19 CCS - Carbon Capture and Storage

Most existing CCS projects in the world are enhanced oil recovery projects. That means that the captured carbon is used to produce more oil, not to reduce emissions.

The push for offshore CCS reflects the same attitude that has left the oceans in crisis today: treating them as a limitless resource to exploit and a bottomless receptacle for humanity’s waste.

Offshore CCS represents the next frontier of ocean abuse by the fossil fuel industry.

Whether on land or under the sea, CCS is not a solution to the climate crisis. Experience shows it is costly and ineffective, and only prolongs dependence on fossil fuels.

Carbon Storage in Theory Once CO₂ is captured, operators can inject it underground or under the seabed into a variety of different geologic formations, including saline aquifers, oil and gas reservoirs, coal seams, basalt formations, and organic shale formations.3 While storage in each of these formations is theoretically possible, there are geologic variables at each injection site that make it difficult to predict the behavior of the CO₂ underground.4 In principle, each of these formations can hold the CO₂ underground at a temperature and pressure that keeps the CO₂ in a supercritical state, meaning that it has properties of both a liquid and a gas. Depending on the site’s geology, the CO₂ may dissolve into some of the brine underground or trigger a chemical reaction that slowly turns the carbon into a solid mineral, over thousands of years, but most injected CO₂ is physically held underground by a seal known as a caprock.5 Descriptions of how CO₂ storage may work must be interpreted in light of the limited experience with CO₂ sequestration to date, the site-specific nature of geologic variations and leakage pathways, and the difficulty of tracking these developments over geological rather than human timescales.

Tooze on IEA Report

One scenario that the fossil fuel industry should not comfort itself with, according to the IEA (pdf), is the idea that gigantic carbon capture will permit a continuation or even expansion of the current industry.

If oil and natural gas consumption were to evolve as projected under today’s policy settings, this would require an inconceivable 32 billion tonnes of carbon captured for utilisation or storage by 2050, including 23 billion tonnes via direct air capture to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 °C. The necessary carbon capture technologies would require 26 000 terawatt hours of electricity generation to operate in 2050, which is more than global electricity demand in 2022. And it would require over USD 3.5 trillion in annual investments all the way from today through to mid-century, which is an amount equal to the entire industry’s annual average revenue in recent years.

Given the industry’s heavy reliance on carbon capture fantasies, this is a strong and important statement from the IEA.

Tooze (2023) Carbon Notes 7 - The IEA’s message to the oil and gas industry: wake up!

CIEL

Deep Trouble

Facing growing scrutiny over their contributions to climate change, polluting industries are increasingly looking for ways to cover up their continued emissions rather than phase out the fossil fuels driving them. One way companies claim the world can continue producing and using oil, gas, and coal without harming the climate is through carbon capture and storage (CCS), which purports to enable polluters to trap their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and bury them underground or under the seabed.

Despite the fanfare around CCS, it is a costly and risky endeavor and nearly all the world’s past CCS projects have experienced unexpected problems or failed outright. The technology’s poor track record hasn’t stopped the fossil fuel industry from championing new projects, and over the last few years, companies and governments have put forward a rash of new proposals that aim to store industrial emissions offshore under the seabed.

A new wave of proposed projects aims to pool CO2 waste from various fossil fuel and industrial activities for injection in offshore storage “hubs” in oceans around the world. This untested technique, which involves a step change in the scale and complexity of offshore CCS, poses uncalculated risks. Some of the envisioned hubs are associated with the buildout of new fossil fuel projects, and most would store waste from industries that must be scaled down or phased out if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Deep Trouble: The Risks of Offshore Carbon Capture and Storage explains the threat presented by a massive buildout of offshore CCS infrastructure and uncovers the government financing and fossil fuel interests enabling and advancing this new wave of projects. The report concludes that governments must halt the expansion of offshore CCS by ending subsidies and support for these projects, while interpreting existing laws and strengthening emerging regulations to protect the oceans from absorbing even more of humanity’s waste and safeguard communities, the environment, and the global climate.

**Ciel memo*

Until now, global experience with offshore CCS has been based on just two projects in Norway, both of which encountered unpredicted problems despite their relatively simple designs and small scales. Far from a proof of concept, those projects prove the complexity of offshore CCS and raise serious con- cerns about proposals to ramp it up in size and scope.

Injecting CO₂ under the seabed presents uncalcu- lated risks and untested monitoring challenges. Whether onshore or offshore, injecting CO₂ under the Earth’s surface has the potential to contaminate groundwater, cause earthquakes, and displace deposits of brine, which can be toxic. These risks have never been confronted at scale, and the magnitude of offshore injection contemplated by proponents would create unprecedented challenges in managing reservoir pressure and monitoring CO₂ plumes in the depths of the ocean.

Proposed CO₂ storage hubs are concentrated in areas most prone to leaks. The single biggest risk of CO₂ leakage comes from the interaction of injected CO₂ with legacy oil and gas wells.

Offshore CCS projects are costly and largely dependent on public subsidies. CCS is inherently expensive, and the costs for its deployment are only heightened offshore. These high costs are driving industry demands for public subsidies, which effec- tively pay polluters to bury some of their pollution rather than require them to stop generating it in the first place.

Regardless of how the captured carbon is used, any CCS project requires significant energy inputs and a web of different facilities to function, and all of this infra- structure poses risks to the public. CO₂ processing facilities, for example, release large amounts of air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, while carbon capture equipment is known to greatly increase the amount of ammonia that a facility spews into the air. Running carbon capture equipment is also enormously energy-intensive, increasing the overall emissions of the facility where the capture equipment is installed.14 This is known as an “energy penalty.”

At high concentrations, CO₂ is a toxic gas and an asphyxiant capable of causing “rapid ‘circulatory insufficiency,’ coma and death.” (When a CO₂ pipeline ruptured in Mississippi in 2020, dozens of people nearby were knocked unconscious and at least forty-five wound up in the hospital).

Tthe total projected capture amount of 450 million metric tons (tonnes) remains relatively insignificant from a climate change perspective, amounting to approximately 1.5 percent of current annual global CO₂ emissions from energy and industry.

The very idea that offshore CO₂ storage is feasible at all is based almost entirely on two small projects, both in Norway. These storage ventures both encountered problems in their early phases and prove that CO₂ storage is a challenging and unpre- dictable task.26 Moreover, uncertainties remain regarding the permanence of storage, processes for long-term monitoring, and liability for leaks. Many of these risks have yet to be fully assessed, let alone comprehensively regulated.

Sleipner and Snøhvit

he world’s first offshore CCS project, called Sleipner, began operating in 1996. The Norwegian petroleum company Statoil (now Equinor) started capturing CO₂ from its Sleipner gas field and inject- ing it into saline reservoirs beneath the North Sea in order to avoid paying the 1991 Norwegian CO₂ tax.32 In 2008, Statoil launched a second CCS project that began capturing CO₂ from its offshore operations at the Snøhvit gas field and reinjecting it beneath the seabed.

In both projects, geologists failed to accurately predict how the injected CO₂ would behave under- ground. At Sleipner, the CO₂ migrated upward from its intended storage point into a different layer of the subsurface. The Snøhvit project turned out to have significantly less storage capacity than expected, forc- ing Equinor to sink an unplanned USD225 million or so into identifying the problem and developing a new storage site. A 2023 report on Sleipner and Snøhvit from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) points to the projects’ problems as evidence that storing CO₂ underground is “not an exact science,” and that CCS, even after “extensive repeated study, using the most modern methods, is not foolproof.”

Despite the significant challenges with these two relatively simple projects, industry leaders still often refer to Sleipner and Snøhvit as success stories that substantiate the safety and feasibility of much larger, more complex offshore CCS projects, such as the hubs being proposed worldwide. The projects have emboldened Equinor and the Norwegian govern- ment to promote Norway as a primary destination for CO₂ waste from other countries.

Until now, these two projects have received little scrutiny in Norwegian political debate or in the broader environmental movement — perhaps due in part to the dearth of independent research into CCS free of funding or participation by the oil and gas industry, including at Norwegian higher education institutions.

Both the Norwegian projects are relatively small in scale: They each have a maximum injection rate of less than 1 million tonnes per year. This amounts to less than one thirtieth of Norway’s annual emissions, and pales in comparison to the much larger ambitions of major proposed projects.

CCS Hubs

The pervasive concept of offshore “CCS hubs” introduces additional complexities beyond what stand-alone facilities like Sleipner and Snøhvit were designed for. Both Sleipner and Snøhvit involve CO₂ captured from a single source, while many new CCS proposals envision storing CO₂ from multiple sources in one location. Because different indus- trial processes produce CO₂ streams with different chemical makeups, hub operators would need to ensure that the substances they accept from different industries would not damage their infrastructure or elevate risks. Impurities like water, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur oxides, or carbon monoxide can all be present in industrial CO₂ streams at varying levels.40 These impurities can cause pipeline corrosion41 and compound the dangers workers would face from a blowout: Even with pure CO₂, a blowout could be deadly due to the risk of asphyxiation, but impurities could make a rupture toxic as well.

Denmark

Denmark’s embrace of CCS is at odds with its commitment to phase out fossil fuels. As a found- ing member of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA) launched in 2021 at the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Con- vention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP26),55 Denmark promised to sunset oil and gas production domestically by 2050. And yet, the offshore CCS projects Denmark is promoting only prolong reliance on oil and gas.

Longship

In 2020, the Norwegian government announced plans to launch a large-scale CCS demonstration project in an effort to create a new market for CO₂ disposal as a service across the European continent. The project, known as Longship, would be an open- source network of CCS infrastructure that includes carbon capture at industrial facilities throughout the continent, paired with transport and storage in a sub-seabed site located off the western coast of Norway. The Norwegian government will fund two- thirds of the project, an estimated USD1.57 billion (NOK 16.8 billion), while the remaining costs will be shared among the project’s partners. The transport and storage component of the project, is known as Northern Lights.

Northen Lights

In Norway, developments are underway for a new offshore CCS project — led by Equinor in partnership with Shell and Total — called Northern Lights. The Norwegian government is providing 80 percent of the funding for the first phase.48 The project would seek to inject 1.5 million tonnes per year of CO₂ in its first phase and up to 5 million in its second. This second phase would increase the amount of CO₂ injected under the seabed by a large margin, but even so, it remains a drop in the proverbial bucket: The carbon injected would amount to less than one tenth of 1 percent of Europe’s annual CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels in 2021.

Northern Lights project involves transporting CO₂ captured from European industrial facilities by ship to an onshore receiving terminal and then moving it back offshore via pipeline for injection into a storage reservoir beneath the North Sea. The subsea storage site is located about 2,600 meters (1.6 miles) beneath the seabed. Phase 1 of the project aims to capture and store 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ per year and be operational by 2024.

The Longship project was initially planned to start with carbon capture at two Norwegian facilities, the Heidelberg Materials cement plant in Brevik and the Hafslund Oslo Celsio waste-to-energy plant. Con- struction is underway at Heidelberg Materials, but the Hasflund Oslo Celsio plant suspended the instal- lation of carbon capture equipment in April 2023 after the project exceeded its budget.

Longship is seeking additional emitters within and outside of Norway to sign onto the project, exem- plifying how the “carbon management” economy depends on steady pollution streams. In late August 2022, the project announced an agreement with the Norwegian fertilizer firm Yara to transport and store CO₂ captured from Yara’s Sluiskil ammonia plant in the Netherlands.

Although Northern Lights is pitched as a major proj- ect, its potential contribution to climate mitigation is quite limited. The project aims to scale up beyond the starting goal of storing 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ per year, adding 3.5 million tonnes of capacity to reach 5 million tonnes depending on market demand.

This represents a potential five-fold increase in the offshore injection rate compared to Norway’s flagship Sleipner project, and with it, increased complexities. But the scale of emissions must be kept in perspective: Norway’s emissions alone amounted to about 49 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) in 2021. The CO₂ volumes that this project aims to bury — drawn from the entire continent — are minor in comparison.

RISKS

The risks of offshore CO₂ injection must be considered in the context of the myriad pressures facing global oceans and seas, including those from increasing temperatures, acidification, nitrogen and other chemical pollution, and the proliferation of microplastics.

While carbon capture equipment may reduce the CO₂ emitted from a facility, it perpetuates, and can even increase, the release of other air pollutants that harm public health and the environment, undermining human rights.

The CCS process itself presents hazards to the climate and environment. Whether onshore or offshore, injecting CO₂ under the Earth’s surface has the potential to contaminate groundwater, cause earth- quakes, and displace deposits of toxic brine.

Brines can be detrimental to surrounding sea life because they can have salt concentrations far in excess of seawater and can contain contaminants such as heavy metals.

Preventing or mitigating hazards associated with CCS is even more technically challenging and expensive at great depths under the sea, where the dynamics of CO₂ may be harder to ascertain than on land and the resulting problems harder to resolve.

It isn’t only the offshore storage of CO₂ that presents possible hazards. Each stage of the CCS process — capture, transport, injection, and storage — has the potential to harm communities and the environ- ment, jeopardizing the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment and other human rights.

Operation of carbon capture equipment could increase emis- sions of harmful fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen oxide, and significantly increase toxic ammonia emissions.

Existing oil and gas pipelines, designed to withstand much less pressure, cannot readily be repurposed for moving large amounts of CO₂.

A large vessel capable of storing CO₂ does not yet exist, much less a fleet of them.

Unlike gas or oil pipelines, the risk from a CO₂ pipeline rupture is not combustion, but asphyxiation. CO₂ is heavily pressurized and denser than air, so if a pipeline bursts, large volumes can be released extremely quickly and stay close to the ground, threatening people in a wide radius from the release.

The US has the largest pipeline network in the world and only has about 8,000 kilometers (km) (about 5,000 miles) of active CO₂ pipelines, compared with 425,605 km (about 265,000 miles) of oil and gas pipelines.

Although experience operating CO₂ pipelines is lim- ited, extensive experience with oil and gas pipelines makes one thing clear: Pipelines leak. Over an eight- year period in the US, there were more than 2,000 recorded incidents with gas pipelines alone. These incidents resulted in more than 100 deaths and nearly 600 injuries.

Presence of water, contaminants, or impurities such as hydrogen sulfide in the CO₂ stream increases the risks of pipe corrosion.

Shipping CO₂ increases emissions in one of the most difficult-to-decarbonize trans- port sectors. Generating fossil fuel emissions to transport fossil fuel emissions is counterproductive at best. Refrigerating the CO₂ cargo — which must be kept under high pressure and low temperature to be transported in liquid form — and powering the ship requires burning more fossil fuels. Research by oil and gas industry analyst Rystad, considering potential CO₂ shipping routes, found that some vessels traveling long distances could produce emissions equivalent to as much as 5 percent of the CO₂ being transported.

CO₂ leaks would affect the marine environment as well. Its interactions with the sea would be complex: hydrates and ice might form, and temperature differences would induce strong currents. Some of the gas would dissolve in the sea, but some would be released to the atmosphere.

The injection of high-pressure CO₂ under the seabed is a complicated process that creates significant risks and uncertainties beyond just leakage. The aquifers into which CO₂ could be injected are not simply empty pockets underground, but porous rock formations that can be filled with brine, water, sand, or other materials. CCS operators propose injecting CO₂ into the “pore space” that these other substances occupy. Injecting the CO₂ into this space displaces whatever was there before, elevating the pressure underground and often pressurizing areas well beyond the boundaries of the injection site. Too much pressure can cause the caprock, the impervious rock layer that seals the brine and CO₂ underground, to crack, causing a leak. Operators must also limit pressure build up in order to avoid triggering earth- quakes, a known risk with any subsurface injection.

Brine can leak from pipelines and needs to be properly managed and disposed of to avoid contaminating the environment. As acknowledged in an EU-funded report involving Statoil (now Equinor), the high salinity of brine can be toxic to benthic (deep sea) organisms like coral and sea anemones.

If brine is allowed to percolate to the surface of the seabed, such brines could cause a ten-fold increase in local salinity in surface sediments and seabed depressions, thus representing a potentially severe source of osmotic shock to benthic organisms.

New studies demonstrate the risks of assuming that the ocean has a vast storage capacity. Researchers warn that the dynamics within each individual geologic formation are unpredictable, and that macro estimates of geologic storage capacity are likely flawed.

Building out industrial-scale CCS may not be as feasible as current regional inventories suggest and pressure management techniques may not function as planned.

Legacy deposits of oil in offshore wells can react with injected CO₂ to form bitumen, a viscous hydrocarbon substance, creating blockages and reducing the ability to inject more CO₂.

If CCS is widely deployed onshore and offshore, even a 0.1 percent leakage rate could cause up to 25 gigatonnes of additional CO₂ emissions in the 21st century, posing a major risk to the climate.

Despite the fact that legacy oil and gas wells pose the single greatest risk of CO₂ leakage at offshore storage sites, the areas being heavily targeted for offshore CCS development are precisely those zones where old wells abound: sites of long-standing oil and gas drilling.

There is little reason to believe that injecting CO₂ into areas where countless existing leaks from oil and gas wells go undetected or unreported would guarantee “permanent” storage.

In the event of a storage well failure or other extreme release of CO₂ offshore, the problem may be very difficult, if not impossible, to correct.

CO₂ might cause wells to fail due to its incompatibility with certain commonly used materials.

If there is a leaking CO₂ well or a blowout, the mitiga- tion measures used for oil and gas well accidents, like a physical barrier, won’t work to contain CO₂. The only option may be to stop injection altogether.

Significant uncertainties about the long-term performance of a CO₂ storage site should be resolved prior to injection of large volumes of CO₂; if uncertainties cannot be resolved, injection should be stopped.

If injection is halted, the CO₂ that would have been captured to supply the injection site will end up simply vented into the atmosphere, assuming the underlying emitting activity is not also paused. This would undermine any climate rationale for operating a carbon capture system in the first place.

CIEL (2023) Deep Trouble -The Risks of Offshore Carbon Capture and Storage (pdf)

19.1 CCS Costs

Beslik

Oxford University conducted a massive study of the phenomena known as rights law, the cost-reduction curves for technologies, and we’ve seen in our lives some stunning examples: the mobile phones, the flat screen TVs, not to mention computer chips.

And so they studied all of them, and some go down in cost very rapidly, some a bit slowly. They have a very small category labelled non-improving technologies. That’s the category that carbon capture and sequestration is in. For 50 years, there has been zero reduction in cost for carbon capture and sequestration. ZERO.

Beslik (2023) Oil-Cave Jabs and the Dramatic Dance of Petrostates at COP28

19.2 EOR - Enhaced Oil Recovery

CIEL

The vast majority of the CO₂ captured at existing carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects around the world is used in oil fields, where it is injected into depleted wells to force more oil to the surface, a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR)

CIEL (2023) Deep Trouble -The Risks of Offshore Carbon Capture and Storage (pdf)