eli5: Why isn’t carbon capture used at emission sources?

Question

I know that there is ‘legacy carbon’ in the atmosphere that needs to get removed but why aren’t we leveraging carbon capture as part of industrial processes (e.g. at the factory’s smoke stack, for example). Or maybe we are already?

In: 54

Answer 1

CO2 removal on each car would be impractical based on the following 2 issues. There are 2 major issues with carbon capture because 1) you need to extract the CO2 from and then once you have it captured you need to do something with it.

In the oil industry the legacy method is to use a chemical called amines that pull the CO2 from hydrocarbon gas. This process needs to be done on a large scale, as it is energy and capital cost expensive.

Secondly, you now have low pressure dirty CO2 and you can either just release it into the atmosphere directly (very common but doesn’t help reduce CO2 emission) or you need to store it somehow so it doesn’t leak into the atmosphere or use it (if you clean it and use it such as in fizzy drinks, the CO2 is still released into the atmosphere).

In an ideal world we could convert the CO2 by some chemical reaction to turn it into a powder or crystals, then we can bury it. This isn’t currently an option.

Now we can clean the gas. Pump it to very high pressure and then send it into a depleted hydrocarbon reservoir and close it. Hoping it can stay there for millions of years like the oil we had extracted.

The problem as always with this is you will create 50% more CO2 to “solve” the problem so you are always chasing tails with current technology and solutions.

This is mainly on the oil and gas and power generation industry. The alternate option people like to push is to use “green” technology like solar and wind. Well this goes back to the problem with the input energy to create these technologies which still comes from oil and gas and power generation so those are really just an offset of CO2 generated over time. Yes my windmill doesn’t generate CO2 today but it will need to operate for many years before it is CO2 neutral.

Note:- the stacks you see at a power plant is intact just water Vapour only as these are cooling towers. They are by far the most efficient and “green” part of the energy cycle