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The Silliness of Carbon Capture and Sequestration
By Benjamin Zycher
June 27, 2022
Beltway nostrums are a dime a dozen, and the climate problem threat emergency crisis existential threat is tailor-made to elicit hundreds of them. An old one now receiving increasing attention is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), a technology designed to capture greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as they are produced as byproducts of such industrial processes as power generation, and then to sequester them underground in caverns or fossil-fuel reservoirs instead of releasing them into the atmosphere.
The basic argument usually promoted in favor of CCS subsidies begins with the observation that fossil fuels are here to stay regardless of the propaganda trumpeted by the environmental left about the “clean energy transition.” Unconventional energy is “clean” only if we ignore the attendant heavy metal pollution, wildlife destruction, noise, flicker effects, massive and unsightly land use, landfill problems, and on and on. And the argument that unconventional energy has become cost-competitive with fossil fuels is preposterous, which is why the former cannot survive in the market without massive subsidies, guaranteed market shares, and many other types of policy favoritism.
So far, so good: Fossil fuels indeed will supply the vast bulk of global energy needs over the long term precisely because the energy content of fossil fuels is concentrated, unlike the case for wind flows and sunlight, which is why wind and solar power require massive amounts of land. And they are unreliable — they have low “capacity factors” — and so require expensive backup capacity, longer transmission systems, and other costly investments. Accordingly, fossil fuels by far are the most efficient sources of needed energy notwithstanding the efforts of governments, international bureaucracies, and the environmental left to increase their costs artificially.
Step two in the CCS argument: Because fossil fuels are here to stay, we need to do something about GHG emissions because there is a climate crisis. The effects of increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG are detectable in the data, but there is no actual evidence of a climate “crisis” in the data on sea levels, cyclones, droughts, flooding, and the other changing dimensions of climate phenomena, driven by both natural and anthropogenic influences with relative weights that are the subject of intense scientific debate. But put that aside. Whatever the evidence on climate phenomena, the proponents of CCS subsidies — and other climate policies — never quite tell us what temperature/climate impact, say, in 2100, would result from a large expansion of CCS technological implementation.
Let us make the wild assumption that a large CCS subsidy program would cut U.S. GHG emissions by half. If we apply the Environmental Protection Agency climate model and make assumptions that exaggerate the future effects of reductions in GHG emissions, that 50 percent cut would reduce global temperatures in 2100 by 0.087 degrees C. That would not be detectable: The standard deviation of the surface temperature record is 0.11 degrees C. Assume instead, again wildly, that an international CCS effort would reduce global GHG emissions by 25 percent. Temperatures in 2100: 0.343 degrees C lower than otherwise would be the case. How much are such outcomes worth?
The International Energy Agency estimates (Table 2.1) that achievement of the global GHG emissions requirements for the “Sustainable Development Scenario” (SDC) would require capture of 840 million metric tons of CO2 in 2030, 5.6 billion metric tons in 2050, and 10.4 billion metric tons in 2070. A generous estimate of the amount of GHG captured by a given facility annually is 1 million metric tons. Accordingly, the number of facilities needed for the IEA SDC rises from 840 to 10,400 over those four decades. At a capital cost of $500 million each, that is a total of $420 billion to $5.2 trillion over forty years, or about $10 billion to $130 billion per year. Precisely who is going to pony up that kind of cash?
The IEA total cost estimates for GHG capture using CCS technologies are around $50-120 per ton. Global GHG emissions are about 53 billion tons per year. Capture of merely 10 percent — less than the approximate advertised but not credible 15 percent Paris goal, and far less than the IEA SDC — at, say, the low-end figure of $50 per ton would cost about $265 billion per year. Is this supposed to be serious?
In short, there is no plausible benefit/cost test that would justify a large CCS effort. In the major climate-economy integrated assessment models (DICE and FUND in particular) a change in only one assumption — the choice of a discount rate that reflects the actual opportunity cost of capital — reduces the per-ton social cost of carbon to something close to zero, or even a negative number in some cases. In the DICE model and in the IPCC 1.5 Degree Report, global GDP in 2100 is lower by 3 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in the absence of policies to reduce GHG emissions. Those numbers almost certainly are not statistically significant, and would be swamped in any event by the increase in global per capita GDP — the IPCC projection is 400 percent — certain to occur between now and then.
The arguments in support of CCS subsidies assume that GHG emissions create a negative externality. That may be true, but it is very far from obvious, as there are important benefits from increasing GHG emissions, among them planetary greening, increased agricultural productivity, increased water use efficiency by plants, reduced mortality from cold, etc. Moreover, temperatures and other climate phenomena are driven by both natural and anthropogenic influences, the relative weights of which, again, are the subject of intense scientific debate. Because CCS and other climate policies cannot affect natural phenomena, it is very easy to make highly unrealistic assumptions about their efficacy.
Let us recognize that the current campaign to promote CCS subsidies is being driven in substantial part by old-fashioned rent-seeking rather than some sort of environmental/climate imperative, whatever the usefulness of the latter in terms of making excuses for the former. There also is the timeless but futile effort of corporate executives desperate to ingratiate themselves with the environmental left in the hope that the green alligators will eat them last. The executives’ basic assumption is that the environmental left is sincere in its pursuit of “solutions” to the climate “crisis,” and that therefore they will support some CCS projects politically. After all, they claim to support CCS if the GHG are simply pumped into underground storage facilities, even as they oppose CCS used to enhance oil recovery (by injecting carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs so as to increase reservoir pressures).
Well, no. The environmental left will never support the pipelines and other massive infrastructure investments needed to make CCS a reality precisely because the only reason to support CCS is as an adjunct to the production of fossil fuels, cement, modern agriculture outputs, and the like so as to reduce GHG emissions. The environmental left opposes all of that as a matter of ideological imperative — it simply opposes modern industrial society — and so it will never support CCS in practice because the central purpose of CCS is to allow modern industrial processes to continue.
That is a central intellectual problem with the argument in favor of CCS subsidies. The environmental left will not and cannot support any given CCS program as actually proposed because their opposition to modern industrial society is a matter of principle. They oppose fossil fuels because they allow billions of people to escape poverty, thus increasing resource consumption and environmental degradation. (The environmental left has never quite explained why wealthier societies are also cleaner.) They oppose technological advance — human ingenuity — as the long term answer to such problems because it is inconsistent with their stance that resource consumption is not “sustainable.” That term has no definition and is wrong in any event as markets are perfectly capable of allocating a finite (“depletable”) resource over time.
In the ideological view of the left, humans are not moral agents with the ingenuity and inventiveness to solve problems; instead they are little more than environmentally destructive mouths to feed. Accordingly, the ideological stance of the left is fundamentally anti-human in that investments in human capital — education, training, health care, etc. — have the effect of increasing the demand for fossil fuels, an outcome that is anathema.
It is not only businesses that engage in rent-seeking. Recall that for years the official “safe” limit for planetary warming was 2 degrees C by 2100. The 1979-2019 satellite record for the mid-troposphere is a warming of 0.17 degrees C per decade, or 1.7 degrees C over a century. So by the time the 2015 UNFCCC 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) was held in Paris, the climate industry realized that it had a real problem on its hands: Not that the planet was burning up, but instead that the 2 degree C “safe” limit was going to be achieved without any climate policies at all. This meant that it was not the planet threatened with conflagration but instead their sinecures, their taxpayer- and foundation-funded sojourns on private jets to conferences in five-star resorts, and their broad political interests generally. So at COP-21 they moved the goalpost: The new “safe” limit now is 1.5 degrees C. Science? What’s that?
Back to CCS: There is no argument in favor of subsidizing it that can withstand scrutiny. Will that actually affect Beltway policymaking? Let us pray.
Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
carbon capture, EVs, EPA squishes ICEs
