Since global warming first came to the public’s attention, the issue has been dogged by disinformation.
Industry insiders have known for half a century their product is damaging our climate. Rather than stopping the harm or investing in renewables, the industry has put its money into sowing confusion, backing anti-science politicians, and offering false solutions to the very crisis that industry created.
Lately one false solution has become all the rage: carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. The premise is simple: large industrial facilities would pump their emissions into the ground rather than into the air. Instead of belching smokestacks, emissions would be sent underground via pipeline.
The idea is appealing for oil refineries, gas facilities, and other fossil fuel infrastructure, given their levels of hazardous emissions. After all, why not lock the emissions in the ground where they (at least theoretically) can’t escape? It sounds better than spewing them into the atmosphere where they can do the most harm.
The reality isn’t so simple.
First, CCS is energy intensive. It takes a series of large steps to operate, including capture of the emissions at the original facility, compression and transportation via pipeline or other mode, and storage in places like Louisiana’s underground salt domes.
On top of that, CCS is also expensive. When combined, the costs and the possible perils are not worth it, even for industry experts. Andrew Reid, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, put it this way, in a recent article for The Financial Times: ”(T)he problem with CCS is that it’s unproven, shown not to work on the whole, is really high cost, relies on huge subsidies, and projects take time to get up and running.”
“The risk is that it becomes an expensive distraction which fails,” Reid concluded.
Possible only because of taxpayer subsidies
CCS wouldn’t be remotely possible if it weren’t for subsidies — taxpayer funds given over to industry to make these projects financially viable.
But why does the oil and gas industry need assistance from taxpayers, when it’s had some wild successes in recent years? These are margins measured in the billions of dollars for single companies each quarter.
Could it be the fact that CCS technology is unproven? CCS had once been favored by environmental organizations and governments more concerned about the threats of global warming than ours. But once the realities became clear, the tables turned. A few years ago, a United Nations panel questioned even the concept of CCS, by questioning whether machines are able to remove carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
On top of all of this are the risks that come with CCS. The space available underground to store carbon emissions – liquefied and injected under extremely high pressure – is nowhere near as plentiful as once thought.
And we should not feel reassured by the little track record there is of storing pressurized gas underground.
Injecting high-pressure gas deep into the Earth
In Louisiana, gas leaks from underground wells, pipelines, and wellheads are almost a fact of everyday life, triggering regular evacuations and occasionally injuries and deaths. This has been ongoing since petroleum was first discovered. No one knows just how much these accidents could increase in frequency or size if CCS were implemented and injections of high-pressure gasses were added to the mix.
The Bayou Corne Sinkhole Disaster gives us a grim example of what can happen when industry experiments with geology. There, deep injection drilling into a salt dome caused the collapse in the underground structure. It soon grew into a sinkhole that swallowed up dozens of acres and collapsed down to 750 feet in depth, forcing the evacuation of an entire town.
Now, a petrochemical giant has proposed the world’s largest carbon storage project in the southeastern of the state. To complete it, however, the company would run a high-pressure CO₂ pipeline past an elementary school, making parents rightfully concerned about the catastrophic impacts of a leak.
We don’t need to focus on worst-case scenarios to see why CCS should not be the centerpiece of our energy future. Even before we discuss its risks, high costs, energy usage, and unproven effectiveness, CCS looks less like a solution to pollution and more like a way for oil and gas companies to call dirty energy clean while creating a new revenue stream.
Then there is the most obvious argument of all: real clean energy has never been less expensive or more abundant.
In 2024, solar electricity generation was almost half as expensive as the lowest-cost fossil alternative. Generation from wind was even less expensive.
The future is already here. We don’t need CCS or any other half-measures from the fossil fuel industry; we need to accelerate the transition to clean energy that’s already underway.
LTG. Russel L. Honoré (Ret.) is the former commander of the US First Army. He leads the Green Army, a nonprofit organization working toward solutions for pollution. Follow him at x.com/ltgrusselhonore.
