Why is carbon capture seen as an attractive solution

Today there are approximately 20 operational large-scale carbon capture facilities around the world, and several countries such as Norway, China, UK, US, Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia are increasing their support for CCS.

Despite an accelerating transition towards a renewable future, alternative fuels- and energy sources alone are unlikely to sufficiently reduce carbon emissions.

Even though most new investments in hydrogen today are placed in green hydrogen, we believe that blue hydrogen with carbon capture also holds great potential for future applications. CCS is in no way exclusively bound to the production of hydrogen, there are several applications extending beyond this. However, they all have the same overall purpose: to make energy consumption cleaner. Contact us! Share information about your application and operational requirements, irrespective of project maturity.

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It's likely that Longannet coal-fired power station just north of Edinburgh will become one of the first in Europe to have its flue gases cleansed of CO2, the gas pumped a few hundred miles north for disposal.

To aid in research that might pave the way for all this, a number of companies including Shell, BP, E. It funded the Edinburgh study; and another consortium member, Scottish Power, funds Stuart Haszeldine's professorship. He told me that the university accepts funds on the basis that the companies involved have no say in what research is done; and as all the data is in the public domain thanks to the Italian registry, anyone could go through the numbers and check the stats.

It's interesting that people are bringing up this question in public; but it has to be said that as things stand, public acceptance isn't the main obstacle to the wider deployment of CCS. Capturing carbon dioxide from the tail of a power station means you have to burn more coal, produce more energy, and so spend more money. Power companies could be induced to implement CCS by a high carbon price. They could be forced to by legislation, as is theoretically the case in the UK.

The Scottish consortium website has a great interactive map giving locations and a few details about CCS projects around the world. Clicking through the ones that are actually in operation gives you insights into what's behind the big projects that are actually up and running - and into another environmental problem that their existence creates. Other climate-adjacent industries, such as electric vehicles and solar photovoltaics, have grown rapidly in the past decade.

But Lashof pointed out the other industries offer benefits outside of their climate impact. Wind, solar and electric cars were all able to start small and build on niche demand.

This in part explains why CCS boosters have so much enthusiasm for the idea of finding ways to monetize captured CO2. Barring the miraculous passage of a carbon tax, it might also be about the only way to get crucial climate tech off the ground.

There have been some successes. In Switzerland, for example, a company called Climeworks is sucking CO2 directly out of the air and selling it to soda companies and agricultural interests. But even those applications have to compete with naturally occurring CO2 extracted from the ground. In other cases, companies can just buy CO2 as a cheap byproduct from chemical manufacturing, he told me. Awkwardly, the most successful market for captured CO2 has been … extracting more fossil fuels , experts told me.

Oil and gas companies buy CO2 extracted from the emissions of coal-fired power plants and pump it into depleted wells to help loosen more trapped hydrocarbons. It makes sense as a way to store CO2 — if you know the geology could reliably hold the oil and gas, then you know it can hold the CO2 as well. There are some policies that will likely help CCS solve its market problems. In , Congress passed a tax credit that rewards companies for each metric ton of carbon dioxide they lock away.

That, combined with new California laws that also reward companies for carbon sequestration, might make CCS truly profitable for the first time, said Geoff Holmes, head of business development at Carbon Engineering, a Canadian carbon management company. But if these policies help a few additional CCS projects succeed, Holmes and Lashof think that could convince politicians to pass more laws that make sequestering CO2 valuable.