Carbon Capture Must Be Part of the Climate Solution

Fossil fuel companies tout carbon capture as a way to shore up their own profits. But the technology holds the potential for good — helping us to save the planet, and ourselves, from ecological catastrophe.

Orca, the world’s first, ONLY and largest climate-positive direct air capture and storage plant, in Hellisheidi, Iceland. (Climeworks)

BYSPENCER ROBERTS

JACOOBIN

12.22.2021

Imagine a group of campers carelessly polluting the forest, leaving beer cans, plastic wrappers, and propane tanks strewn about the understory. An ecologist comes upon their campsite and explains how they are harming the forest ecosystem. The campers decide to stop polluting, but never clean up the mess. This is analogous to a climate strategy without carbon removal.

At its root, the climate crisis is a chemical imbalance. Global heating is just one of its side effects. To restore the ecological conditions in which we evolved, we must restore the balance of carbon flows between our atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. This means not only halting carbon emissions, but returning carbon to where it came from.

Where to Put All This Carbon

Since 1750, an estimated 26 to 46 percent of cumulative historical emissions have been released from the biosphere through deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction. Fortunately, ecosystems have myriad ways to reverse this process. Even on the mouth of a smokestack, the most advanced technology scrubbing the densest coal plume pales in comparison to a tropical forest, which itself pales in comparison to a mangrove. It’s true that nothing sequesters carbon more quickly than nature.

But the world’s ecosystems have a carbon ceiling, or carrying capacity. Even if we somehow returned all converted land to its preindustrial state, models estimate we could only sequester around 41 percent of cumulative historical emissions — in other words, roughly as much carbon as the biosphere originally contained.

This is because at least half of the carbon we’ve released into the atmosphere has come from the lithosphere, through burning fossil fuel from the Earth’s crust. There is no natural process to reverse this at the necessary scale and speed.

Despite this reality, many leading climate advocates argue that carbon capture is unnecessary. They point out — correctly — that if we rapidly decarbonize, the planet could make it halfway back to preindustrial carbon dioxide levels by the end of the century.

But again, the changing climate is only one consequence of the global chemistry experiment we’ve been running. If we leave all this carbon in the atmosphere, levels will eventually decrease once we stop emitting. That’s because most of it will dissolve into the ocean, triggering a chain reaction with carbonic compounds that acidifies seawater. Removing carbon from the atmosphere reverses this process. Even if we should reach preindustrial temperatures in the 2100s by emissions cuts alone, we will have done nothing to address ocean acidification. Is it a victory to achieve a planet where there are vast areas of ocean with no oysters to filter water, no corals to shelter fish, no pteropods to support food webs?

Worse yet, without burying carbon, the effects of temperature change will be catastrophic on both sea and land. We will almost certainly cross the two degree threshold, virtually dooming corals to extinction, liquidating the Arctic sea ice, sinking hundreds of cities from Bangkok to Miami, and killing millions of people in heatwaves. To survive, we must stabilize our climate — and quickly.
Ungreenwashing Carbon Capture

While leading biogeochemists have long made the case for carbon capture technology, its most visible proponent is the fossil fuel industry. Its lobbyists use it to sell carbon credits to big polluters and empty promises to world leaders. Its interest in the technology isn’t motivated by an obligation to humanity or the planet, but rather a strategy to silence critics and stay in business — whether that means emitting less or more. Today, most of the small amount of carbon the industry captures isn’t stored, but rather used in enhanced oil recovery to lubricate geological fissures and accelerate carbon extraction. Needless to say, this exacerbates the problem.

There are only a few forms of carbon capture technology that yield net-negative emissions. First, some catalyze natural processes, such as enhanced rock weathering and ocean iron fertilization. However, the sequestration potential of these approaches is generally thought to be modest — and with a high risk of negative ecological side effects.

Then there’s bioenergy carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. BECCS augments the theoretically net-neutral process of growing and burning biofuel with capturing carbon at the smokestack, storing it underground to push emissions into the red. This method could potentially sequester a lot of carbon, but at a high cost in land. While we wouldn’t have to expand cropland if we drastically reduced agricultural land use by farming fewer animals, using land to grow biofuels would sacrifice its higher potential for carbon sequestration through rewilding.

This leaves direct air capture (DAC), perhaps the most technologically challenging of all. DAC generally involves a system of enormous fans sucking air through a chemical sponge that filters roughly a thousand air molecules for every four of carbon dioxide. These are then liquefied in solvents and pumped back underground.

The drawbacks associated with direct air capture are low compared to other forms of geoengineering and related to the risks we already take during fossil fuel extraction, including seismic destabilization and injection well leaks. However, DAC is water-intensive, and although we might develop passive systems that use wind, absorbent solvents, or electrodialysis, today’s direct air capture technology demands high quantities of energy and is only emissions-negative if powered by renewables.

Therein lies the most significant caveat: carbon capture is no excuse for aggressively cutting emissions. It will only help if we also rapidly phase out the fossil fuel industry.

Unfortunately, that’s who’s getting all the funding. Fossil fuel corporations are raking in public investments and tax exemptions to research and develop carbon capture, yet posting pathetic results. Despite decades of R&D, billions in carbon capture subsidies, and proposals for $100 billion more, ExxonMobil reported capturing less than 1 percent of its emissions in 2019.

The charitable interpretation is that carbon capture engineering is uniquely challenging. A less credulous explanation is that fossil fuel corporations simply have no incentive to develop carbon capture technology. Funding isn’t contingent on progress, and scaling isn’t worth the capital of thousands of engineers and millions of construction workers. Either way, the research and development of carbon capture technology can only be successful if we decouple it from the fossil fuel industry and build it within the public sector, far from the tyranny of the profit margin.

Despite such misinvestment, net-negative carbon capture technology does exist. In August 2021, a prototype called Orca went online, making it the biggest direct air capture facility in the world. While its developer, Climeworks, is at best a net-neutral corporation — it sells carbon offsets to make a profit — Orca is net-negative, running on geothermal and drawing down a relatively impressive four thousand tons of CO2 per year. At that rate, we’d need more than eight million of them running for fifty years to capture all the fossil carbon we’ve burned (and it would take longer for the atmosphere to level out).

The good news is that the facilities are not that big — about the size of a shipping container, of which we have around 43 million — and like solar and wind, we can expect this technology to gain efficiency over time. Plus, if considering where to install them, we do already have millions of drill pads complete with tubes connected to oil deposits or porous shale strata. Lastly, it’s not all or nothing. Every atom counts.

The Real Net Zero

Carbon capture is not the easy road to net zero that oil lobbyists want to sell us. The real net zero is somewhere around 280ppm CO2. We should think of carbon capture more like putting an imperceptibly diffuse toothpaste back into countless millions of leaky tubes — essentially reverse-engineering fossil fuel, our most disastrous geoengineering experiment ever. It’s a moonshot, yet it’s not rocket science. And while there is a complex engineering case for carbon capture, the ecological case is simple: we need to rebury carbon to reverse ocean acidification.

Carbon capture is a challenge we cannot afford to turn away from, regardless of the venal purposes for which the technology has so far been developed. Today, it is used as a justification for prolonging our dependence on fossil fuel and enriching those who have profited from its extraction. Tomorrow, it may be the only way to remedy the crime against nature that precedes and precipitates climate change — the distortion of planetary chemistry.

This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Spencer Roberts is a science writer, musician, ecologist, and rooftop solar engineer from Colorado.

Corporate Media Fed COP 28 Carbon Capture Confusion

Corporate Media Fed COP 28 Carbon Capture Confusion

By Olivia Riggio

January 5, 2024

Source: FAIR

The COP 28 UN climate conference concluded with countries agreeing to a plan to transition away from fossil fuels, using language that fell short of calling for an explicit phaseout. In the debates over whether countries need to phase fossil fuels “out” or merely “down,” carbon capture and storage (CCS), a form of so-called fossil fuel “abatement,” played a central role.

Rather than exposing CCS as the greenwashing ploy it essentially is, some reporting placed disproportionate significance on the technology, adding to the confusion and misunderstandings about climate change that fossil fuel companies have been funding for decades.

An excuse to not eliminate

“Don’t be fooled,” writes Jonathan Foley in Scientific American (12/4/23): Carbon capture is “mostly a distraction from what we really need to do right now: phase out fossil fuels and deploy more effective climate solutions.”

Before COP 28 even began, climate activists were not hopeful. The conference, held in Dubai, capital of the oil-dependent United Arab Emirates, reeked of almost comedic irony. The conference’s president, Sultan Al Jaber, is the head of the petrostate’s national oil company.

During a November livestream event, Al Jaber falsely claimed there was “no science” indicating a phaseout of fossil fuels was necessary to keep warming levels below the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement. He added that phasing out fossil fuels would “take the world back to the caves” (Guardian, 12/3/23).

CCS technology—which involves capturing carbon from sources like power plants and steel mills, and storing it underground—has become a key part of the fossil fuel industry’s arguments against the elimination of its environmentally devastating product. Instead of rapidly ending the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the claim goes, we can simply “abate” the emissions with CCS.

The reality is that even optimistic estimates see CCS (also known as carbon capture and sequestration) as playing only a limited role in mitigating emissions from difficult-to-decarbonize sectors. But polluters aggrandize its potential contributions in order to keep expanding fossil fuel extraction while at the same time claiming to take action on climate (Scientific American, 12/4/23). In fact, most successful CCS projects are actually used to force more oil out from underground, in a process called “enhanced oil recovery” (Washington Post, 10/25/23).

Given the chokehold the fossil fuel industry had on this COP and subsequent conversations about climate change mitigation, journalists must be clear and realistic in their reporting about the capabilities of carbon capture, and its role in both climate crisis solutions and fossil fuel industry greenwashing.

‘A valuable role’

To back up the idea that carbon capture is a “valuable tool,” the New York Times (12/6/23) links to a study whose headline calls it “Too Little, Too Late, Too Slow.”

The New York Times’ headline, “Can Carbon Capture Live Up to the Hype?” (12/6/23), could have been most easily and accurately answered by a short “no.” Instead, the subheading misled about CCS’s plausibility as a climate change solution, claiming that “experts say it could play a valuable role.”

But what’s the evidence on offer? The article mostly described the failures of expensive carbon capture projects to even get off the ground. The only reference to that supposedly “valuable role” linked to three studies or reports. The titles of two were “[Carbon Capture]—Too Little, Too Late, Too Slow—It’s No Panacea” (S&P Global, 10/18/23) and “Heavy Dependence on Carbon Capture and Storage ‘Highly Economically Damaging,’ Says Oxford Report” (SSEE, 12/4/23).

A third, seemingly more optimistic, report came from the International Energy Agency (11/27/23). But that agency’s latest report actually offered the opposite message, its executive director explained (Toronto Star, 11/23/23): Oil companies’ plan to achieve “net zero”—removing as much carbon from the atmosphere as they emit—by capturing emissions while increasing production is an “illusion” based on “implausibly large amounts of carbon capture.” Lucky for those companies, New York Times headline writers are here to keep up that illusion.

The Times article itself even noted that “total fossil fuel use will have to fall sharply no matter what to keep global warming at relatively low levels,” and that carbon capture is “no silver bullet.” It cited the IEA’s roadmap to lowering carbon emissions to net zero by mid-century, noting that even in this ideal plan, CCS would account for just 8% of the world’s total emissions cuts, and that “the vast majority of reductions would come from countries shifting away from fossil fuels entirely.”

While CCS could play a part in mitigating emissions from industries like cement, steel and fertilizers, the benefit can only be realized if the technology’s logistical and financial limitations are addressed, explained Jonathan Foley in a piece for Scientific American (12/4/23). Food and Water Watch (7/20/21) characterizes CCS as an “expensive failure” that’s energy intensive and actually increases emissions.

Even while outlining CCS’s “limitations,” the Times managed to both-sides the issue:

One big dispute is over how big a role this technology, known as carbon capture and storage, should play in the fight against global warming. Some oil and gas producers say it should be central in planning for the future. Others, including many activists and world leaders, dismiss carbon capture as too unproven and too risky.

In a “dispute” about how to cut carbon emissions, oil and gas producers’ arguments should certainly not be taken at face value. And, while “activists and world leaders” are among those who “dismiss carbon capture,”crucially,  so are scientists.

The Times piece played down the many economic and logistical failures of CCS as “limitations.” While removing carbon will likely play a necessary—albeit small—role in meeting climate goals, CCS’s  success hinges on our abilities to phase out fossil fuels. The tone of the piece’s headline is overly optimistic, offering a false sense of hope—and “hype”—for a technology that’s used more as a fossil fuel fig leaf than a climate change solution.

‘Vital…but falling short’

Bloomberg (12/6/23) notes without rebuttal that “CCS has been discussed as a way to limit the damage caused by fossil fuels without having to abandon them.”

An explanatory Bloomberg piece (12/6/23) about carbon capture, headlined, “Why Carbon Capture Is Seen as Vital in Climate Fight but Falling Short,” used similarly weak language.

In addition to CCS, the piece highlighted direct air capture (DAC), another carbon capture technology that removes carbon that is already in the atmosphere, rather than at the site of emission, and also performs at a tiny fraction of the scale that would be necessary for it to be an actual solution. According to the article, the largest DAC hub in the world, found in Iceland, only removes the equivalent of the annual emissions of 250 average US citizens.

For more context, the Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs that Biden’s Department of Energy is supporting are anticipated to suck only about 1 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. In 2022, global emissions of CO2 were 40.5 billion metric tons (Scientific American, 12/4/23)–adding more than 40,000 times as much carbon as the hubs are supposed to take out.

To say these technologies are “falling short” is quite the understatement.

To say they’re “vital” requires context. The Bloomberg piece explained:

Even if solar and wind energy largely supplant fossil fuels, holding temperatures down will require capturing large amounts of emissions produced by activities that are hard to decarbonize, such as making cement.

That much is true. However, it leaves out the most important part: Carbon capture can only make a difference in a world that drastically cuts emissions. Without that priority being met, its impacts are marginal at best—and, at worst, a distraction that permits fossil fuel companies to increase emissions and worsen the crisis.

In a press briefing with Covering Climate Now (11/9/23) regarding CCS and carbon dioxide removal, David King, former chief science adviser to the British government, emphasized that reducing greenhouse gas emissions was still the No. 1 priority, as human activity continues to emit the equivalent of about 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

‘Some environmentalists’

Washington Post (12/11/23) attributes the idea that carbon capture is a “false climate solution” to “some environmentalists.”

A Washington Post report (12/11/23), leading with the tearful remarks of Mona Ainuu, a climate activist from Niue, a small island nation, described the ultimate, disappointing outcome of the COP: The draft agreement to come out of the conference called not for the phaseout of fossil fuels, but for the mealy-mouthed “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

The agreement also called for the rapid phase-down of “unabated coal.” The Post explained carbon capture and sequestration:

Some environmentalists view CCS as a false climate solution, saying it could prolong the life of polluting facilities for decades to come. They note that the International Energy Agency has warned that humanity cannot build any new fossil fuel infrastructure if it hopes to limit warming to 1.5°C.

Like the Times report, the Post framing failed to give readers the unvarnished truth they need, that CCS is only seen as a key climate solution by industries whose profitability depends upon the further burning of fossil fuels. No further information on the IEA report was given, or any information about the other litany of scientific studies, reports and information on the failures of CCS, allowing the specific concerns of “some environmentalists” to go unmentioned.

All of these pieces fail to mention why the fossil fuel industry is so gung ho about this dubious technology: While oil companies’ greenwashed PR campaigns tout CCS, corporations and governments continue to ramp up extraction.

Carbon capture and removal will likely play a small role in avoiding the most devastating effects of climate change, but it’s spitting in the ocean without a fossil fuel phaseout. It is journalists’ job to explain this accurately, while reminding audiences to not forget the No. 1 priority: eliminating fossil fuels.

 

Carbon capture method plucks CO2 straight from the air

Using humidity-powered technology, researchers found several new ions that facilitate low-energy carbon sequestration

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

NEW IONS FACILITATED CARBON CAPTURE.

view more 

CREDIT: DRAVID LAB / NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Even as the world slowly begins to decarbonize industrial processes, achieving lower concentrations of atmospheric carbon requires technologies that remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — rather than just prevent the creation of it.

Typical carbon capture catches CO2 directly from the source of a carbon-intensive process. Ambient carbon capture, or “direct air capture” (DAC) on the other hand, can take carbon out of typical environmental conditions and serves as one weapon in the battle against climate change, particularly as reliance on fossil fuels begins to decrease and with it, the need for point-of-source carbon capture.

New research from Northwestern University shows a novel approach to capture carbon from ambient environmental conditions that looks at the relationship between water and carbon dioxide in systems to inform the “moisture-swing” technique, which captures CO2 at low humidities and releases it at high humidities. The approach incorporates innovative kinetic methodologies and a diversity of ions, enabling carbon removal from virtually anywhere.

The study was published today (Oct. 3) in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

“We are not only expanding and optimizing the choice of ions for carbon capture, but also helping unravel the fundamental underpinnings of complex fluid-surface interactions,” said Northwestern’s Vinayak P. Dravid, a senior author on the study. “This work advances our collective understanding of DAC, and our data and analyses provide a strong impetus to the community, for theorists and experimentalists alike, to further improve carbon capture under practical conditions.”

Dravid is the Abraham Harris Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and director of global initiatives at the International Institute for Nanotechnology. Ph.D. students, John Hegarty and Benjamin Shindel, were the paper’s co-first authors.

Shindel said the idea behind the paper came from a desire to use ambient environmental conditions to facilitate the reaction.

“We liked moisture-swing carbon capture because it doesn't have a defined energy cost,” Shindel said. “Even though there’s some amount of energy required to humidify a volume of air, ideally you could get humidity ‘for free,’ energetically, by relying on an environment that has natural dry and wet reservoirs of air close together.”

The group also expanded the number of ions used to make the reaction possible.

“Not only have we doubled the number of ions that exhibit the desired humidity-dependent carbon capture, we have also discovered the highest-performing systems yet,” John Hegarty said.

In recent years, moisture-swing capture has taken off. Traditional carbon capture methods use sorbents to capture CO2 at point-of-source locations, and then use heat or generated vacuums to release CO2 from the sorbent. It comes with a high-energy cost.

“Traditional carbon capture holds onto CO2 tightly, which means it takes significant energy to release it and reuse it,” Hegarty said.

It also doesn’t work everywhere, Shindel said. Agriculture, concrete and steel manufacturers, for example, are major contributors to emissions but take up large footprints that make it impossible to capture carbon at a single source.

Shindel added that wealthier countries should be attempting to get below zero emissions as developing countries, which rely more on the carbon economy, ramp down CO2 production.

Another senior author, chemistry professor Omar Farha, has experience exploring the role of metal-oxide framework (MOF) structures for diverse applications, including CO2 capture and sequestration.

“DAC is a complex and multifaceted problem that requires an interdisciplinary approach,” Farha said. “What I appreciate about this work is the detailed and careful measurements of complex parameters. Any proposed mechanism must explain these intricate observations."

Researchers in the past have zeroed in on carbonate and phosphate ions to facilitate moisture-swing capture and have specific hypotheses relating to why these specific ions are effective. But Dravid’s team wanted to test a wider breadth of ions to see which were the most effective. Overall, they found ions with the highest valency — mostly phosphates — were most effective and they began going down a list of polyvalent ions, ruling out some, as well as finding new ions that worked for this application, including silicate and borate.

The team believes that future experiments, coupled with computational modeling, will help better explain why certain ions are more effective than others.

There are already companies working to commercialize direct air carbon capture, using carbon credits to incentivize companies to offset their emissions. Many are capturing carbon that would already have been captured through activities such as modified agricultural practices, whereas this approach unambiguously sequesters CO2 directly from the atmosphere, where it could then be concentrated and ultimately stored or reused.

Dravid’s team plans to integrate such CO2 capturing materials with their earlier porous sponge platform, which has been developed to remove environmental toxins including oil, phosphates and microplastics.

The research on direct air capture of carbon dioxide was supported by the Department of Energy (DOE-BES DE-SC0022332), and made use of the SHyNE Resource facilities, supported by NSF-NNCI Program (NSF ECCS-2025633).

---

JOURNAL

Environmental Science & Technology

DOI

10.1021/acs.est.3c02543 

CARBON CAPTURE IS GREENWASHING

Carbon capture key to net-zero electricity, but federal timelines too tight: report

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

Carbon capture and storage is key to greening Canada's electricity grid, but meeting the proposed time frame laid out by the federal government will be extremely difficult based on the current state of the technology, according to a new report. 

The report also warns that if federal clean electricity regulations are too stringent, it could scare companies away from investing in emissions-reducing carbon capture altogether.

Carbon capture and storage is a term that describes the use of technology to capture harmful greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes and store them safely underground, preventing them from entering the atmosphere.

Experts say the large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage in hard-to-abate sectors like oil and gas production and cement manufacturing will be required if Canada is to have a shot at meeting its climate targets.

Carbon capture and storage units will also need to be installed on natural gas and coal-fired power plants in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia — provinces that don't have significant hydroelectric capacity and as such are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels — if the country is to meet Ottawa's goal of obtaining a net-zero electricity grid by 2035.

But Thursday's report from the Regina-based International CCUS Knowledge Centre urges the federal government to rethink the emissions intensity limits for carbon capture-abated power plants laid out in its draft clean electricity regulations.

The draft regulations currently state that after 2035, fossil fuel-driven power plants will have to meet an emissions performance standard of no more than 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide per gigawatt of electricity produced per year. 

That means to be compliant, natural gas-fired power plants would need to achieve a nearly 95 per cent CO2 capture rate, said Beth Valiaho, the CCUS Knowledge Centre’s vice-president of policy, regulatory and stakeholder relations.

She added no carbon capture facility in the world is currently achieving that level of performance. SaskPower's Boundary Dam, for example — the only large-scale carbon capture facility currently installed on a power plant in Canada — has a capture rate of 65 to 70 per cent.

That facility was designed to have a 90 per cent emissions capture rate, but has been plagued by technical issues and equipment failures.

"It doesn't mean it can't be done," Valiaho said, adding many carbon capture technology vendors believe a 95 per cent capture rate is technically achievable.

"I think there is a future state where this works at that kind of high level, but, you know, there's not one operating continuously in the world right now with that type of performance."

Valiaho said many of the problems that have been encountered at Boundary Dam can be avoided at future carbon capture facilities by employing some of the lessons learned at that site.

But she said if the federal requirements are too strict, and power generators have doubt about whether the standards are achievable, they may choose not to invest in carbon capture at all. 

Overly stringent regulations could also put operators who installed carbon capture technology in good faith in the position of being non-compliant with the law. Valiaho said under the current draft regulations, Boundary Dam would have to shut down, even though the facility has captured more than four million tonnes of harmful CO2 since operations began in 2014.

"We want to see CCUS go forward. We don't want it to fail because of unachievable standards," she said. 

Scott MacDougall, an electricity program director at the Pembina Institute, said carbon capture and storage is an extremely important technology when it comes to reducing emissions from the electricity sector, especially in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

He said he's hopeful the federal government will hear the feedback from industry and build more leniency into the regulations.

"The (clean electricity regulations) should incent the use of CCUS technology and not penalize it," MacDougall said.

"Hopefully they'll take some advice on board about this and make some adjustments down the road."

GREEN CAPITALI$M

Carbon capture innovator completes 

£8m funding round
February 26, 2021

Tom White, C-Capture CEO


Carbon capture technology company C-Capture has announced that it has completed an £8 million ($11.13 million) funding round supported by existing shareholders IP Group, Drax, and bp Ventures, with additional funding from the British Business Bank’s Future Fund.

The investment reflects the confidence of the C-Capture board in C-Capture’s carbon capture technology and the Government’s support for companies who have the potential to help solve the climate crisis.

C-Capture has patented a unique, solvent-based technology that offers a safe, low-cost way to remove carbon dioxide from emissions using a post-combustion capture approach. It provides a means to make the removal of carbon dioxide significantly more economic from a range of large-scale processes, such as power generation from coal, gas and biomass, and the production of cement, steel, and aluminium.

C-Capture is one of the technologies being evaluated as part of a pilot programme at Drax, to demonstrate carbon-negative power production. C-Capture was recently recognised by bp’s advancing low carbon programme and was highlighted in a recent UK government report as an important emerging carbon capture technology.



C-Capture was founded in 2009 as a spin-out from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leeds with backing from IP Group.

Tom White, C-Capture CEO, said: “Additional investment from our shareholders supports C-Capture in further optimising its carbon capture technology, improving performance whilst driving down costs. The benefits our technology can offer over current state-of-the-art carbon capture technologies may help deployment across a range of sectors to be accelerated. Securing this round of investment allows our technical team to really focus on developing a product that will change the way the world thinks about carbon capture.”

Ben Murphy, investment director at IP Group and C-Capture Director, said: “C-Capture is a testament to the potential for new science to shape the world for the better. C-Capture has the potential to be one of the most impactful startups in the world’s future energy system. At IP Group we are proud to have been there from the beginning, helping to build the company up from its foundations.”

Jason Shipstone, chief innovation officer at Drax Group and C-Capture Director, said: “Carbon removal technologies are essential in addressing the climate crisis. Drax and C-Capture will continue to work together to develop the vital negative emissions technology, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, expected to make a significant contribution towards the UK reaching its legally binding net zero by 2050 target.”

Martin Sellers, low carbon digital technology principal at bp and C-Capture Director, said: “Carbon capture is an essential technology for the energy transition, as according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) Sustainable Development Scenario, it will account for 7% of the cumulative emissions reductions needed globally by 2040. bp ventures recognises C-Capture’s progress in developing the technology, and in helping to meet that important target.”

Doug Ford opens door to storing CO2 underground to help hit climate change targets

Story by Mike Crawley • 

Premier Doug Ford's government is opening the door to allowing underground carbon capture in Ontario, a way of fighting climate change by trapping and storing greenhouse gas emissions.

The government brought in legislation to repeal Ontario's previous ban on injecting carbon dioxide underground, and is now proposing rules for carbon capture pilot projects.

The process involves capturing industrial emissions of CO2, compressing them into liquid, then putting them deep into the earth, in effect cancelling their release into the atmosphere.

Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources, Graydon Smith, calls carbon capture a big opportunity for the province.

"You look at other jurisdictions, not only in Canada but in the United States and really around the world, and carbon capture is seen as emerging effective technology that can really make a difference," Smith said in an interview.


Graydon Smith, left, is Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry.

© Evan Mitsui/CBC

While carbon capture has been touted particularly by the oil and gas sector as a way to neutralize emissions, the price tag can be hefty. Federal and provincial taxpayers have covered a significant chunk of the cost of projects in Canada so far.

Industry groups hoping Ontario will move faster

A range of companies and business lobby groups encouraged the Ford government to lay the groundwork for starting carbon capture in this province.

"This is one of those tools we need to use from our toolbox to help us get to net zero," said Dennis Darby, president and CEO of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.

"I'm hopeful that Ontario will get there, but they've been slow," Darby said in an interview. "They've taken the right first step, but it's a bit of a baby step. Let's see if they go further."

"Industry always wants to to move very quickly and I understand that," countered Smith. "I think they're very excited by the prospects of this technology as are we. But it's also important to get it right."

Canada's leaders on carbon capture are Alberta and Saskatchewan. According to federal figures, Alberta captured more than three megatonnes of CO2 in 2021. (For a sense of scale, Alberta's emissions that year totalled 256 megatonnes.)

Ontario's biggest-emitting candidates for using carbon capture include steel mills, cement makers, gas-fired power plants and refineries.

Jim Redford, vice-president of energy services for Enbridge Gas, says his company's industrial customers are keenly interested in the opportunity.

"Carbon capture is a great way for those businesses to continue to use natural gas, but also to significantly reduce their emissions," said Redford in an interview.

"When you look at the energy future, no one type of energy is going to power Ontario," he said, calling carbon capture "a great way for natural gas to continue to be used, with lower [net] emissions."

Where to store captured CO2 will be key question

Ontario produced 150.6 megatonnes of CO2 emissions in 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available. The Ford government has pledged to reduce annual emissions to 144 megatonnes by 2030.

One of the issues facing Ontario will be where to store the captured CO2. The two likeliest candidates: disused oil and gas wells that dot southwestern Ontario and saline aquifers (where porous sedimentary rock is filled with saltwater), stretching from Windsor to Port Dover.

The liquefied CO2 would almost certainly be shipped from the emission sources to the underground storage by pipeline.

Enbridge "would have the ability to transport carbon dioxide," Redford said. "We are familiar with the geology of Ontario and the storage of underground gases. So transportation and storage [of CO2] is really a natural extension of the business we have today."

Keith Brooks, programs director with advocacy group Environmental Defence, says carbon capture may be useful for offsetting emissions by the cement or steel industries. But he opposes its use to offset emissions from the use of fossil fuels.

"We don't think that carbon capture is a good solution for the fossil fuel industry," Brooks said in an interview. "It doesn't actually move that industry into the net zero economy that we're trying to build, and instead it acts as a lifeline."

Brooks says allowing carbon capture from such industries amounts to prolonging dependence on fossil fuels while "deluding ourselves that we're actually taking action on climate change."

Gas-fired electricity production to ramp up

He's particularly concerned that carbon capture will be used to justify Ontario using fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Gas-fired power plants make up six of Ontario's 25 biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, accounting for 4.5 megatonnes of CO2 annually. The province is preparing to solicit bids to build even more gas-fired generation capacity to meet expected growth in demand for electricity over the coming decade.

There's also the question of who will pay for carbon capture.

"If companies want to invest in that as a technology, or as a solution to deal with their emissions, that's up to a company to decide, but it's not something that taxpayers should be footing the bill for," said Brooks.

The province of Alberta paid more than half the cost of Shell Canada's $1.3-billion Quest carbon capture project northeast of Edmonton, and the federal government kicked in nearly 10 per cent.

SaskPower, the Crown corporation that produces electricity in Saskatchewan, spent $1.5 billion on a project to capture carbon at a coal-fired generating station, and the facility has struggled to hit its targets.

"At this point, the Ontario government is not backing (carbon capture) projects or funding these projects," Smith said. "We're just creating a framework for them to take place."

As for a timeline, while pilot projects could start as early as this year, it's hard to see carbon capture going at a commercial scale in the province much before the end of the decade.

After Alberta announced funding for the projects in 2009, it took six years for the Quest carbon capture facility to launch and 11 years before the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line pipeline began operating.