Climate Crisis: ‘Massive investment in CCS is a cover for the expansion of the fossil fuel industry’

IPCC released its Synthesis report, the last instalment of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) cycle, on March 20, 2023. 

The report stated that there are multiple barriers to implementing carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But the technology, which is largely not mature, has attracted investments in the recent past. Down To Earth (DTE) speaks with Lili Fuhr, deputy director of the Center for International Environmental Law, to understand what this means, why this technology is listed as one of the potential mitigation options and what she expects from the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Rohini Krishnamurthy: The IPCC synthesis report has listed CCS as a mitigation option in energy supply. But how is it likely to help, given that the report also mentions there are technological, economic, institutional, ecological, environmental and socio-cultural barriers. What explains this?

 

Lili Fuhr: There are three different working groups. One looks at the physical science, one at the impacts and the other at mitigation pathways, including the options and the solutions. There are different scientific expertise needed in each of these working groups. Natural scientists are very active in working groups I and II. Working group III is dominated by economists. 

In order to provide policy-relevant information through IPCC, the academics in that space have built economic models over the years. At the centre of that are so-called integrated assessment models, which are very complex models that are actually more like black boxes. 

The models are not peer-reviewed, but the studies produced based on these models are peer-reviewed and they make it into the IPCC for assessment.

But these models and the pathways built from those models, all come with implicit and explicit assumptions, and they have limitations. The limitations are because of the economic thinking in which they're framed as well as the way they can model certain things. 

It is not easy to model societal changes, lifestyle changes or transformations of changes, such as a certain technology becoming less costly over time. So, these models certainly have a lot of constraints and limitations and underlying assumptions. And that's been mostly invisible or not transparent in the IPCC report so far. 

So over the last couple of years, we’ve seen quite a bit of debate on this, which has culminated in a much better description of the very fact that we have assumptions and limitations in these models in this Synthesis Report for policymakers. 

What is missing is the mention of those assumptions and limitations in concrete detail. That is not information that can now be found easily in the summary for policymakers. Most of the model pathways assume that the world will not get more equitable over time -- the global north will remain rich and the global south poor. This is something that is enshrined in their models. 

Political conclusions need to take into account that information. 

Also, these models use various discount rates, which is a way of assuming whether it’s more cost-efficient to do mitigation action in the near future or far away future. Unhelpfully, most of these models assume that it’s less costly to do mitigation in the future. So they delay mitigation action in the near future. 

Working Group III talks quite a bit about that information and the relevance of discount rates. The issue is not transparently communicated in the Summary for Policymakers right now, but one can piece it together. 

The models assume that CCS is going to get less expensive over time. We haven't seen that evidence in the real world. It also assumes specific capture rates in CCS facilities, which haven't been delivered in the real world. 

So this is why this information in the footnote is so important because it says that the capture rates are far below those in the model pathways. That is a highly policy-relevant piece of information. 

It is currently unhelpfully put into a footnote. But I'm glad it at least made it to a footnote because without that, we would have an unqualified mention of CCS in those pathways. 

RK: Why is this push for CCS concerning?

LF: There is a strong push for CCS both for the power sector, but also, to add it to hydrogen production or ammonia production. So it would become so-called blue hydrogen and blue ammonia, which then is labelled clean by a lot of governments and companies, which is very different from green. 

Clean is not the same as green in this case. If we’re seriously looking at a 1.5 degree Celsius global warming target, we need to fundamentally transform our economies rather than just capturing some carbon from industries. 

There are pathways, and there are definitely also academic scientists who are building models of transforming industry sectors without CCS.

Massive investment in CCS is a cover for the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. So I think we really need to call out these delays and deception tactics by the industry right now.

Industries are cashing in on massive new subsidies. Most of the carbon capture and storage and most of the CCUS (the carbon capture, use and storage projects) are for enhanced oil recovery.

They're actually used to produce more oil by injecting CO2 into the ground. So they're not a mitigation technology, they’re the opposite — they produce more emissions. 

And then CCS has this huge energy penalty. So if you add CCS to a polluting facility, it actually requires more energy input to get the CCS part to work. It comes with chemical pollution as well as pipelines, which can blow up. We’ve seen accidents. So, it comes with huge risks for people, communities and ecosystems. 

And currently, if you look at the United States, for example, the places where that CCS infrastructure rollout is planned, those are communities already heavily impacted by polluting industries. So it is really that deception and also a form of racism that we see pushing us as a climate mitigation option. 

If we allow the Global North to bet on these unproven technologies, that will just make it even more unequal because it will simply allow them to use that more carbon space in the near future.  

RK: What do you expect from COP28?

LF: We definitely see investments in CCS and CCUS. It is picking up across the world. The US is a hotspot, but the European Union is also following through. We see subsidy schemes being changed or new ones being introduced. There’s a lot of excitement in companies investing. 

We’re very worried about how this is going to play out for COP28. The United Arab Emirates is very keen on CCS and CCUS. They've been promoting it quite a bit. So we’re really looking at this COP, thinking this is going to be a festival of false solutions.

The last COP was a playground for fossil fuel lobbyists. And we’re even more worried about the next COP with that presidency in that part of the world. This is why we were hoping for the IPCC Synthesis Report to put some guardrails in place and to explain what is aligned with science and what isn't. 

At this point, that information is contained in the report, but it’s still hidden from plain sight. So, we still need to point policymakers in the right direction.

Policymakers need to understand that we cannot abate fossil fuels. There is no way that we can continue to extract and burn fossil fuels and think that we can make the emissions go away by a magical techno-fix. That is not what works in the real world.

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