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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Carbon capture is just hoping that “Science will magic the problem away for us so we don’t have to do anything differently.” But the reality is that will not be the case. We’re not just going to suck the carbon out of the air. There is no energy efficient way to do it, and if you’re using energy to suck up carbon in order to offset the energy we’re already using….I think you see the problem. The only solution is to limit the carbon being dug up and transferred from fossil fuels to planetary heat-blanket.
Many of the most carbon polluting industries, are already some of the most expensive to run, when compared to a newer green option.
Solar & wind power is dramatically cheaper than coal power, even before they add-on expensive carbon capture.
Green steel, made with Hydrogen & Arc furnaces, are expected to be cheaper than steel made with Coal. Cheaper Before adding the expensive carbon capture.
The same may be true even with cement manufacturing.
There are plenty of comments here saying “because’ it’s expensive”. But my point is even more direct – These polluting industries are inefficient uses of capital even BEFORE they have to build expensive carbon-capturing systems. The carbon-capture system only makes them even less efficient uses of capital.
We probably will see carbon-capturing at “smokestacks” of industries that truly cannot be made green. But to-date, there are economical paths to cleaner industry which actually IMPROVE the economics of the industry for all of the most significant carbon producers.
It’s still uncertain whether carbon capture can actually work or not. At the moment we are pumping the captured carbon underground, but we have no real conception of if and for how long it actually stays there. It’s a sort of “good guess” that we are storing the carbon indefinitely. This is a big reason people argue against CCS in the first place.
The only legitimate way we would use CCS is on projects and industry that necessitate CO2 production. Perhaps concrete production or the like, although there are possible green alternatives. Besides that it is better for the environment and the bottom line to use that money for renewable development.
One thing is that the carbon credit systems make it very convenient for the industry to just pay for carbon credits and let someone else somewhere else deal with the actual task of carbon capture.
Still, “point source capture” is being done: https://netl.doe.gov/carbon-management/carbon-capture/psc-map
It is in places, but carbon capture cost money so there has to be someone paying for you to capture the carbon. So some new power plants in order to get permission to be built they may have to promise to be zero carbon emissions so then they might use carbon capture at source.
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.
One of the largest sources of carbon emissions is as a result of concrete settling and curing in place on construction sites. There really is no way to capture that.
Certain irony in the fact that we had carbon scrubbing in the 70s. When we gave all our heavy industry to the east, we didn’t give the scrubbing technology.
This is why Nuclear is the answer. No other energy source can account for every gram of waste they’ve produced in the history of their existence.
It’s actually done. There are experiments to remove CO² at the exhaust. For example with MEA and I think alkali scrubbers also. But it’s not yet left the experimental stage.
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