The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 388ppm. As of 2024 it is 4xxppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there was about to be a vote on Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. And alongside that, there was also peak hype for Carbon Capture and Storage, which was being attacked by clued-up elements of the environment movement as an expensive distraction and boondoggle that wasn’t going to fix climate change. It was being attacked by the denialists as an expensive boondoggle that was not going to fix a non-existent problem. What’s a little bit interesting here is that a relatively senior Liberal, was willing to come out and say the same. Perhaps dog whistling to the denialists perhaps simply because it was the truth, that CCS is a pipe dream.
What we learn is that there’s lots of people criticising CCS, and CCS’s answer would have been to deliver the goods. But the technology is incredibly expensive. There’s not really a market for it. And it hasn’t worked.
What happened next? Well, the CPRS fell over and then so did CCS. The Liberals got back into power in 2013 and abolished the carbon price. And the rest is history…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Hello everyone. I am doing another seminar in the Sussex Energy Group’s Energy & Climate series.
On Tuesday 5th November from 1300hrs to 1400. It is free to attend, you just have to register.
It is based on work I’ve been doing since my book (did I mention I have a book out?) and tries to gaze into the crystal ball to see what might be coming… Keen to hear people’s comments, questions, thoughts, critiques..
.
The blurb for the seminar is here
Carbon Capture and Storage has been proposed and nearly with us for two decades. The rationale has shifted from saving the coal industry to industrial purposes and now the production of ‘blue hydrogen’ and even greenhouse gas removals. It is currently in the midst of one of its periodic hype cycles.
The UK has had a series of proposed pilot projects, crashed competitions and a recently repeated promise of $22bn in funding for construction of CCS infrastructure. This has raised the political temperature, and the fragile consensus in favour of it may not survive. How much can the last 20 years tell us about the next 5? Drawing on his recent book and developments since it was written, Marc Hudson will offer:
some metaphors for thinking about CCS (Schrodinger’s Cat and the T-1000 Terminator)
a very brief overview of the history to date and present status – both globally and in the UK
some possible scenarios around the politics, economics and physics for the UK in the coming 5 years
a set of important tasks for “non-captured” intellectuals and academics in the coming months and years.
I will talk for no more than 30 minutes, meaning that there’s at least 25 minutes for question and answer
You can see my previous two SEG seminars, from 2022.
March 8 2002: – Industrial Decarbonisation: where does it come from, where might it go?
Twenty two years ago, on this day, October 27th, 2002, some people fly off to the US and Canada.
Report of DTI International Technology Service Mission to the USA and Canada from 27th October to 7th November 2002
Carbon dioxide capture and storage : report of DTI International technology Service Mission to the USA and Canada from 27th October to 7th November 2002 / Advanced Power Generation Technology Forum ; Mission leader Nick Otter.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 373ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that CCS had been climbing the agenda for a few years, especially since it looked like the political negotiations around the Kyoto process were going nowhere. So you know, maybe throw your eggs in the technology basket and there were always these opportunities for nice conferences and PowerPoint slides and fun dinners and schmoozing. So it goes.
What we learn is that there’s always a new technology that’s going to save us. And that those technologies need “selling.”
What happened next, CCS started climbing in the popularity stakes. The Americans were throwing money at it with FutureGen. And then, years later, the Europeans and the Brits said that they were going to throw money at it. And here we are 23 years later. And how much C02 was actually being saved? Or stored?
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
You may have read a bit about Carbon Capture and Storage recently. CCS is (still) being used as a way to avoid asking really hard questions about our future as a species (that is not hyperbole). A thread.
1/13
200 yrs ago, in 1824, a French scientist, Fourier, proved that SOMETHING in the atmosphere was trapping some heat from the Sun. If not, the planet would be much much colder. 30 yrs later Eunice Foote and John Tyndall showed carbon dioxide (C02) was a ‘greenhouse gas’.
The basic problem is when humans burn oil, coal and gas (“fossil fuels”) for energy, heat, making stuff, carbon dioxide is released as a by-product. Levels of C02 in the atmosphere have gone from 280ppm 200 yrs ago to 422 today. And climbing. Heat is trapped.
CCS is supposed to stop some of the C02 getting into the atmosphere. But even if (and it is a HUGE IF) it worked perfectly, at scale, it would be merely slowing down the increase of C02 in the atmosphere. Again, C02 traps heat. Too much heat is Really Bad.
4/13
CCS as a set of technologies is simultaneously old and new (as I call it here – Schrodinger’s Cat of a technology.
In the UK, there was brief interest in CCS in the late 1980s, but it really only kicked up in early 2000s.
More funding and another competition followed. In November 2015 George Osborne, then Treasurer, dismissively kneecapped it. Industry was furious. No, FUCKING FURIOUS. It looked like CCS might be dead. Then came the Kipling Manoeuvre….
8/13
From 2018 to now, there has been rhetorical support for CCS. And endless consultations and dribs and drabs of (big) money. But the future is not clear.
9/13
My guesstimate fwiw is
a) some projects will be begun
b) there will be fierce opposition from some locals and NGOs
c) There will be very entrenched positions
d) The winner will be … ???
10/13
This matters because we have
a) Limited money
b) Policy bandwidth and
c) Even less time (actually, net zero time)
To sort all this out.
11/13
I will be trying to point out the gaps and silences in the positions of pro and anti-CCS types.
(My position – defo a case for industrial ccS, but oil & gas sector will use that as figleaf).
Thirteen years ago, on this day, October 19th, 2011,
On 19th October, 2011, the Government terminated negotiations with the ScottishPower consortium as the Government considered it could not agree a deal that would represent value for money (NAO, 2012). The first CCS competition ended without any winner.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 392ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that BP had been interested in using CCS on one of its projects in 2005. proposed it. They pulled the plug in 2007, because Treasury wouldn’t comply. Then a CCS competition had been established in November 2007, Gordon Brown launched it at a WWF event. And the idea was it would be up and running within a couple of years. Ha ha. The competition dragged on and dragged on and dragged on, eventually whittled down to only one interested company. And they’d only been doing it because they were going to be given loads of money to keep the stranded assets afloat. And even then, that didn’t come off. But a second competition was already waiting in the wings.
What we learn is that CCS has a long, long history of failure in the UK, of broken promises of delayed and then ended schemes. Hopefully by now I can point to my book?
What happened next was that a second competition was set up as was the UKCCS Research Centre, some money for workshops and networking and so forth. And then the competition came undone in November 2015… And then, well, you should buy my book!!
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Five years ago today (October 11 2019), the rules were amended – as they so often are – to allow for a new wheeze…
In 2019, Contracting Parties to the London Protocol adopted a resolution (LP.5(14)) to allow provisional application of an amendment to Article 6 of the Protocol to allow export of CO2 for storage in sub-seabed geological formations. Two or more countries can therefore agree to export CO2 for geological storage. To do so they must deposit a formal declaration of provisional application with the Secretary-General of IMO, and also notify IMO of any agreements and arrangements for permitting and responsibilities between the Parties, following the existing guidance. https://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/Pages/CCS-Default.aspx#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20Contracting%20Parties%20to,CO2%20for%20geological%20storage.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 411ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that CCS was becoming important for the rhetoric of mitigation, but there were various legal barriers. This helped remove one of them.
What we learn is that who is gonna let laws get in the way?
What happened next. The CCS bandwagon keeps trundling on. Too important to powerful actors not to.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
References
Wettestad et al 2023. ESG on Norway and Mongstad to Longship
A mere 17 years after the UK government first said it was indeed going to support Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), another bold (but vague) announcement has arrived. This one accompanied with a telephone number vague promise (£22 bn of taxpayer money spread over an alleged 25 years).
Reeves’ article – titled “Today, with our £22bn pledge for carbon capture, Labour’s green revolution for Britain begins “ – reads as if it were drafted by a ChatGPT knock-off trained entirely on industry press releases (“gamechanging technology” “4000 jobs“) and then ‘improved’ with the liberal and random sprinkling of sub-Blairite phonemes (“That’s what drives this government to do things differently. That’s the change we are offering. And that is the change we are determined to deliver.”)
Perhaps the general lesson is the extraordinary power of the fossil fuel lobby, able to get a chancellor who has taken body blows already for having a “treasury brain” and an aversion to any promises of public spending to come out so openly for a huge expenditure with such weak public support.
It’s not clear that it is much more than a confirmation of a similar announcement from the Tories, with confirmation that projects everyone knew were “winning” in the third competition for taxpayer support. As the ever-astute FT writers point out
“the three industrial sites receiving support to attach carbon capture technology to their projects fall short of the eight which entered negotiations with the government last year. The prospects of support are now unclear for the remainder.”
Before explaining some of the history and talking about what we can reasonably expect to happen next, I’d like to offer two ways of thinking about CCS.
First, take the famous thought-experiment of the physicist Schrodinger, in which a cat in a box can be thought of as both dead and alive simultaneously. CCS is, when its proponents want it to be, a mature, proven technology that just needs “policy certainty” (which mostly seems to be code for whopping great Research, Development and Deployment grants and subsidies and generous under-written-by-the-taxpayer ‘market’ mechanisms). At other times, when research money is being dispensed or decades of delay, under-delivery or downright failure need to be explained away, CCS is a nascent technology, deserving of additional patience and faith. Always dead and alive simultaneously.
Second, if the cat is too cliched, turn your attention to one of the only great Hollywood sequels, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. You will recall it is about a world under the threat of a man-made environmental catastrophe, but for the most part oblivious. CCS can be thought of as the liquid metal assassin. It’s able to shape shift at will (CCS has been a technology that would save the coal industry, then one that would reduce industrial emissions, then one that would enable the production of so-called ‘blue hydrogen’ and is now even part of sucking random air out of the atmosphere (Direct Air Capture). Like the liquid metal nemesis, it is also incredibly hard to kill. No matter how many failures it endures, there it is, impassive, gleaming, ready for another bout.
The super-short version of this history (and really, there’s a best-selling (1) and award-winning (2) book about this just waiting for your credit card details) is as follows
Man-made climate change first went properly viral in 1953. Oil companies have known about the possible problem of climate change for a long time. A Shell representative wrote an article in the New Scientist minimising it in…. Any takers? … October 1959.
In the early 1970s oil companies started -for entirely different reasons – capturing carbon dioxide and pushing it into oil wells. This was to push extra oil out so it could be sold and burned. This is known as “Enhanced Oil Recovery” and is still a large part of the business model for today’s CCS. The cannier among you may have noticed that doing this would not actually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being released from below the ground into the atmosphere. In so many ways CCS is a Shrodinger’s Cat of a “climate mitigation” technology
In the mid-1970s, an Italian physicist, Cesar Marchetti, proposed large scale CCS as a climate solution (with storage being done in the deep oceans). (See my letter in Private Eye). There was a momentary flurry of interest in CCS in 1989, as politicians responded to scientific and public concerns about “the greenhouse effect”, but they quickly realised it would be incredibly expensive, risky and complicated. Attention turned to “clean coal.” In one of life’s little ironies, exactly 31 years ago today (October 4, 1993, the newly-appointed head of the World Coal Institute was reported as saying that the move toward clean coal technologies would be stepped up in the next five years.
With the coming of the Kyoto Protocol it was obvious that eventually some sort of climate technologies (whether actually implemented or not) would be needed by the fossil fuel companies and their supporters. The Blair Government started making appreciative noises, but refused to support a BP proposal in 2005-7. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a competition to support development and deployment of face-saving…. Sorry, coal-saving technology. That competition fizzled out, but not before a junior Tory minister in the Coalition government told Parliament in June 2010 that
… the coalition Government are committed to carbon capture and storage, which will be a major plank in our efforts to decarbonise our energy supply by 2030; we are committed to the generation of 5 GW of CCS by 2020.
Another competition began. Almost exactly nine years ago (late 2015) Treasurer George Osborne spectacularly and sneakily pulled the rug on a mere 1 billion pound competition (this was back in those innocent pre-pandemic days when 1 billion was real money).
CCS could have died as a policy option in the UK. That it didn’t is down to a relatively small loose network of highly-motivated and skilled individuals who brought it back from the dead. (In my book I call this the Kipling Manoeuvre, for, well, reasons. Did I mention my book is for sale in no good bookshops, but you can order it from good bookshops and bad. Also, online.)
That Kipling process of recreating a consensus around CCS was basically complete by November 2018. The last 6 years have been a spectacular go-slow, of perseverating, consultationitis, head-scratching, and can-kicking. Even the hosting of a COP didn’t get the UK government to make a decision….
That’s a very UK-centric history (the clue is in the title of The Book). For an international perspective, there are other books, academic articles, et cetera. And then there is this video.
Burning the uncapturable Midnight Oil
In February 1990, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at about 353ppm, the Australian band Midnight Oil released a single “Blue Sky Mine”, also the title of the album.
It’s a banger.
It describes a corporate scandal around an asbestos mine. It will shock you to learn that the owners knew the dangers, but the workforce was cheap, disposable, and, well, what do you think happened?
Three lines come to mind
“They pay the truth makers…”
CCS is surrounded by armies of well-paid PR flaks, churning out soothing talking points. But they’re not the only truth makers. There are other people trusted to create “value-neutral” knowledge who may not always be quite so value-neutral as they want (everyone) to believe. There’s a rather interesting letter in today’s Financial Times…
The other lines – I will let you fill in the blanks – are
“And the company takes what the company wants.”
“And nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground”
What next? Expect “me too” and resistance. Accidents will happen
Four final predictions.
First, Scottish advocates of CCS will be unsurprised but fuming; always the bridesmaid… They might sing another Australian song “What About Me? “What about me? It isn’t fair. I don’t have enough, now I want my share”) and continues “And now I’m standing on the corner, All the world’s gone home Nobody’s changed, nobody’s been saved” I predict that the Scots will be singing it, lustily, via glossy reports, scientific papers and everything in between.
Second, the “anti-CCS” forces will grow, coalesce. Until now they have been relatively muted in the UK since a brief flurry in the late 2000s, when they killed off the idea of building new “capture-ready” coal-fired power plants..
Expect more of these sorts of statements and campaigns (I will add to the list below) and, of course, expect counter-attacks from CCS’s powerful advocates (“uninformed,” “NIMBY,” “Luddite,” “anti-progress,” “hypocritical” etc)
Three, there will be further delays and reversals, over policy, funding, deployment. Don’t count out battles over the path of carbon dioxide pipelines, or the other transport infrastructure.
Don’t be surprised if the “permanent” storage isn’t quite as certain as the blithe assurances would have you believe.
Finally. In 1990 the atmospheric blanket of heat-trapping carbon dioxide was 354 ppm. This year it hit a new record of 426. It is absolutely certain next year will be higher. All the CCS in the world, all the “Direct Air Capture” in the world (don’t even start me on that) will not change that, ever. CCS would at best slow down the acceleration of the thickening of the blanket, at great cost.
We have no idea what we are into, and we have no idea which consequences are going to come how fast in which order. Buckle up.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 399ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that despite FutureGen having failed, people were still banging on about CCS as The Way Forward. And were willing to put vast sums of taxpayers’ money where their mouths were…
What we learn is that not all pilot projects work. CCS advocates are remarkably schtum about Petra Nova, Boundary Dam and Gorgon. Instead they bleat on about Sleipner Field…
What happened next? Boundary Dam really hasn’t worked.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Twenty eight years ago, on this day, September 15th, 1996, a crucial part of the CCS publicity campaign came into existence.
The Sleipner Vest (West) field is used as a facility for carbon capture and storage (CCS).[1][8][9] It is the world’s first offshore CCS plant, operative since September 15, 1996.[10][11] The project, in the initial year, proved insecure due to sinking top sand.[10] However, after a re-perforation and an installation of a gravel layer in August 1997, CCS operations were secure.[10] As of 2018, one million tonnes of CO2 have been transported and injected into the formation yearly since 1996.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 363ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that in 1991, the Norwegian government had passed a carbon tax. And this gave an incentive for the state owned oil company, Statoil, (the clue is in the name) to set up injection of CO2 into a depleted North Sea oil and gas field known as Sleipner. Also, the oil and gas they were extracting had high CO2 anyway, so they were going to need to ‘sweeten’ it anyway.
And this is really the poster child for CCS alleged as a proof of concept and is still being trotted out as “CCS works” almost 30 years later.
What we learn is that government policy can drive innovation and corporate behaviour if it’s well-designed with few loopholes, one or two incentives, etc. And it’s within the corporate skill set and their imaginations and so, it came to pass.
What happened next. Sleipner Field kept getting used as the poster child for CCS for the next 30 years because there are precious few other actually successful projects that bear much scrutiny: looking at Kemper, looking at you Boundary Dam, looking at you Gorgon.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2024 it is 424ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the year before the Senate had called for a report about CCS and Australia. This was in the broader context of CCS being pushed by Howard since about 2004 (earlier if you count the PMSEIC stuff).
What we learn is that these sorts of investigations throw up reports of varying quality and usefulness.
What happened next? The CCS bandwagon kept going for a couple of years before it finally the wheels came off in late 2010.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
