Capturing Carbon: Silver Bullet or Fool’s Gold?
And do the environmental movement and EPA actually disagree?
One of the most contentious topics in the green transition is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), with uncommonly sharp internal disagreement for something that might seem like a clear win: When we burn fossil fuels, we have technology to filter out most of their emissions before they enter the atmosphere. That is, undoubtedly, good technology to have.
The debate therefore focuses primarily on the trade-offs and secondary effects.
Why CCS is Good
There is no pathway where we remain under 2ºC of warming without some form of carbon capture.1 Given that we have, in fact, almost surely already locked in more than 2ºC of warming, the best models available believe we can only remain on a net-zero pathway if we use CCS to decarbonize gas and thereby phase out coal much faster.
So CCS is good because CCS is a critical technology standing between humanity and overshooting 2ºC. Some people — mainly fossil fuel supporters — would also argue that CCS is vital because it allows fossil fuels to remain a viable bridge energy source, decarbonizing fossil energy enough to make it acceptable for another 20-30 years.
Many (again, often fossil fuel apologists) would also argue CCS will be crucial to generating so-called “blue hydrogen” — that is, hydrogen created with gas plants that use CCS to mitigate emissions. And blue and green hydrogen (green being the kind created with renewable energy) are high-risk but potentially critical fuels in decarbonization. (Here, see a recent piece by Adam Tooze that examines the dilemma of hydrogen in much greater depth, as I may in a future installment.)
So, proponents argue, CCS will mean we can retain much of our current (fossil-oriented) energy infrastructure and cheap sources of generation without the same level of discomfort — we can keep burning carbon and pulling it back out of the air, and well, gee whiz, at that point, do we even really need to quit fossil fuels?
Why CCS is Bad
And that is why CCS is considered bad: Many environmentalists see it as a trap, laid by a patient, powerful fossil fuel industry that has no intention of decarbonizing or playing any part in an energy transition. CCS, critics say, will stall the urgent transition. It will seduce policymakers into delaying or shrinking investments in the new transmission lines that renewables need disproportionately while stringing along2 the fossil fuel infrastructure we urgently need to decommission.
CCS, then, is an illusion, one that pretends to help keep power cheap while making it clean — all while actually displacing our efforts away from the truly cheap, truly clean renewable sources that should be the backbone of our power sector.
CCS, moreover, is a new-ish and unsteady technology, not currently used in hardly any fossil-fired plants and potentially prone to the kinds of leaks that make methane (“natural”) gas worse than coal. (CCS operations have historically abated millions of metric tons of CO2. Globally, the fossil fuel industry emits tens of billions annually.) Many environmentalists and climate-hawk policymakers therefore think that if you buy into CCS, then they have a bridge to sell you.
To an extent, however, the EPA appears to disagree. And I think I agree with EPA.
What’s EPA Doing?
The U.S. EPA has authority under the Clean Air Act (section 111(d), or § 111, for short) to regulate power sector greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). In fact, it’s required to. But previous efforts like Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) have been famously rejected by the Supreme Court for effectively requiring generation shifting (i.e. replacing coal and gas with renewables). As Justice Kagan put it in West Virginia v. EPA, “the Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency [the EPA] — the decisionmaker on climate policy.”
Obviously, we will still have to shift generation to hit net-zero. But because of the Court’s rejection of the CPP in West Virginia, EPA must now develop a standard that achieves its legal obligation of pursuing the “best system of emissions reductions” at the plant level, instead of requiring sector-wide generation-shifting.
Enter CCS. Under § 111, EPA can rely on “adequately demonstrated” technologies so long as they’re not exorbitantly expensive. As noted, CCS arguably isn’t terribly well-demonstrated. But the Global CCS Institute (surely a neutral source) asserts that CCS “is a proven technology and has been in safe, commercial operation for 45 years.” Among the Institute’s members is a who’s who of fossil companies, from BP to Chevron and a profusion of their friends.
So fossil fuels like CCS. They say it works. They say carbon capture will keep them viable into the future and help green their dirtiest of industries. The catch? CCS is very, very expensive. Estimates put its current cost at almost $90/ton. So the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), in a savvy move, boosted tax credits for CCS to $85/ton. Now, arguably, no catch.
So when the EPA set its new § 111 emission standards, it decided to call fossil fuels’ bluff. If fossil fuels were so thrilled about CCS, and the government was going to make it cheap(er), then EPA was going to let the industry operate in the corner it had backed itself into. Time for fossil fuels to perform like they could capture 90% of their emissions. Or enjoy an early, involuntary retirement.
New baseload gas plants must, by 2035, capture 90% of their CO2. Bam. New intermediate load gas built must, by 2032, cut emissions by blending growing percentages of hydrogen in with gas, ratcheting up through 2038. Bam. Big existing baseload gas plants would face the same timeline. Bam.
Will the New Rules Work?
This is exciting stuff. To be sure, it has gaps: According to estimates from the Natural Resources Defense Council, EPA’s current § 111 proposal would cover a mere 7% of existing gas plants, accounting for just 30% of power sector gas emissions. The § 111 rule would apply no CCS requirements at all on coal plants that retire before 2040. And the coal plants retiring pre-2040 and thus facing weaker standards are disproportionately near Black and Indigenous communities.
But EPA estimates these paltry new rules alone would avoid tens of thousands of premature deaths and “deliver up to $85 billion in climate and public health benefits over the next two decades” (suggesting how seriously air pollution harms human health). And EPA anticipates 617 million metric tons of CO2 would be avoided from 2028-2042 by regulating existing coal and new gas (though that 14-year emissions reduction would be equivalent to just 10% of US emissions in 2022).
Still, perhaps you predicted what happened nonetheless: Utilities don’t like the sound of this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad regulation. Legal & climate experts anticipate energetic litigation (no pun intended). And fossil fuels, after cheerleading CCS as a reason to believe they need not change their business model, have shown their true colors: They only wanted to use it as cover, not as a basis for the ways they get regulated.
My Take on CCS
So, is CCS good, bad, both, or neither? My take is it’s good CCS exists even (or especially) if we barely build any. In other words, we want it to be widespread enough for courts to believe EPA is right to call it “adequately demonstrated” for the purposes of holding utilities to a CCS-based standard. Beyond that, CCS should be a cost fossil fuels/utilities increasingly bear themselves, without government subsidies. That way, the astonishing cost-competitiveness of renewables will cause them to win out, as the cost of solar falls “by 13% year-on-year, and wind by 9%” — rates of innovation fossil fuels can’t even dream of.
Some extremely smart people think that, supercharged by huge government tax credits, CCS might actually happen as costs fall (not least because the phase-in timeline is so sedate). And if that’s true, then I’m a little worried. The IRA tax credits are probably a bit too generous — or perhaps, pyrrhically, they’re so generous that EPA’s new rule will get upheld in the courts.
The best-case scenario, however, is an immediate end to new fossil fuel infrastructure, not another subsidy of the industry, allowing it to pollute (at lower levels) into the lungs and atmosphere of yet another generation. CCS tax credits, then, are a dangerous bargain as we seek to set regulations in the present that may haunt us in the future.
So I guess I like that CCS exists, but only because I think fossil fuel companies are liars whose bluffs must be called and who should shudder at shouldering the social cost of their business when they’re (someday) caught between prohibitive costs and obsolescence.
Direct air capture (DAC), which is more relevant to legacy emissions, is different from CCS and not at issue for our purposes.
Again, the linked conversation is more DAC than CCS, but the “stringing along” effect is in the same vein.
Reminds me of the way the plastics manufacturing industry lulled US consumers into thinking plastics were "environmentally sound" when they added recycling codes to plastic packaging. However, since the government did not require the industry to set up the infrastructure to actually recycle those numbered plastics, most of them get dumped into landfills anyway.