CCUS is another tech dead end

IF it was not for an email I received about a week ago crowing about how "Space-based solar energy is the key to future energy production" (No, really. I'm not making that up), carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) would still be at the top of my list of dumb technological solutions to climate change, even ahead of small modular nuclear reactors, and my regular readers know how I feel about those.CCUS sounds like voodoo when someone tries to explain it, and in its limited real-world applications has made a very poor showing of itself. Yet people whom one would think ought to know better, such as the climate and energy experts at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), seem to be enchanted by it, so it probably deserves more attention, if only to try to prevent the world from wasting more time and money.For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, CCUS is a catch-all term for a variety of technologies that extract carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere or from emission sources and either store it in some safe fashion or make use of it for other products or applications. The purest (and easiest to develop) form of CCUS is vegetation such as forests, which naturally extract large amounts of CO2 from the air and replace it with smaller amounts of oxygen and other non-harmful gases — provided, of course, the trees or other vegetation serving as a carbon sink are left alone, and not cut down or burned, which releases their stored CO2.Manmade technologies are relatively new and thus not quite as elegant as what nature provides, but development is proceeding at a rapid pace. CO2 extracted from the atmosphere or emissions can be concentrated in gaseous or frozen solid form (dry ice) for industrial uses, stored underground by pumping it into disused oil, gas and geothermal wells, or processed into more complex chemical compounds such as ethanol or ethylene. As of now, the most common and least expensive form of CCUS is extraction from emissions at natural gas processing plants, with the sequestered CO2 mostly being "stored underground"; according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), these systems account for about 65 percent of existing CCUS capacity worldwide.The "stored underground" description is a bit vague and perhaps intentionally so; in reality, more than 90 percent of all captured CO2 is used in the extraction of more oil and gas from the ground. In a literal sense, the CO2 is indeed "stored underground," but omitting the reason why it is stored underground seems rather misleading.Two unsolvable flawsThere are two basic reasons why CCUS is essentially useless and most likely will remain so no matter how enthusiastically it is embraced by development institutions and policymakers. First, its contribution to reducing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is inconsequential. As of the end of 2022, the IEA reported that there were 35 operating CCUS facilities worldwide, which are capable of removing a total of "almost" 45 million metric tons of CO2 per year. At the time of that report, another six CCUS projects were in the works — had obtained "positive final investment decisions," is how IEA put it — which, when completed, would add another 6.5 million MT of carbon removal capacity annually for a total, sometime around 2030, of perhaps 53 million MT.Unfortunately, global annual CO2 emissions as of the end of 2022 were about 37.9 gigatons and growing at about 0.9 percent per year. Current CCUS capacity is just 0.11 percent of annual CO2 emissions, and even under the IEA's most optimistic scenario, an increase in operational facilities from the current 35 to 200, removing a total of 220 million MT of CO2 annually by 2030, CCUS would only account for 0.54 to 0.58 percent of annual emissions. In order to simply keep up with emissions, disregarding the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere, the world would need to add about 155 new CCUS facilities every year after the initial 200 were in operation.The second insurmountable obstacle to making CCUS a worthwhile investment in time and money is its enormous direct and indirect energy requirements. Separating CO2 from atmospheric air or emissions from a particular source requires a catalytic electrolysis process. That, in turn, requires a lot of two things that are not particularly kind to the environment and produce a lot of emissions of their own: electricity and rare metals that must either be mined or produced through other complicated industrial processes.Powering CCUS facilities with renewable energy would solve the larger part of that problem, but unfortunately, most existing CCUS technology does not run on renewable energy; the 65 percent of existing capacity that is connected to natural gas processing certainly does not. So far, there is not any current research on the carbon footprint of CCUS technology, so putting an exact dimension on it is not yet possible, but the situation is obviously not a good one. This is particularly true when one considers the use of almost all of the captured CO2 for oil and gas extraction; whatever minor contribution to CO2 reduction CCUS provides is canceled out, or more likely exceeded, by the new emissions from the oil and gas that are produced.Just as with plastic, the only real solution to an excessive and growing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is to drastically reduce emissions, something that so far has been an insurmountable challenge for the world. When the world finally accepts that we cannot have our cake and eat it, too, false solutions such as CCUS will be properly dismissed. I wouldn't hold my breath until that happens, [email protected]