Carbon capture is a technology that has been discussed for years, but has always felt like a fossil fuel industry talking point more than a technology ready for the mainstream. The theory is simple, rather than allowing emissions to find their way into the atmosphere, capture them as they’re created and bury them deep underground.
Occidental Petroleum, one of the world’s largest oil companies, has been leading the charge on carbon capture. It plans to build a billion-dollar plant, called Stratos, in Texas to do just that. Amazon, Shopify, Airbus and the Houston Texans NFL team are just some of the large companies that have signed up to buy Statos’ carbon offsets. Occidental’s CEO has proposed building 100 more plants just like it. It all sounds good, maybe even too good. As this article from Bloomberg explains, this isn’t the first time Occidental has made a big splash about a cutting-edge carbon management technology.
Travel about 100km down the road in Texas and you’ll come across another Occidental Petroleum plant – Century. Built in 2010 it was set to become the world’s largest example of carbon capture. Fast forward 13 years and Occidental quietly sold off the project for a fraction of what it cost to build.
Bloomberg has investigated the Century project and found that the plant never operated at more than a third of its capacity. Interestingly, and somewhat reassuringly, it wasn’t because the technology didn’t work. Rather it was because the economics didn’t hold up.
Economics are a solvable problem. The majority of the world has embraced some form of carbon pricing (either through a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme) that help renewable energy projects that may have marginal economics. The challenge is the United States, and Texas in particular, don’t seem likely to follow the rest of the world including some American states and embrace a market-based mechanism like carbon pricing.
The International Energy Agency sees carbon capture as a critical technology to achieve net zero by 2050. In fact, current carbon capture capacity globally is 45 million tonnes of CO2 per year, which is just 4% of what the IEA believes the world needs by 2030. So plants like Occidental’s new Stratos plant are critical. But don’t get caught up in the hype. Technologies like carbon capture and clean coal have long promised far more than they’ve delivered, and in the meantime they provide cover for polluters to keep on polluting.
The proof will be in the emissions reduction. Until then, it’s just hot air.
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