Pearls and Irritations

Carbon Capture and Storage, nothing but an inadequate fig leaf for obscene government endorsed corporate practices. Direct Air Capture may play a useful climate role in a few decades. Banks still lending trillions to fossil fuel companies.

Capturing carbon: where are we? Part 2 of 2

Last week I described the difference between absorbing CO2 at its point of production (Carbon Capture and Storage – CCS) and drawing it out of the air (Direct Air Capture – DAC). I then presented evidence that both approaches are technologically immature and expensive and that neither will make any contribution to controlling global warming during the next decade which is the overwhelming priority at the moment.

This week I focus on current plans for expansion of CCS and DAC.

The International Energy Agency has identified existing, under construction and planned CCS projects that will become operational between 2022 and 2030 (see below). At present, the vast majority, not surprisingly, are still being planned but even if they all come to fruition, it is projected that by 2030 only 320 million tonnes of CO2 will be captured each year. The biggest increase in capture will occur in the power and heat industry.

Global planned CCS capacity in million tonnes of CO2 (Mt CO2) per year

A back of the envelope calculation indicates that in the ten years from 2021-2030, CCS will capture a total of about 1,600 million tonnes of CO2. Yippee! that 1.6 billion tonnes is going to make a real dent in the probable emission of something like 400 billion tonnes of CO2 over the same period.

In summary, CCS is a combination of technological optimism trumping the evidence, corporate lies and profiteering, and political capture and cowardice.

As for Direct Air Capture of carbon dioxide, it is thought that each DAC unit will at some future time be able to extract about one million tonnes of CO2 from the air per year. At current emission rates that will require 40,000 DAC units working, and consuming energy, all year round just to cancel out each year’s emissions – i.e. without making any impression on all the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere, put there mainly in recent decades.

DAC technology does, however, begin to look as though it might have a use once we have reduced emissions to 10-20% of current levels, provided all the DAC units are powered with renewable energy.

The bottom line is:

• stop burning fossil fuels in the next decade
• minimise all greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible
• judiciously use nature to mop up as much of the CO2 in the atmosphere as possible
• if necessary, use CCS to catch the residual emissions from hard-to-reduce industries until they also can be eliminated
• don’t let CCS be a ragged fig leaf covering obscene failures of industries and governments to actually reduce the production of CO2 (see for instance Chevron’s Gorgon gas project off the coast of WA), and
• keep developing DAC as it probably will be needed at some stage after 2050 to draw CO2 out of the air to correct an overshoot beyond 1.5^o

If you missed it, David Shearman’s contribution to the CCS issue in P&I earlier this week is well worth reading.

Banks still lending trillions to fossil fuel companies

In the seven years since the Paris Agreement was signed at the end of 2015, the world’s 60 largest banks have lent or underwritten US$5.5 trillion to fossil fuel companies. Compared with the previous year, in 2022 the total amount fell by 16% but this is partly attributable to the companies being awash with cash as a result of the huge profits generated by the war in Ukraine.

The principal lenders were Morgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America who collectively provided a quarter of the finance. Australian banks were far from innocent bystanders but were well down the list: ANZ (US$22 billion), NatWest (US$17 billion), Westpac (US$9 billion) and Commonwealth (US$8 billion).

The size, reach and influence of the fossil fuel industry globally is reflected in the list of fossil fuel recipients which runs into the thousands. Indeed, the five well-known and main recipients of the banks’ money, Exxon (US$77 billion), Saudi Arabian Oil Company (US$52 billion), BP (US$48 billion), Shell (US$43 billion) and Total (US$35 billion), received less than 5% of the total.

The banks themselves like to tell us how their lending policies are in line with the Paris goals (a dubious claim at best) and that they are increasing their financing to renewable energy (correct), but, as I keep saying, the reality is that it won’t matter how much we increase the funding and generation of renewable energy until we start dramatically reducing the use of fossil fuels and the production of greenhouse gases. That is the only metric that really matters.

Inside Climate News has a rather more nuanced commentary on the bank lending data.

James Hutton and the abyss of time

Four hundred million years ago there were fish in the sea and plants were beginning to colonise the land but that was as far as evolution had progressed.

A little over 200 years ago, while Arthur Phillip and his charges were busily establishing the physical and social foundations of 21^st century Australia, James Hutton, was equally busily observing the rocks on his farm in Scotland. His conclusion that the 6,000 year biblical history of the Earth could not be correct transformed science, challenged long-held beliefs and ‘burst the boundaries of time’. Needless to say, it didn’t make him popular with the church or scientists.

Hutton, the Founder of Modern Geology (although it’s doubtful that the word had entered English at the time), went looking for stronger proof of his theory and found it on the coast at Siccar Point about 50km east of Edinburgh. There he discovered an ‘unconformity’,

a junction between two radically different rock formations where tens of millions of years had passed without leaving any rock record. The yellow line in the picture below (‘Hutton’s Unconformity’) marks the junction between the lower rocks that formed around 430 million years ago and the upper ones that weren’t laid down until about 370 million years ago.

The story of Hutton’s discovery is nicely told on location at Siccar Point in ‘The man who discovered the ‘abyss of time’, a 12 minute BBC video. Towards the end, David Farrier, one of the hosts, observes the nearby cement factory and nuclear power station and reflects: ‘So many, not just human generations, but species have not left any trace in the book of the Earth. But we’ve begun to write our names in the densest, most terrible ink in this book. And I think that’s what sets us apart in our relationship with deep time – is that we are a part of it in a way that no other generation ever has been.’

What if?

On what potential event did EO Wilson in 1987 predicate the following catastrophic scenario?

‘If [X happened], I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months. Most of the fishes, amphibians, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and with them the physical structure of the majority of the forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world. The earth would rot. As dead vegetation piled up and dried out, narrowing and closing the channels of the nutrient cycles, other complex forms of vegetation would die off, and with them the last remnants of the vertebrates. The remaining fungi, after enjoying a population explosion of stupendous proportions, would also perish. Within a few decades the world would return to the state of a billion years ago, composed primarily of bacteria, algae, and a few other very simple multicellular plants.’

For an examination of the circumstances that might lead to this (admittedly not imminent but nonetheless plausible) future event, see this four part article.

Coronation? Who, what, where?

When India gained independence in 1947 there were tens of thousands of tigers in the wild. Following independence, trophy hunting of tigers expanded beyond the previous colonial elite and by the early 1970s there were only 1,800 tigers left (cheetahs had been wiped out completely). The Indian government initiated Project Tiger which involved anti-poaching measures (although poaching still occurs), relocation of villages to expand tiger reserves and improving the reserves. Fifty years later, the number of reserves has increased from nine to 53, the area included has grown from 14,000 to 75,000 square kilometres, and the number of tigers has expanded to just less than 3,200. During the same period India’s population has quadrupled.

In fairness to Chuck and Cammie, I doubt that they will ever be shot like Liz and Pip below.