Carbon Capture is the Boondoggle of Climate Change Projects
The US has been spending billions for unproven carbon capture technology and intends to spend more
Boondoggle- A wasteful or extravagant project with no practical value
By Michael Coppola and Nancy Lazar
The fossil fuel industry has convinced the Biden administration that carbon capture is a critical technology needed to prevent further climate damage. They view carbon capture as a way to counter the CO2 that fossil fuel puts into the air when used as a fuel. Carbon capture is a process that sequesters carbon dioxide from the factories or power plants that produce it and stores it somewhere instead of letting it go into the atmosphere. They would like to argue that as long as they remove as much CO2 as they put in from burning fossil fuels the combined process is greenhouse gas neutral. There are significant flaws to the argument that carbon capture activities are greenhouse gas neutral.
First, burning fossil fuels produces other greenhouse gasses in addition to CO2. The two of most concern are nitrous oxides and methane. They are 300 and 30 times more heat generating respectively than CO2 over a 100 year period. So if you are burning fossil fuels and not removing these gasses you are not greenhouse gas neutral. The other factor they ignore is the amount of greenhouse gas produced by the capture, transportation and utilization of the CO2. Let’s take a look at their latest deception on a process to use carbon capture to supposedly save the planet from further climate disruption.
They are currently promoting the use of CO2 in a process called enhanced oil extraction. Enhanced oil extraction is used on oil wells that no longer can extract oil by conventional methods. By pumping CO2 under high pressure into the oil extraction zone up to 40 percent more oil can be pumped out. In the past they would extract CO2 from natural underground deposits for the enhanced oil extraction. This of course is not capturing CO2, so they have suggested using CO2 captured from coal fired generating plants and then using it to extract more oil from old wells. This they say would result in a net decrease in greenhouse gasses. What they neglect to address is it takes energy to extract the CO2, transfer it to the well site and pump it under high pressure into the oil field. So one must take into account how much energy will be used and how much greenhouse gases will be produced by those activities. You also have to account for the energy used and the greenhouse gasses produced to construct the pipeline and the capture facilities. The extraction process also results in methane gas escaping into the atmosphere. By ignoring these activities they cannot claim that the process of carbon capture and enhanced oil extraction is greenhouse gas neutral.
They are also promoting the idea of collecting CO2 from pig waste ponds in North Carolina and piping it to Texas well sites. They would collect it by trapping it in a canopy over the pond and pumping it under high pressure through the existing natural gas pipeline system. There also are a few problems here. CO2 if exposed to any water becomes very corrosive and can eat through the pipe resulting in a deadly plum. The town of Satartia in Mississippi just had such a leak. Natural gas pipelines are not designed to resist this corrosion, so they would have to create a separate pipeline that could resist the corrosion or extract any water that is mixed with the CO2 that comes from the pig waste pond. Either way, it requires large amounts of energy that produce large amounts of greenhouse gasses.
The worst part of their campaign is that they convinced the Biden administration to support it and to pay for research to make the process work. The current infrastructure bill has earmarked billions of dollars to CO2 capture and the construction of a pipeline system. They even managed to get the government to count the carbon-oil extraction process officially as carbon capture so they get a tax credit.
A coalition of progressive environmental groups sent an open letter to President Joe Biden and Democratic Congressional leaders calling on them to reject the technology. They wrote, “Carbon capture is not a climate solution.” They also said that the money in the infrastructure bill would be better utilized by subsidizing the installation of solar panels and the purchase of electric vehicles. Both are sure methods of reducing the production of greenhouse gases and reducing the need for fossil fuels.
We have to convince the Biden administration that this is a waste of tax payer money. Less than 10 years remain to drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses going into the atmosphere. The solar panel and electric vehicle technologies are improving rapidly in their efficiency and decreasing in cost. Extracting more oil and continuing to burn it as a fuel makes as much sense as pumping water into a sinking boat.
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