Vested interests: fossil-fuel fans will use IPCC report to peddle carbon capture scam

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report to be released this evening is expected to show the need for far greater urgency in efforts to keep the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, and the severity of climate change impacts already being inflicted around the world, fossil-fuel industries will see the report as an opportunity, not a threat.

That’s because the stronger the case for climate action, the more fossil-fuel interests will push for carbon capture and storage (CCS) as requiring massive and urgent investment.

And who would get that investment? Why, fossil-fuel companies.

The outlines of the argument were demonstrated by long-time CCS spruiker and member for multinational coal companies, Joel Fitzgibbon, in an op-ed for The Australian Financial Review at the weekend. “Only by deploying CCS and other low-emission technologies can we hope to achieve our global emissions reduction ambitions,” he wrote.

That echoes the official line from the fossil-fuel-industry funded Global CCS Institute (established by the Rudd government; shamefully the CSIRO remains a member):

Implicit in the IPCC 1.5 SAR, somewhere between 350 and 1200 gigatonnes of CO₂ will need to be captured and stored this century. Currently, some 40 megatonnes of CO₂ are captured and stored annually. This must increase at least 100-fold by 2050 to meet the scenarios laid out by the IPCC. Clearly, a substantial increase in policy activity and private sector commitment is necessary to facilitate the massive capital investment required to build enough facilities capable of delivering these volumes.

What the spruikers don’t say is that CCS, even in its simplest and most business-as-usual form, doesn’t work. We’ve seen that at the disastrous Gorgon project, where Chevron hasn’t even come remotely close to meeting its commitment to sequester 80% of the CO₂ extracted from offshore gas.

The problem for Fitzgibbon, the CCS institute and other spruikers of the CCS scam, is that Gorgon is the dead easy form of CCS, where fossil-fuel companies do something they have to do anyway — extract CO₂ from natural gas, because otherwise they can’t liquefy it — and then pump it underground.

The harder form of CCS is extracting CO₂ from emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, which is entirely non-viable as a large-scale technology. Just ask Mississippi Power, the fossil-fuel company that threw in the towel — years late and billions over budget — on a CCS system at its new Kemper power plant in 2017. Or NRG Energy, which shut its CCS gas-fired plant Petra Nova in Texas in late June. Or Sask Power, which operates a CCS-based plant in Canada and has fallen spectacularly short of its commitments to sequester carbon.

That won’t stop fossil-fuel companies — now the biggest advocates for CCS — continuing to push it as a workable technology and calling for government subsidies and regulatory free rides to help bring it to fruition — which may never happen, and is highly unlikely to happen in a timeframe that halts runaway climate change. But it provides a double benefit for fossil-fuel companies — taxpayer handouts, and delays in taking serious abatement action because we hope CCS will deliver us in the nick of time.

The more alarming outcomes of the latest IPCC report will simply encourage fossil-fuel companies — and their media cheerleaders — to demand money for a technology that doesn’t work at scale.

To illustrate how poor a policy option CCS would be, compare it with nuclear power. CCS and nuclear power have something in common: they both have a long history of massive delays and colossal cost overruns, so much so that they can only work effectively with some form of government support or guarantee. But nuclear power is at least a proven technology that reliably operates in a number of countries and forms a major power source in countries such as the UK, France, the US and Japan. The case for nuclear power is far more compelling than for CCS.

But both are far more expensive than renewables combined with battery storage, which will generate huge numbers of new jobs and investment. The technological solutions for zero-carbon energy production are available now. They don’t need billion-dollar handouts to fossil-fuel companies to be developed. And anyone claiming they do is scamming you.