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.
Eighteen years ago, on this day, June 30th, 2006, the fantasy technology gets an investigation,
Friday 30 June 2006 the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation announced an inquiry into the science and application of geosequestration technology in Australia
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 382ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that since the Prime Minister’s Science Engineering and Industry Council in 1999, geo sequestration in Australia had been in favour. The Coal 21 plan, Coal 21 conferences and so forth. And so, some senators decided it was time to start taking a closer look at what CCS might in fact, be able to achieve if everything went swimmingly.
What we learn is that give them enough time and – bless ‘em – Parliamentarians will start demanding that the right questions are asked.
What happened next? The report was delivered a year later. CCS died in 2010, but has since been revived – it’s too useful a fantasy to stay dead…
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 373.5ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that everyone was talking about carbon capture and storage. And its cousins. Direct Air Capture and BioEnergy Carbon Capture and Storage found their start this early date, at least conceptually. And, of course, it was our old friends at IIASA who posted this. They never met a geoengineering technological fix that they didn’t approve of. That’s who these people are, for better or for worse. Can’t blame them for being what they are.
What we learn is that technocrats gonna technocrat, to channel Ms Swift.
What happened next? There’ll be another almost 15 years before BECCS started being taken really seriously. And that was in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement where the warning bell was ringing ever louder. And rather than reach for fundamental social transformation, which they don’t know how to do, and would force them to admit that the last 35 years had been worse than useless and wasted, they double down on the techno, because they can do no other.
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.
Seventeen years ago, on this day, March 26th, 2007, the broken clocks at the Lavoisier Group (a denialist outfit) were right about CCS, with an article in the Brisbane Courier Mail denouncing it as a boondoggle that would not ‘work’ but would waste a lot of money.
Last month Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd announced Labor’s National Clean Coal Initiative.
Roughly speaking, the term clean coal refers to various technologies for removing carbon dioxide from coal when it is used to generate electricity, both before and after combustion occurs. The term encompasses carbon capture and storage technologies.
Rudd’s policy commits $500 million of taxpayer funds on the development of these technologies, with the proviso that each taxpayer dollar must be matched by two private sector dollars.
Rudd also proclaimed that Labor would establish an emissions trading scheme, set renewable energy targets, develop plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, convene a summit on climate change and ratify the Kyoto protocol.
Apart from ratifying an obsolete international treaty and organising yet another Canberra talkfest, Labor’s policy of subsidising corporations, making grandiose plans and setting impressive-sounding targets is eerily similar to existing Government policy.
The Howard Government happily boasts about Australia meeting its Kyoto targets and has already set up a taskforce to examine emissions trading schemes.
Its Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund has committed taxpayer funds of $500 million for research, with the proviso that each taxpayer dollar must be matched by—you guessed it—two private sector dollars. Additional funding is planned for future years.
Robson, A. 2007. Clean coal is all hot air. Courier Mail, March 26
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that a few days before the ACTU had been in the news, promoting CCS. And everyone was talking about CCS; the Lavoisier Group were keen to try to debunk it.
What we learn from this is that just because they’re climate denialists and idiots, doesn’t mean they’re wrong about the plausibility of a technology, even if it is being pushed as a solution for a problem that they don’t believe exists. Stopped clocks right twice a day and all that.
What happened next The Lavoisier Group, which was essentially Ray Evans and his mates funded by Hugh Morgan, kept going and were pretty effective at what they did. This was also in the lead up to Labor Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd‘s conference in Parliament as opposition leader on March 31 2007 when he said that “climate change is the great moral challenge of our time.”
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 years ago, on this day, March 24th, 2004, all that nonsense about “clean coal” got a boost.
LAST Wednesday Federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane launched COAL21, a plan of action aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions arising from the use of coal in electricity generation.
O’Neill, M. (2004) Coal industry’s plans to clean up its act should not be lightly dismissed .Canberra Times, March 30.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 377ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Liberal Prime Minister John Howard had pulled Australia out of the Kyoto negotiations in 2002. And therefore, technology-centric so-called solutions, such as CCS were flavour of the month. There was an Energy White Paper on the way. And it was a battle between fossil fuels and renewables. Things like Coal21 provide nice talking points, and sources of sound bites and images for supporters of the status quo to pretend matters are in hand.
What we learn is that much of what seems to be the official government policy aimed at making everyone’s lives better, especially Vorsprung durch Technik, is in fact, short-term PR stunts, where it really doesn’t matter if it comes off or not. It only has to last until slightly beyond the next election. And as long as it’s all plausibly deniable, then the politicians and funders are largely happy.
What happened next
Coal21 had some conferences. And then various projects were announced and didn’t eventuate or were failures even under their own terms – looking at you Gorgon. But that’s okay because their success or failure in the real world was kind of irrelevant. They were there primarily to support the continued existence of the fossil fuel industry.
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 years ago, on this day, February 17th, 2004, CCS hype really got going.
JUDGING by the heavy hitters attending a conference on the Gold Coast this week, geosequestration is about to get a substantial workover in Australia in the next few years.
Geosequestration is the capture of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and placing them underground. To some environmentalists the concept is about as popular as toxic waste.
For Australia’s biggest export industry, coal, geosequestration may be the difference between death and survival.
Wilson, N. 2004 Turning coal clean and green. The Australian, February 21
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 378ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that from about 1999/2000 oil and gas companies and their crumb maidens had started being enthusiastic about technology, especially carbon capture and storage as a way of legitimising the ongoing digging up transporting, selling and burning of thermal coal. This was especially important for Queensland and New South Wales (Victoria’s brown coal is unexportable).
What we learn is that you can wave a new technology, however implausible under people’s noses, and they’ll come trotting, squealing with delight, thinking that there’ll be another trough for them to stick their snouts in. The song remains the same.
What happened next, the promises around CCS kept going until 2009/10. Reality intervened, physics intervened, economics intervened. The whole promise thing went away again. And then came back 10 years later, because, well… what else has the fossil fuel industry got?
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.
