The above calculations, rough as they are, lead me to conclude that it’s very risky to rely on natural climate solutions alone. I’m concerned we could risk placing all of our regeneratively grown eggs into one lovely, but small, regeneratively grown basket. If you’re absolutely sure not only that emissions will decline very sharply over the next ten years, but that natural climate solutions will be as effective as we hope, and also that global demand for meat will stop rising and decrease dramatically—if you would bet it all on everything going just right—then okay, perhaps natural carbon removal is all we need. I don’t know anyone that would place that bet, however. Moreover, I’m worried about what happens when books are published, countless YouTube videos are recorded, and conference halls are packed with people, all propagating the notion that soil can magically suck up all the carbon that’s been burned. It’s so intuitive that we should be able to save the planet through care: regenerative agriculture seems like it should be the right answer. It feels right and good to source hope there. Nevertheless, I’m concerned that this determined post-truth faith in soils could contribute to a failure to invest in other technologies that are also needed for this gargantuan carbon removal challenge.
When it comes to afforestation, regenerative agriculture, biochar, and blue carbon, climate change may actually be the least compelling reason to take many of these actions. We should regrow complex forests for their biodiversity benefits, establish agroforestry because it increases farmer resilience, recycle crop residues in order to create a circular economy, improve farm information systems to help farmers, and take care of the soil so as to avoid dead zones in the oceans—and much, much, more. Climate benefits are a fantastic bonus to these efforts, but the current magnitude of emissions overwhelms what these sinks can address during this century. We are deluding ourselves if we think this can be the only response to the disaster faced by people and species around the world. Natural climate solutions should be pursued with all the energy we can muster, and they really can make a contribution. But if we genuinely care about lessening climate impacts, curbing sea level rise, or saving species, other measures will also be needed.
Part II: Burial
4
Capturing
Southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada, summer, sunny, 77°F / 25°C
The most interesting part of the power plant was, in fact, the tabby cat. It wound its way around the greenhouse, gingerly stepping among sprouts and purring warmly. The ghost presence trotted behind as I toured the greenhouse’s chambers, jumping between the trays of seedlings and the seeding machines.
The greenhouse lay in the shadow of Shand: a hulking coal-fired plant that is also home to the Shand Carbon Capture Test Facility, which serves as an experimental area for clients to test new carbon capture equipment. It’s owned by SaskPower, the state power monopoly of Saskatchewan. The waste heat from the coal plant warms the little trees through the winter. Over the past twenty years, Shand’s greenhouse has handed out 10 million seedlings for free to people who are creating prairie shelterbelts or restoring habitat.
We are drawn to the lively—this striped cat, full of personality and intentions; the seedlings, aiming to grow. Infrastructure, on the other hand, strikes most of us as boring. Cold. Pipes, vents, bolts. Or hot, but inhuman, of another realm: inhospitable. Infrastructure is entangled three-dimensionally in landscapes like these. Picture Shand, rising between the coalfields with their draglines scraping. Then, fourteen kilometers due west of the Shand power plant and greenhouse, lies Boundary Dam Power Station—yet another coal-fired power plant. However, this one is the first generating station to use carbon capture and sequestration. Picture the Aquistore Project, a few kilometers west of that, shooting carbon 3.4 kilometers down, through a layer of brine-filled sandstone, into the Deadwood and Black Island formations. Picture the pipeline also snaking north toward the mature Weyburn oil field, where the captured CO2 is injected into depleted formations to force out more oil.
The Boundary Dam CCS project is one of these legendary names that commentators pull out as proof of concept; these industrial personae come and do their dance. Drax. White Rose. Gorgon. Sleipner. Petro Nova. Kemper. If you read enough articles, these spirits of industry loom larger than life—they keep appearing, and journalists keep making site visits, trying to evoke them as interesting subjects. Some of them have already fallen; canceled ghosts. Yet it’s hard to get a sense of their character; they are so easily abstracted as a collection of pipes. If you’re lucky, they might make some kind of noise or smell, offer some sensory input to hold on to. Writing in the New Yorker, environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert manages the feat of evoking a direct air capture research facility: “In the workshop, an engineer was tinkering with what looked like the guts of a foldout couch. Where, in the living-room version, there would have been a mattress, in this one was an elaborate array of plastic ribbons. Embedded in each ribbon was a powder made from thousands upon thousands of tiny amber-colored beads.” But when she comes to the Archer Daniels Midland BECCS plant in Decatur, Illinois, a geologist warns her: the facility is not sexy. She agrees: “It was, indeed, not sexy—just a bunch of pipes and valves sticking out of the dirt.”1
The character of these projects emerges not from their pipes and valves, but from their settings. Boundary Dam and nearby Shand are set upon a scraped wasteland, with tangled little wild roses and thorns reclaiming the chalky ground. Mounds of white earth contour the surface, and blue water gathers in the hollows. This is the southeast corner of Saskatchewan, around Estevan, where the lignite coal seams of the Ravenscrag Formation have been mined since the 1850s. Lignite coal is softer, moister brown coal. It lies near the surface and is strip-mined. If you find a high point, a ridge or a picnic table outside of Boundary Dam, you’ll be able to survey the coalfields stretched out below, the draglines resting. The infrastructure lives within a history, a sense of place.
Boundary Dam’s claim to fame is groundbreaking, literally: it was the first power station to use CCS. On one hand, the technology’s proof-of-concept promises updates; the renewal of aging infrastructure. On the other hand, the captured carbon dioxide finds its ultimate use in enhanced oil recovery, furthering extraction. It is a precarious moment for the facility. Although coal still powers 40 percent of Saskatchewan’s electricity, coal with CCS can’t compete with the flood of cheaper renewables and natural gas. While there’s a feasibility study underway on whether to install CCS for Shand, at neighboring Boundary Dam, the decision was made to retire units 4 and 5 rather than retrofit them for further CCS: low gas prices make their operation a losing proposition. As of this writing, the federal government had agreed to keep them operating for a few more years without CCS. Kicking the can and the “stranded asset” label down the road until 2024 offers further job security to coal workers. If Saskatchewan makes the decision not to move forward with coal and CCS, 1,100 coal worker jobs could be at risk.2 The whole thing is subsidized right now by a high carbon tax, which gets passed to consumers, who don’t get to choose how their power is generated.
Indeed, despite being new and pioneering infrastructure, the status of “stranded” still looms over Boundary Dam—and indeed, many of the landscapes where these jobs exist already feel rather stranded in time. It’s not as if stranding is an unfamiliar phenomenon here. There’s a piece of a rusty, massive gear stuck by a roadside to commemorate Taylorton, a company mining town that’s now overgrown with prairie—a casualty of strip mining technology that wiped out underground mines and the communities that grew from them. “Stranding” assets can seem politically inconceivable from the present’s point of view, but it seems equally inevitable from the gaze of history, looking back at all the innovations and infrastructure which slipped into obsolescence because something better came along.
Is there anything likeable about projects like Boundary Dam, and what they promise? What, in fact, do they promise?
To many, a “good” future is synonymous with a “gre
en” one. Forests, farms, the bioeconomy—intuitively, managing carbon goes hand in hand with tending the earth, massaging the carbon cycle by growing things. For life is already doing the work—it’s a matter of encouraging it, restoring it, letting it flourish.
Through another lens, though, the lively biological realm is messy and unpredictable: it works in temporary time scales, and it’s vulnerable to climate change itself. If the goal is permanent removal, far better would be to transform carbon in chemical and geological ways—the alchemy of the nonliving. Cultivation is generative. Burial, however, is pollution disposal, is safety, is sequestering something away where it can’t hurt you anymore. One approach generates life; the other makes things inert. In this section, we will delve into the possibilities of geologic sequestration.
Carbon capture and storage is stuck. There is a major disconnect between what energy forecasters say is necessary (a lot of CCS), and what countries and industries find feasible (apparently, no CCS).
Carbon capture and storage is not a singular technology, but rather a practice that combines several verbs: capture, transport, store, monitor. The carbon dioxide is typically captured at the point where it’s emitted. Generally, scrubbing the carbon out of gaseous waste streams is done chemically using compounds called amines, which bind carbon dioxide molecules. Then, the carbon is transported to where it will be stored, cooled into liquid form and moved by railway, ships, tanker trucks, and so forth, or conveyed as a gas via pipeline. This all takes a fair bit of energy. Basically, capture of climate-significant amounts of carbon dioxide entails an infrastructure on the same scale of today’s oil industry—but to put the carbon back underground. The storage takes place in caverns underground, or in depleted oil wells. And then this carbon must be monitored, to make sure it is staying there. Eventually, it will turn into minerals, dissolve in water, or be trapped in rock.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that to meet a 2°C target, 3,500 CCS plants are needed by 2050. As of 2019, there are twenty-two large-scale CCS facilities expected to be operational by 2020—but this number has already shrunk, from seventy-seven planned as of 2010 down to forty-five in 2017, capturing a mere 80 million tons of CO2 per year.3 When it comes to what countries have laid out for how to cut their emissions under the Paris Agreement, only a dozen countries mention CCS (and none mention BECCS).4 Yet the IEA’s 2°C scenario has CCS delivering ninety-four gigatons of emissions reductions through 2050, half from the power sector and a third from industry, with BECCS delivering a total of fourteen gigatons of negative emissions during that time. “Without CCS, the transformation of the power sector will be at least USD 3.5 trillion more expensive,” the agency cautions.5 Do these reports get sent around just so the report writers will have done their jobs? Will CCS actually get going due to these new calls of urgency—or is the reputation of failure contagious?
Many green groups vigorously oppose CCS. According to Greenpeace, for example, CCS is a costly distraction that cannot save the climate. Enhanced oil recovery is “a euphemism for increasing oil extraction.” Indeed, right now, the primary market for CCS is enhanced oil recovery: using CO2 to force out oil that wouldn’t otherwise be extracted. Greenpeace gives figures that without CO2 injection, 65 percent of that oil would be left underground: “Under the auspices of helping the climate, carbon capture will be used to increase oil extraction by as much as 185 percent.” They conclude, “It is clear that for the industry this is about extracting more oil—growing more as an industry—than they otherwise could.”6
This is certainly true: for the fossil fuel industry, it is about extracting more oil. Yet there’s also more to the story. This technology has received heavy public subsides; the public sector already has a strong role in it. The question is, what could CCS be if it were deployed not in service of the industry, but for us? Instead of reflexively dismissing it as a tool of the fossil fuel industry, we should work to understand its possibilities for helping clean up CO2. Perhaps industry’s failure to make use of this technology could even be an opportunity to redirect it for more progressive ends.
To begin, let’s look at a bit more of the history. CCS is another technology with roots in the 1970s. Cesare Marchetti, a modeler at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria (who also coined the term “geoengineering”), suggested storing carbon in the oceans, via a scheme he christened the “Gigamixer.” His was one of the earlier writings proposing CCS to address the climate change problem.7 However, throughout the 1980s, oil companies mainly explored carbon capture technology in the context of enhanced oil recovery, and pipelines for this end sprawled out from natural mines in Colorado to the oil fields of West Texas. At present, there are over 6,500 kilometers of CO2 pipelines in the United States, chiefly for enhanced oil recovery.8
But in the 1990s, the climate community became interested in CCS. In conjunction with this, the United States and Saudi Arabia asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to do a special report on the technology.9 The resulting 2005 IPCC report put CCS firmly on the climate change agenda. In the lead-up to the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, $30 billion in public funding announcements were made. But then, only $2.8 billion was actually invested.10 The mood soured; the hype fizzled. Cheap gas was once again king.
Many analysts think that the past few decades of research and practice have shown how to store and transport carbon safely, though others remain concerned. The CO2 would be injected into deep geology—say, one kilometer below the surface—well below drinking water, into places like saline aquifers or empty oil and gas reservoirs. Storage capacity is not expected to be an issue. There are many places to put the CO2—but this, along with storage integrity, is a topic of continuing research.11 Notably, though, if highly concentrated CO2 were to escape from a pipeline on land, this could lead to acid rain, acidification of water resources, and the asphyxiation of plants and animals; a marine leak could severely impact underwater life, as well. Concentrations of CO2 above 2 percent have major impacts on human respiratory systems. At 7 to 10 percent, one falls unconscious and dies.12 Obviously, pipelines need to be placed such that they avoid areas with important water resources, sensitive biomes, and seismic activity.13 Induced seismicity, or the creation of earthquakes, is a concern that may arise with disposal of oil field brines into saline aquifers, which increases the pressure of fluids inside the rock. As stated in the National Academies report on negative emissions technologies, “The field does not fully understand induced seismicity from subsurface injection of CO2.”14 This is an important research gap, and the report recommends allocating $50 million to study induced seismicity.
When it comes to injection of CO2, global needs can conflict with local geographies. There’s not always a “source and sink match,” which is to say, the place where you’d want to build a carbon capture facility isn’t always near the place where you can store the carbon. The cultural and social aspects of the terrain may constrain storage potential in many places. In India, one case study notes, the agricultural heartland of the Indo-Gangetic Plain has a large technical storage potential, but the arable land supports half a billion people. One of the suitable storage sites is close to the holy city of Varanasi, which would omit it from consideration.15 Liability is also a huge issue: Who wants to insure this sort of risk?
If storing this waste underground for thousands of years doesn’t sound great to you, you’re not alone. Indeed, the forecast is still not bright for carbon capture and storage.
One of CCS’s key failures has been its disastrous relationship with coal. Everyone thinks of it in terms of coal. “Coal for electricity,” or imagining CCS’s primary role as supporting continued use of coal for electricity generation, has been a hegemonic frame, as policy analyst Alfonso Martínez Arranz argues. This is especially true in Europe, he notes, where the dogma dangled the proposition of European coal’s dominance over Russian gas, and promised a novel, emerging technology that Europe could offer
the world.16 This coal-for-electricity frame had its obvious appeal, given that fossil fuels powered modern civilization, that 80 percent of the world’s energy supply still comes from fossil fuels, and that trillions of dollars have been sunk into this infrastructure.17 Critics easily disparage this sort of CCS as a technofix that allows climate to be solved without any change in production or consumption. “The weakest point of the fossil fuel regime is presently its legitimacy,” writes one group of critical scholars, observing that the addition of CCS promises to resolve this challenge.18 However, they also suggest that the hype may have peaked: CCS has been contested by numerous NGOs, and it is still relatively unknown by the general public.
Even though it’s tempting to see CCS as life support for fossil fuels, the truth is that coal plus CCS can’t compete with cheap gas and renewables; it’s a dead end in many regions of the world. Solar is a blazing star, while CCS for coal seems like a blast from the past—a holdover from the Bush I administration and its coal interests, belonging to a pre-financial-crisis era. CCS with natural gas looks far more economically viable. Many eyes are on a new demonstration scale power plant outside of Houston, Texas—Net Power’s natural gas-fueled power plant. It employs a technology called the Allam power cycle that actually uses the heat of pressurized carbon dioxide to turn its turbines instead of steam—producing pipeline-ready carbon dioxide, thus bringing the cost of carbon capture way down. If it works at scale, it would be price-competitive with a regular gas-fired power plant, but without the emissions.
After Geoengineering Page 13