People don’t believe me when I tell them that the world is completely failing to address climate change, and that the worst scientific predictions are going to come true as a result. Typically, they’ll point to carbon capture technology as one of the innovations that will not only save us, but allow humanity to keep doing what it is doing without even so much as an inconvenience or uncomfortable moment.
However, carbon capture is a lot like recycling in that it is hypothetically a good idea, but because it was implemented by a fossil fuel industry (or adjacent industry) that is desperate to fool the public so it can keep on raking in enormous profits, it is actually an elaborate ruse.
Related: How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
The Petra Nova plant in Thompson, Texas (outside of Houston) used to be the only Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS) plant in the entire USA, but then it closed near the end of January, just barely making it to four years of operation. The details of its operating model — and the reason it shut down — illustrate quite effectively that CSS was an elaborate ruse meant to convince comfortable liberals that the problem of climate change was being addressed, while basically not doing anything about climate change.
When I imagine CSS, I think of the carbon being converted to little black cubes, and then maybe they sell them as dice or something. Of course, in my imagination, the sequestration process doesn’t take any extra energy — it might even be powered by the wind or solar. That’s not what was happening at all.
In reality, the Petra Nova plant was a complex made up of four coal-fired power plants and a smaller natural gas plant. Only one of the four coal-fired power plants was using CSS, and the CSS process was powered by the natural gas plant. The “sequestered” carbon wasn’t turned into little cubes, but rather the scrubbers recovered carbon gas that was then used to pump into an oil field; this process increased the amount of oil that could be extracted from the fields where it was used. I don’t know whether the gas was able to escape after being used in this way, but my guess is that they didn’t care whether it did or not, so it probably did.
This is capitalism, so the whole project had to be “financially sustainable” which means that when the price of oil plummeted due to the pandemic, they shut down the CSS process completely — not that it matters, because it wasn’t ever really sequestering any carbon. Now, renewable energy has become cheap enough that it no longer makes sense to run coal-fired plants at all, making the entire “clean coal” propaganda campaign from the right wing all the more absurd.
Let me just emphasize: Because the CSS process was powered by a natural gas plant that didn’t use CSS, and because the recovered gasses are just injected into an oil field (and ultimately re-released) and thus used to extract more oil than otherwise would have been extracted, CSS actually produces more carbon emissions than would have been produced without it. It’s a really bad joke.
Here is a more detailed article about the Petra Nova plant by Molly Taft, published at Gizmodo.
I don’t want you to give up hope that we can do something about climate change (although there’s no longer any hope of “stopping” it — we can only potentially keep it from killing us all at this point). What I hope you take away from the Petra Nova ruse (and the recycling ruse) is that capitalism will always fail to do the right thing. Solutions to climate change exist, but they exist outside of capitalism. If we continue to put capital in charge of climate, it will kill us all.