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?
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Energy is very price sensitive. A power plant operator has the business plan of producing power for as cheap as possible and then selling it for the most they can (for the most part, there are some exceptions to this). Power plants have annual operating costs, which they want to minimize, an then they have revenue which they get from selling the power. These costs include the actual operations and maintenance costs, fuel costs, and finance costs.
The big reason why carbon capture isn’t used, is because it adds a lot of cost to the power plant, but does not produce more energy to sell, or somehow get them a higher price. It just add cost. While a government could force companies to do this, it would create a lot of problems and instability that would likely result in a new government which repeals the regulation. Customers hate high prices, politically sensitive districts hate seeing major employers go through problems.
With all the money that it would take to retrofit a power plant for carbon capture, they would be far better off just using that money and buying solar panels, wind turbines, batteries (and in some areas, geothermal). The prices of those technologies are so cheap that in much of the country its cheaper to replace your fossil fuel plants with renewables than it is to operate your fossil fuel plants.
A way that companies and investors look at investments is by taking the total amount of profit generated from selling energy for the year, an then dividing that profit by the total amount of energy sold. I need to be clear, this is energy SOLD, not energy produced. Its possible to produce energy and not have a buyer.
So it would look like this. (Annual Revenue – Annual Costs)/Total power sold. This gives us a Price per unit energy. This is a price per kilowatt hour kWh or megawatt hour MWh. Investors and utility companies want assets that have a very very low cost per kWh. The lowest is the best.
The the “Annual Revenue”, the power companies want that to be as high as possible, ideally infinity. That would mean infinite money. Which if you are a business, is the best way to win the game. You want the annual costs to be as low as possible. Ideally zero.
The worst case scenario is where the annual costs are greater than the annual revenue. This would mean that it would cost $100 to make $90. This would mean that the best business decision would be to shut the plant down as it is a money loser. Any sort of power plant that loses money every year would be in this scenario.
The government can do subsidies, these subsidies can either raise the annual revenue, or reduce the annual costs, and since utility companies like free stuff from the government, ideally both.
The carbon capture technology does nothing to lower this cost per kWh. All it does is make their existing assets more expensive to operate.
The utility companies have options. Instead of buying carbon capture technology, which does nothing for them, they can use their money to buy solar panels and windmills, and very soon, utility scale energy storage (or in some places, pumped storage). All of these assets have a very low cost per kWh that is only getting cheaper (solar is already the cheapest way to generate electricity, but its not 24/7).
This is why you are not really seeing carbon capture pop up, but you are seeing a lot of solar panels, windmills, and if you live in California or South Australia, batteries. Its a better use of money to skip the plant upgrades, put money into renewables.
There is a double whammy effect. As these renewables become more common, their prices continue to decline, which push more people to buy them. But they also push down wholesale energy market prices during certain periods (such as anytime the sun is out, or any time there is a breeze, and double if it is sunny and breezy at the same time). These cause the older power plants to make less revenue per year.
So in addition to making less revenue, their costs will go up. Remember that worst case scenario I brought up, where the annual costs are greater than the annual revenue, that is what could happen as renewable energy disrupts markets.
In short. The reason why carbon capture isn’t used is because its bad business. Its not that great at actually stopping pollution, and it still requires fossil fuels.
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