This is a carbon capture plant.
It's the fossil fuel industry’s preferred method for tackling climate change.
Simply put, it removes damaging CO2 from the atmosphere.
Done correctly, It could indeed be essential
if the world is going to meet its climate goals.
But it's also highly controversial
because of its popularity with fossil fuel companies.
And the tech is featuring prominently
at the annual United Nations Climate Convention,
COP 28, taking place in Dubai.
It’s significant that it's happening in the UAE
because the UAE is one of the world's
largest oil producers.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that carbon capture
is front and center at this year’s COP summit.
It poses the critical question:
can we ensure that the technology is deployed
in ways that benefit the planet,
not just the balance sheets of oil and gas companies?
Carbon capture is central at COP this year
because it’s the oil sector's favorite
climate solution as it were,
it’s a technology that's been used
in the sector for decades in particular to generate more oil.
And in today's context, where carbon capture is seen
as a kind of climate solution, the fact that it's being used
all over the world to generate more oil and gas is highly controversial.
In Abu Dhabi, about 100 miles from here,
is what’s known as point-source carbon capture facility.
It shows how carbon capture can work well, but also some of it’s pitfalls.
Al Reyadah plant is a carbon capture plant attached to a steel factory.
Point-source carbon capture is about
attaching a kind of trapper to the end of a gas processing plant
or some kind of pipe that's popping out that's producing CO2.
The captured carbon dioxide is compressed
and then transported to an oil field
where it is used to extract more oil.
In these old wells,
the oil can be sticky and hard to get out,
so they use a lubricant like carbon dioxide
to loosen that oil and effectively enhance oil production.
Most of the investments in point-source carbon capture
over the past three decades,
something like $83 billion,
have been to extract more fossil fuels rather than just reduce emissions.
In 2022, the technology captured just 0.1% of global emissions.
If the world is to achieve its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050,
the International Energy Agency estimates
that we need about 30 times more
point-source capture capacity by the end of this decade.
But the oil and gas industry has been slow to commit and act.
For now, CCS capacity remains at about 40 million tons.
If all announced plans were built,
underground CO2 storage could reach 400 million tons by 2030.
Carbon capture technologies have really been a tiny drop in the ocean when
when it comes to delivering on technologies or processes
to cut emissions globally.
While its backers say that Al Reyadah plant delivers what it promises,
there's a growing list of point-source carbon capture projects
that have fallen short of their goals.
A prime example is Chevron's Gorgon facility off the coast of Australia,
which has long endured technical problems,
as has the Kemper power plant in Mississippi
that aim to capture carbon emissions.
But economics can also play spoiler.
That happened to a long delayed ExxonMobil project in Wyoming
and led to the underperformance
of a Texas mega-project built by Occidental Petroleum.
Occidental has tried various forms of carbon capture technology
over the years,
usually as a way to boost its production of oil and gas.
Now it's spending big on a new approach.
Occidental Petroleum is now spending $1.1 billion
to build a direct air capture plant.
The US government has made millions of dollars of taxpayer money available
to companies looking to build out this technology
in the form of tax credits.
And Occidental Petroleum wants to make use of that money.
There are only a handful of direct air capture plants operating in the world.
In fact, the Stratos plant
will have a hundred times the capacity of the largest one operating today.
That’s the Climeworks site in Iceland.
Direct air capture is ten times more expensive
than point-source air capture.
That’s because these are huge machines
that are sucking carbon dioxide
out of the atmosphere,
a much more dilute source than point-source streams
of for example, gas.
If government subsidies can increase the scale of deployment,
it could also reduce costs.
Scale has helped other green tech reduce costs rapidly.
If you look at solar and wind power,
where prices have fallen 90, 95% over the past three decades,
what engineers have to do
is make hundreds, thousands and millions of the same thing.
And by making each of those units, they learn how to make it cheaper.
That hasn't happened with carbon capture yet.
Most of the carbon capture plants are huge and almost unique.
In an ideal world, renewable energy will solve all our problems.
But that's not the world we live in.
The world needs infrastructure.
We need new bridges, we need roads, we need buildings.
We even need wind turbines
which are made out of steel and concrete.
Those are the sectors that are known as the hard to abate sectors.
The very chemistry of making cement
produces carbon dioxide,
whether you use fossil fuels or not.
And thus carbon capture technology is crucial
to be able to reduce emissions from producing cement.
Many experts agree that
if the world is going to have any chance
of reaching the climate goals laid out in the Paris Agreement,
more CCS will be essential for some sectors.
Time is, however, quickly running out.
The world has left the problem of tackling climate change to so late,
that now climate scientists have to include more and more carbon capture
to be able to balance out the emissions.
The gap between where we are with carbon capture technology
and where we need to be in 2030 is massive.
Every carbon capture plant takes about 5 to 7 years to be built.
That leaves barely two years to massively scale up its deployment.
Carbon capture technology has been around for 50 years.
They have been talked about as a climate solution for at least 30 years.
But for all the promises that they've made decade over decade,
they haven't been able to live up to it.
Obviously having carbon capture and storage in oil and gas production
is better than not having carbon capture and storage in oil and gas production.
But critics are concerned that the oil sector
is pushing this technology
as a license to continue and even expand oil and gas production
rather than rapidly rein it in.
We have to change course to address climate change.
At COP 28, the oil industry will bring their favorite climate solution,
But it's the very industry
that has failed to commit to actually building these projects.
The reality is that carbon emitting industries are going to take a long time
to phase out.
Until that happens,
carbon capture may be the next best option
to reduce their impact.
But it needs to be deployed effectively and soon.