2 from its offshore production wells and reinjecting the gas under the seabed for enhanced oil recovery. By the end of 2017, 7 million tons had been captured and injected into pre-salt offshore fields.
• In 2014 The Boundary Dam coal-fired power plant in Saskatchewan began capturing 1 megaton of CO2 annually and transporting the gas by pipeline to the Aquistore Project for permanent geological storage.
• In 2015, Air Liquide in Port Jerome, Normandy began capturing 100,000 tons of CO2 annually from a hydrogen production facility.
• In 2015, the Quest Project in Alberta began capturing 1 megaton of CO2 per year from an oil sands upgrader. By July 2017 the company announced it had stored 2 million tons permanently in stable underground geological formations.
• In 2016 Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Steel Industries implemented the first commercial CCS facility for the iron and steel industry.
• In 2016 Tuticorin in Chennai, India began capturing 60,000 tons of CO2 annually from the flue gas of a coal-fired power plant with the gas being used as feedstock for soda ash production.
• In 2016 Saga City completed construction of a Toshiba-built carbon capture and utilization system attached to municipal waste incineration, harvesting 10 tons of CO2 per day for use in crop and algae production.
• In 2017 Decatur-based Illinois Industrial began capturing CO2 from a corn-to-ethanol plant with an injection capacity of 1 megaton per year.
• In 2017 Petra Nova began operating a post-combustion CO2 capture system at a power plant near Houston, Texas, producing 1.4 megatons of the gas which was then piped to nearby oilfields for enhanced recovery.
• In 2018 a pulp mill in Saint-Felicien, Quebec began capturing 30 tons of CO2 per day from its softwood kraft pulp mill.
• In 2018 Beijing Shougang began capturing CO2 for a steel production facility and using it to produce fuel-grade ethanol.
• In 2019 Gorgon, an offshore Western Australia gas developer began capturing between 3.4 and 4 megatons of CO2 per year from operations and piping the gas underground into stable geological formations.

As much as these facilities have shown the viability of CCS, it is the road ahead that holds promise for the industry as the power, oil and gas, cement, and materials manufacturing industry sectors pivot towards net-zero carbon by the mid-century.

Just how many projects are already in place or planned for can be seen on the map below.

In the most recent IPCC reports on climate change, the international body has declared CCS as a necessary technology to keep mean global atmospheric temperatures from rising 1.5 Celsius (2.4 Fahrenheit) degrees or higher. Speed to implement in this decade is seen as critical. With only 21 operational facilities currently in play, the world needs almost 50 times that number to draw down on CO2 and methane (CH4) emissions that have been added to the atmosphere in the past century-and-a-half. The total number of existing or planned projects, however, remains in the low one-hundreds, far too low to make the needed difference.

And since Houston, Texas, is the oil capital of the United States, the quotation “Houston, we have a problem” seems fitting re CCS global deployment as a climate change mitigator. Those who profess that CCS is the solution need to do much better.

The post Capturing Carbon Slowly Taking Hold as Emitters Begin to Address the Global Warming Challenge appeared first on Techso Mogro.

States Julian Melchiorri, seen in this YouTube video, and founder and CEO of Arborea, “When I founded Arborea my goal was to tackle climate change while addressing the critical issues related to the food system.” The company’s primary focus has been on developing cultivation technology designed to maximize the amount of plant-based food that can be grown per square meter regardless of the quality of the land. With the BioSolar Leaf planted on a single hectare of land, you can sequester 250 times the amount of CO2 when compared to the equivalent amount of forest. In addition the BioSolar Leaf produces what it calls a sustainable source of biomass from which it extracts organic food additives for plant-based food products.

The Chandelier, however, is clearly something new for the company, using its innovative BioSolar Leaf technology to create a living, breathing, functional work of art. Depicted in the image below, the Chandelier incorporates 70 Biosolar Leaves backed up by a complex hydraulic and mechanical support system to ensure the blue-green algae and phytoplankton thrive.

The Chandelier seen here is now part of the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Plans are to create more of these structured cultivation systems that can then be installed both in and on the surfaces of buildings to sequester CO2 and improve urban air quality. The Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, in London, is planning to use the technology to clean its “filthy air,” states Counsellor Stephen Cowan. He goes on to state, “Arborea’s BioSolar leaves are set to revolutionize air quality in London and across the world.” 

The Imperial College of London has served as an incubator for Arborea and hopes to incorporate the technology within its many structures as well. BioSolar Leaf panels can be applied to the rooftops and siding of buildings unlocking the technology’s breakthrough full potential.

If you are thinking about hanging your own Bionic Chandelier, your colour palette will have to complement its very green appearance.

The post Gizmos & Gadgets: Introducing the Bionic Chandelier appeared first on Techso Mogro.

“Humans started adding fossil CO2 to the atmosphere about 300 years ago and accelerated land use emissions by expanding croplands and pastures. The unintended consequence of these activities is a 120 ppm increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2, which is now changing our climate.” 

Having said what seems obvious to most of us on the planet, with the exception of climate change deniers and the Trump administration, the report describes technologies that could be used to reverse the buildup of atmospheric CO2. Whether through sequestration using natural and technological solutions, the opportunity exists to develop a broad range of solutions which come under the name, negative emissions technologies (NETs). This group includes carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), although both are not exactly being used today to create a negative outcome. CCS and CCUS are add-ons to existing industrial facilities, used to trap CO2 as it is emitted, and then either compress or liquefy it and pipe it underground, or convert it where it can become permanently bonded within a product.

In the National Academy report it describes the current state of NETs. Some are close to deployment while others remain theoretical. In assessing the need for negative emissions technologies, the benchmark reference is Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. The reason for NETs is to work towards a global warming limit of less than 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) degrees, and ideally 1.5 Celsius (2.4 Fahrenheit). The Trump administration has announced its intention to withdraw from the Paris agreement. Nevertheless, the report states its conclusions would be no different, with or without the federal government’s participation, because there is sufficient commitment from U.S. states, cities, corporations, NGOs, and other countries around the world to meet the targeted temperature limits. And NETs appear to be an important addition to a range of decarbonizing strategizing.

How should NETs contribute?

1. NETs should be integrated into an overall climate change mitigation portfolio of strategies that includes industry-wide and personal carbon reductions by all.
2. Four NETs are ready today for large-scale deployment including both natural and technological solutions. These include afforestation and reforestation, changes to overall forest management, soil CO2 retention in agricultural practices, and using biomass with CCS for energy generation.
3. Current NETs can be scaled to capture and store substantial amounts of CO2.
4. NETs can play a larger role in mitigating climate change if scaled up with a potential to remove 10 Gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050, and 20 Gigatons per year by 2100.
5. The capacity of natural carbon sinks such as afforestation, reforestation, and soil CO2 retention is finite.
6. Direct air capture and carbon mineralization technologies could add to the total capacity but currently are too costly.
7. Blue carbon removal, and in particular, coastal projects could be added to improve CO2 uptakes.
8. CO2 storage in geological formations could be critical for decarbonization of energy power plants using fossil fuels.

In all these conclusions there is an assumption that a price will be put on CO2 to justify development and implementation to make the economics of the technology sustainable. What that price should be varies depending on the technological solution.

The majority of current NETs if implemented have a cost recovery of $20 USD per ton of CO2. They are even viable at $100 per ton. But on some of these technologies there are obvious constraints. For example, there is only so much space for afforestation and reforestation because these compete with other forms of land use such as growing crops.

At Techso Mogro, we have described other negative emissions technologies including large-scale CO2 direct air capture. The National Academy report acknowledges direct-air’s potential but sees its major barrier to entry being the current high cost of CO2 recovery at around $600 per ton.

Another NET, carbon mineralization, is also constrained by many unknowns.

But if both of these can be developed to scale, and the economics can be made to work, they would play a significant part in climate change mitigation.

When would these two become viable? The price per ton captured has to drop as the technology scales up, while, at the same time, the price per ton of carbon has to escalate to a point where the two intersect.

What other constraints are currently holding back scaling NET solutions?

The report describes “significant scientific gaps remain for all NETs.” For example, carbon mineralization uptake in geological formations presents many unknowns.

How quickly will the mineralization occur?

Is the rate a variable based on the type of rock formation below?

Does all the carbon bind with the rock or can we leave pockets of CO2 underground that could later seep to the surface?

And there are potential negative feedbacks and unknowns when talking about CCS or CCUS technologies. The“long-term consequences” of sequestration technologies could have unintended results that directly impact climate change, sea level rise, and other physical alterations to the planet’s homeostasis.

In its conclusions, the National Academy report gives multiple reasons to pursue NETs including:

• initiatives by state, local governments, corporations, NGOs and other countries make it an attractive field for investigation in the effort to reduce carbon emissions.
• existing tax credits from $35 to $50 per ton for captured CO2, already on the books in many US jurisdictions, can be applied to NET research.
• the intellectual property and economic benefits to be accrued to U.S. companies and researchers makes this an important avenue for the country to pursue.
• and, of course, the end result of keeping global warming within 2.0 Celsius cannot be overstated.

The post Pre-Release of Report on Negative Emissions Technology Provides an Agenda for CO2 Removal appeared first on Techso Mogro.