Fallacy 4: Carbon Capture and Storage Is a Viable Strategy to Combat Climate Change
This fallacy, most popular with those in the fossil fuel industry and those of a more market-oriented and politically conservative bent, is no more realistic than the previous three.
An examination of the history, effectiveness, and efficiency of carbon capture and storage suggests that it is a far more limited approach to regulating greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere than proponents suggest.
As we examine the validity of these fallacies, we should be reminded of a quote variously attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and Ronald Reagan: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, but what we know that isn’t so.”
https://climatechangedispatch.com/four-climate-fallacies-green-schemes-fake-fixes/
Yet, expenditure on Carbon Capture (enabling fossil fuel industries to persist) is happening under a Labour government:
Amplifying voices across sectors
UK announces £22 billion investment in carbon capture and storage
The UK government has announced a significant £22 billion investment in carbon capture and storage projects, focusing on developing two carbon capture clusters in Merseyside and Teesside. This initiative aims to stimulate private investment and generate jobs in these industry-heavy areas.
https://business.itn.co.uk/uk-announces-22-billion-investment-in-carbon-capture-and-storage/
Environmental disaster:
Carbon capture project greenwashes waste incinerator expansion
Posted by peoplenature123
A carbon capture project is being used to greenwash the expansion of one of the UK’s largest waste incinerators, at Belvedere, Kent.
Cory Topco, which owns one incinerator and is building another, says it will capture greenhouse gases from burning waste, liquefy them, and send them by ship to Yorkshire, to be piped under the North Sea and stored.
□ Cory promises to capture more than 90% of its incinerators’ greenhouse gas emissions – but no carbon capture plant on earth ever got close to that.
□ Cory has an agreement with Viking CCS to to offtake its captured carbon in Yorkshire and bury it under the North Sea – but there are doubts about how, and whether, that could work. Competition authority officials, who say non-pipeline schemes should not get government funding, could cause problems.
□ Cory claims it will generate electricity to power 371,000 homes – but is more likely to put less than half of that into the grid. The CCS plant would have a devastating impact, though – doing irreparable damage to the Crossness nature reserve.
□ The incinerator expansion will encourage local authorities to send waste for burning that could be avoided or recycled, reinforcing fossil-heavy economic throughput and putting the impact-light “circular economy” ever further out of reach.
□ Cory hopes the project will be funded by the government’s multi-billion-pound carbon capture subsidy schemes – money that could be spent more effectively on genuine decarbonisation measures.
Doubts about Cory’s claims it can capture 90% of greenhouse gas emissions at Belvedere arise from carbon capture and storage (CCS)’s 40-year global history of failure.
Cory would use post-combustion carbon capture technology, that pulls carbon dioxide out of the flue gases (i.e. gases coming out of chimneys) with amine solvents. Only one company in the world – SaskPower, which operates the Boundary Dam coal-fired power station in Saskatchewan, Canada – uses this method. In more than ten years of operation it has not once hit its target of capturing 90% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Boundary Dam’s average capture rate was about 50%, not 90%, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found. Less than 65%, said separate analysis by Carbon Tracker.
Some CCS has higher capture rates, but only at gas processing plants, where the CO2 is easier to collect, because it comprises such a big proportion (up to 90%) of the flue gases. Even these plants struggle to make the process pay: usually they do so by pumping the CO2 back into oil fields, to increase the pressure underneath oil deposits and make them easier to produce … which obviously defeats any decarbonisation purpose.
Greens respond to carbon capture plans by Paul Corry
4 October 2024
Reacting to the government announcement of investment in carbon capture and storage projects, Green MP and party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said:
“Labour has spent too long listening to the pleadings of energy companies for major public investment in unproven technological solutions like carbon capture that simply won’t deliver the immediate real change we need.
“This announcement is no substitute for the urgent and immediate investment needed in home and business insulation to cut energy use and the increased renewables funding that is badly needed to meet future energy needs.”
https://greenparty.org.uk/2024/10/04/greens-respond-to-carbon-capture-plans/
borderslynn 