An old solution to the emission problem

A more than seven-decade-old technology is coming in the limelight on the journey to net zero

Countries and companies around the globe are turning to a more than seven-decade-old technology, which never found much favour earlier, in order to meet the net-zero goals they have committed to. This is after the belated realisation that even aggressive adoption of the current clean energy technologies will not be enough to reach those targets.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) or its newer version, carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), are not new technologies. The basic experiments can be traced back to the 1920s, though the first big project to inject carbon dioxide directly into the ground was launched only in 1972 by a Texas oilfield.

Since then, CCS and CCUS projects have been initiated in fits and spurts — in European countries as well as in the US — though it never became a mainstream tool in the environmental battle. As a technology, it was never considered “hot and new” by companies or policymakers for them to get excited.

Policymakers did not find it attractive enough to provide tax breaks or other incentives to persuade companies to adopt them. For the firms, the capital cost-to-return equation was unclear. Also, there were many other attractive tools for big, profit-making but polluting companies to get a good environmental citizen certificate. From setting up solar plants and wind farms, to plantation programmes, and carbon credit purchases, the big corporation had many options to prove their environment-friendly credentials.

Many climate scientists also were not in favour of setting up big CCUS plants and widespread encouragement of the technology. They felt it could be a moral hazard — companies and countries would be less inclined to reduce emissions and back clean energy production if carbon capture became popular.

Finally, many governments also thought that natural carbon sinks — forest covers and oceans — were more than enough to trap emissions, while policy makers could focus more on clean energy technologies and reduction in overall emissions per se.

That view has undergone a change. If nothing else, the past few years have shown that the battle against climate change is not easy — and there are no simple equations. Solar, wind and hydrogen energy adoption and green hydrogen technology are not moving fast enough to replace all old “polluting” fuels.

Disruption in the oil market caused by the Russia-Ukraine war has led to a fresh demand for coal. Also, neither green hydrogen technology nor storage technologies have evolved quickly enough to replace coal, oil, gas or petrochemical-based fuels in every application. Finally, in many industries such as fertilisers and cement or even steel, there are no easy replacements for the dirty fuels being used. 

Industrial carbon capture and utilisation, which seeks to trap not just carbon dioxide emissions but also sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and particulates, is therefore turning out to be a good solution for many such polluting industries.

Carbon dioxide emissions can be utilised in a range of industries — from fertilisers to oil recovery to building aggregates and even for transforming into synthetic chemicals and fuels. Even so, this is a fraction of the total emissions that are captured. The bulk of the captured gases are buried deep underground or underwater — in depleted oil or gas reservoirs and in depleted coal as well as other underground mines that are no longer seeing active mining. It will remain trapped there for millennia, according to current calculations. Hardly any gas leaks out once it has been buried in these mines.

A flurry of new projects has started — in Europe, the UK, the US, China and Malaysia and other places.  According to the International Energy Agency, currently about 45 MT of carbon capture capacity is up and running in 35 commercial projects around the world. There are 200 more CCUS plants in various stages of construction that are supposed to come up by 2030, which will capture 220 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

North America and Europe predictably have moved very quickly in recent times and they are developing industrial hubs and clusters that make the building of big CCUS facilities economical. Companies within the cluster can share both projects as well as operational costs. Asia-Pacific is not far behind.

India, after initial tardiness, seems to be fully backing the technology. The NITI Aayog released a detailed paper on “Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage (CCUS) Policy Framework and its Deployment Mechanism in India” in November last year, but multiple pilot projects had been initiated much earlier.

For India, CCUS could be particularly important in meeting its emission goals. We are the third largest emitters in the world in absolute terms because of our population size. (Our per capita emissions are much lower). Despite aggressively building clean energy capacities, our dependence on fossil fuels will remain in the foreseeable future. Most importantly, our large reserves of coal and the projects in coal gasification make CCUS particularly useful for the country.

The writer is former editor of Business Today and Businessworld and the founder of Prosaic View, an editorial consultancy