The fundamental problem with Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS)
The UK Government’s announcement of a whopping £22bn investment in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) caused quite a kerfuffle in Sustainability circles. Like the hydrogen economy, CCS seems to have soaked up huge amounts of public cash over several decades without much to show for it. While, like hydrogen, I’d be delighted if CCS would work in practice, here’s my take on why it almost certainly won’t. But we need to rewind back to basic principles.
I got my first paid Sustainability job in 1998 working on the Design for a Clean Environment project at Newcastle University. Desperate to get up to speed on the topic, I chanced on the book Material Concerns by Tim Jackson which set out the principles of Sustainability in very clear terms. I loved it.
Jackson gives a brief history of human’s approach to pollution as follows:
- Foul and flee: the prehistoric, nomadic approach of “do what you want, if you deplete resources or make a mess, you move on.” Obviously as population increases, you run out of fresh territory to move on to and you have to get a (tiny) bit more sophisticated.
- Dilute and disperse: all those smokestacks and sewage pipes running into rivers and seas were designed to shift pollution (a little bit) away from population centres and into enough air or water that it was rendered reasonably harmless. Obviously as population and pollution increased, this ran up against natural limits as many a cholera outbreak or pea soup fog will attest.
- Concentrate and contain: the opposite approach to the above has traditionally been applied to solid waste: middens, slag heaps and landfills are examples. All depend on your ability to contain the problem: leaching of landfill liquids into groundwater (often a source of drinking water), or fires and explosions from the build up of methane are two of the major risks.
- End of pipe solutions: these involve capturing and processing pollution at the end of the process, just before it is released into the air or water to remove the worst materials in there. Effectively it is trying to turn dilute and disperse into concentrate and contain – and you still have to do something to contain what you have concentrated, liquids and gases being rather difficult to keep under control indefinitely. The other problem is that the end of pipe process is an additional step in the process which is, by definition, inefficient.
- Cleaner Production/Design: this was the revolutionary concept at the time I read the book: design the pollutants out of the system before they are ever created. And this is what I spent the next two years researching at the University – and what I’ve spent the following couple of decades trying to implement.
To me, the fundamental problem with CCS is that it is not only end of pipe, but end of pipe being applied to one of the two major products of energy production. It’s one thing to remove small amounts of by-products such as sulphur dioxide or dioxins, but fundamentally, CCS is trying to interfere with the basic thermodynamic process that turns a hydrocarbon into energy plus carbon dioxide and water. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says “in any process, you always lose something” (entropy always increases) – on a conceptual level at least this suggests that the amount of energy required to concentrate and contain carbon dioxide in a similar manner to the original hydrocarbon (eg in a depleted oil well) will almost certainly render the energy production process uneconomic.
One of the defences of CCS is that “we need every weapon in the arsenal to tackle climate change.” That might sound superficially attractive, but in order to tackle this existential threat, shouldn’t we be pursuing the most efficient path to decarbonisation? If the Government is sitting on £22bn which it could invest in expanding proven technology (eg renewables), developing a promising new technology (next generation batteries) or having another go at one which hasn’t really delivered despite decades (and many millions – billions? – of dollars) trying, why wouldn’t you want to get more carbon bang for your buck?
I think we’ve been flogging the dead horse of CCS for far too long.