Carbon Capture: Inefficient Technology

With the impacts of climate change starting to emerge, the search for viable solutions becomes increasingly urgent. Among the proposed methods, carbon capture technologies have emerged as a popular option for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. However, a closer examination reveals that these technologies may not be the panacea they appear to be. Carbon capture technologies essentially harvest carbon dioxide by separating it from other gasses and cooling it down to a liquid form. The most common form of carbon capture is post-combustion capture, which directly captures emissions from smokestacks of factories or power plants. The most commercially viable method, according to research engineer Howard Herzog, uses chemicals called amines that bind to CO2 at lower temperatures, isolate it, and then release it at higher temperatures for storage.  The liquid CO2 can then either be sequestered deep underground or repurposed for various commercial uses. Private industrial companies love this technology: carbon capture technology lets companies produce more fossil fuels while supposedly neutralizing their impact. Governments have poured billions of dollars into funding the development of carbon capture technologies. Unfortunately, despite its apparent benefits, carbon capture is not a feasible long-term solution to climate change and may ultimately cause more harm than good.

Standard estimates suggest carbon capture can harvest 85 to 90 percent of the CO2 emitted by factories or power plants. However, this statistic, despite its ubiquity across various internet sources, is almost definitely a gross overestimation and is quite misleading. This high effectivity rate was obtained in ideal laboratory conditions in which temperature, pressure, and gas composition were carefully managed. In the real world, where variables fluctuate and human error is inevitable , these optimistic results do not hold up. In fact, according to tests run by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, the carbon-capturing equipment associated with these findings is only 55.4 percent effective in common outdoor settings on average. When factoring in the carbon impact of upstream emissions—emissions caused by mining and transporting fossil fuels, including leaks and combustions—this number drops to an astonishingly low 10 to11 percent. 

Furthermore, carbon capture machinery can’t magically run on its own. These technologies require a significant amount of energy, often derived from…fossil fuels. As part of their “climate-change” mitigation campaigns, corporations use  a fossil-fuel powered process to mitigate the impacts of their use of fossil fuels. Even when powered by renewable sources, the technology’s environmental cost is still significantly larger than if that renewable energy source directly replaced the fossil-fuel source it is meant to mitigate. Even worse, sequestered CO2 is commonly repurposed for industrial use, like injecting liquid CO2 into old oil mines to force crude oil out of the ground. Thus, the supposed “future” of greenhouse pollution reductions has only catalyzed the production of fossil fuels that cause climate change in the first place. 

Carbon capture-hopefuls have argued sequestration technology could grow more efficiently with a couple more years of development and few more billion dollars in funding.Though true, embracing carbon-capturing technology, flaws and all, on a societal scale would prove detrimental. Despite the buy-in by corporations and tech-conglomerates, carbon capture is not the messiah of the environmentalist movement, and masks the pollution records of private companies from the public eye. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy wherever possible remains the sole method to appropriately combat climate change. 

While research into carbon capture should continue—and it may eventually become a genuinely effective method for filtering out CO2 at its source—we should not prioritize it or provide subsidies to companies simply because they claim to use it. It is time to address the root causes of climate change instead of giving its perpetrators another excuse to maintain harmful practices.