A 2019 study in Nature Energy shows renewables outcompete carbon capture on cost as well. power plants will be ready for retirement by 2035.Ī March report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a non-profit that advocates for a transition away from fossil fuels, found that power generation with CCS could make electricity more expensive compared to alternatives, including renewable energy plus storage. A 2020 study by Grubert found three-quarters of U.S. "What you wouldn't want to do is pull that reliability out when it's actually not ready to retire."īut multiple lines of research suggest that may not make economic sense. "They're providing stability reliability to communities," Wilcox said. The fuel overtook coal as the U.S.'s top source of electricity in 2016 and made up nearly 44% of the country's power production. She gave the example of new natural gas-fired power plants, of which nearly 5.7 gigawatts of new capacity were added in the U.S. There are cases where CCS could be used on existing fossil fuel plants responsibly, according to Jennifer Wilcox, principal deputy assistant secretary in the Energy Department's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. The industry sees it as a way to potentially continue pumping more oil and gas, including plans to use the captured CO 2 to extract even more fossil fuels. Doing so has proven challenging for the industry to date, but IRA tax incentives have created renewed interest. The oil and gas industry, though, is among the biggest backers of CCS, with companies looking to retrofit power plants and refineries with the technology. Science shows that CCS largely shouldn't be used when alternatives such as renewable energy are readily available. In some cases, it may make more sense to retrofit a new steel plant with carbon capture technology rather than pursuing other avenues such as electrification, according to analysis from BloombergNEF, which found that doing so could abate as much as 600 million tons of CO 2 per year by mid-century. While startups and incumbents are looking at ways to produce the world's most used metal without the emissions, the costs are great and the industry needs to cut emissions rapidly. Steelmaking is another industrial process with few immediate decarbonization pathways. "Unless you come up with a replacement for cement or a vastly different formulation, there's not a way around those emissions without using something like CCS," Grubert said. Startups like Brimstone are working on cement decarbonization, but most of the techniques to clean up cement are far from ready for mass commercialization. While parts of the cement-making process can be electrified, some of the CO 2 emissions from production are "fundamental to the process," said Emily Grubert, an associate professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame. One of those hard-to-abate sectors is cement, which accounts for about 8% of global emissions. "The real utility of carbon capture is addressing the hard-to-abate emissions that can't be dealt with," said Ben Grove, carbon storage manager at the Clean Air Task Force, a climate research nonprofit. But research shows that the use cases where that would be beneficial to the climate are fairly narrow. Point source can be deployed at oil, gas and heavy industry facilities. Other technologies pull already-emitted CO 2 out of the ambient air, a process called direct air capture (DAC). So-called point source carbon capture and storage (CCS) grabs CO 2 at the smokestack of sites such as industrial plants. There are two main ways machines are used to capture carbon. In the coming years, the world will have to decide whether carbon capture can be deployed responsibly-and what to do with the CO 2. These tensions were front and center at last year's COP28 climate talks held in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, where the technology was a central pillar of the summit's agreement. Costs, too, could limit its utility, and there are questions whether the technology can even be scaled up in the first place. The fossil fuel industry's involvement, in particular, has raised the specter that carbon capture could be used to prolong oil and gas extraction, endangering the climate rather than helping protect it. Yet for all the momentum and growing need to decarbonize, the technology has drawn mounting opposition. The U.S., in particular, has focused on boosting carbon capture thanks to the Energy Department investing billions of dollars in the technology and attractive tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act for project developers.Ī growing array of science also shows the world will need to capture carbon at a fairly vast scale in the coming decades to limit global warming to 1.5☌. Governments and climate activists are pressing companies to eliminate their emissions, but there's doubt whether solar, wind and batteries can do so alone.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |