Carbon Capture. Getting behind the hysteria.

Carbon capture is in the news again, as the new Labour government announces a substantial new programme for the development of the technology. This has attracted a barrage of criticism from both Left and Right, in spite of the fact that carbon capture is widely regarded as an essential component of any mitigation strategy. So it’s worth exploring a bit further.

 

Some technical background.

 

We should get the terminology clear. There are many approaches to carbon capture, including the use of natural processes in the carbon cycle, for example by improved land use, planting trees or through various “geo-engineering” schemes to increase the “fixing” of the carbon in the oceans.  Greens and others, unsurprisingly, tend to favour the most “natural” and least environmentally intrusive of these. 

 

Second, when CO₂ is captured, it can either find a useful purpose, or it can be sent to a safe permanent store. Use in the soft drinks industry will be trivially small, but it can also be used in the production of synthetic fuels. Most recently there has been a lot of interest in synthetic aviation fuel (SAF) for the hard-to-decarbonise aviation industry.

 

Trees are one form of direct atmospheric carbon capture (DACC). But there are also industrial process approaches to direct capture, sometimes referred to as mechanical trees, which rely on established chemical techniques to separate CO₂  from the atmosphere. It’s claimed that the cost of DACC and subsequent storage (DACC+S) could be brought down to below $200/ tonne, a level that could imply total costs of emission-free oil use well within the historical range of oil price variations. Proposed options for storage include geological formations such as depleted oil reservoirs  and the deep oceans

 

Problems with and arguments against the various DACC methods include:

 

·       excessive requirement for land use, sometimes in competition with food production; this will apply to some but not all methods of both a “natural” and industrial nature; this places an upper limit on what they can achieve

·       excessive land use can also have ecological and human rights implications

·       unproven nature and potentially high costs, and, in the case of natural methods, science unknowns around whether particular land-use policies will be net emitters or receivers of CO₂

·       for industrial methods, high energy use requirements

·       the argument that carbon capture is a distraction from the preferred alternative of eliminating fossil fuels

·       in relation to storage, doubts about suitability of locations, safety and permanence; transport of CO₂and injection into storage may also be expensive

 

The above has all been about direct air capture. However it is, for obvious reasons, likely to be much easier and cheaper to capture high concentrations of CO₂  at the point of combustion when it is released from the fossil fuel. A Green version of this technique involves the use of sustainable bio-fuels, known as bio-energy carbon capture and storage or BECCS. BECCS is likely to be severely supply limited in relation to the scale of what is needed. More generally carbon capture can be fitted or retro-fitted to fossil burning plant, including power generation, and this has generally been the main focus of carbon capture and storage policies, usually referred to as CCS.

 

An additional issue for CCS is that it is likely to be less than 100% effective, with a leakage rate of perhaps 10% or more, so it is not a silver bullet.

 

Is carbon capture an essential component of climate strategies?

 

The IPCC is fairly clear that carbon removal, ie DACC, will be an essential component of any feasible route to a sustainable future. It also endorses continued use of fossil fuels, where this is accompanied by CCS, as one of the options for getting to a net zero future. CCS is also supported by the UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC) as part of a UK strategy aimed at this objective. Both these bodies have the advantage of access to a huge body of scientific and technical advice on the subject, in the context of means to mitigate climate change.

 

So should the UK government be promoting CCS?

 

On the basis of IPCC and CCC advice, the principle of promoting CCS seems to bejustified. There may be alternative means of getting to net zero, but if this is the quickest and cheapest option, then there should be no reason to object to it. Moreover this will not just be a UK issue. Much of the world is even more locked into fossil-based technologies than the UK, so the potential of CCS as an interim or transition technology may be quite important.

 

Whether it has a positive contribution to a UK industrial strategy is another question. Potentially the answer is that it does. Countries like Germany have a much higher lock-in to fossil fuel. But as ever, geography and trading relations matter. Not all countries will enjoy the storage options that the UK has, and Brexit will make the potential to exploit European markets harder.

 

Finally there is a history to this. In 2015 the Cameron/ Osborne government cancelled a CCS programme after the spend of £ 100 million of public money and substantial private sector investment of time and resources. This was part of a major rolling back of  Cameron’s Green promises and accompanied the slashing of budgets on other “easy win” measures such as home insulation. As a marker of determination to take net zero seriously, the Labour government's move is a welcome step. But it does not detract from the need to continue to explore the wider DACC options for carbon removal and storage, nationally and globally.

WHAT ARE THE REAL ISSUES WITH LIFESTYLE AND CLIMATE POLICY?

 

Arguments about the supposed war on motorists operated by a Labour London mayor, with ULEZ, the Welsh government with its 20 mph speed limits , and, allegedly, its  planned extension to England becomes ever more bizarre, as do the allegations of a prospective tax on meat, the likely household cost of replacing gas boilers, and anything that the culture warriors of the Tory party think can be turned into a populist rallying cry. So perhaps it’s time to reflect on what are the elements of truth about lifestyle and climate, and what are simply creative approaches to reality, or lies and falsehoods as they might be called by the less charitable.

 

Let’s deal with some of these in turn.

 

ULEZ

 

Actually this has little or nothing to do with climate policy. It was first mooted as a sensible proposal by Tory London Mayor Boris Johnson. It’s primary purpose is to improve air quality and public health. It may have increased CO2 emissions slightly in the short run, by driving out diesel cars faster than petrol cars, but this will have been offset by encouraging a faster take-up of electric vehicles.

 

Congestion charging

 

Again the primary benefit for this has usually been argued as the reduction in congestion and the substantial saving in the time drivers have to spend at the wheel. There is an important secondary benefit in reduced particulate emissions and in reduced CO2 emissions, because the stop-start involved in congestion reduces overall fuel efficiency.

 

Some of this benefit was negated by the rather illogical exemption of electric vehicles from the London congestion charge. At a time when most vehicles are still petrol or diesel, EV vehicles will still have increased congestion, and hence emissions from all the other non-EV vehicles on the road. When all vehicles are EV, there will still often be a strong case for congestion charging, or road pricing, even though the incremental health and CO₂ benefits have become minimal. 

 

The reality therefore is that there is a climate policy case for congestion charging, but it is not a case that has been promoted particularly vigorously.

 

Speed limits

 

Reduced speeds will generally tend to reduce fuel and energy use. This is a matter of simple physics. But the effect in residential areas where the limit is already 30 mph is likely to be relatively trivial. Much more significant would be a reduction from 70 mph to 60 mph on motorways and dual carriageways. In the 1970s US governments imposed 55 mph limits in the face of the OPEC cartel and global oil price hikes, primarily in order to reduce fuel consumption.

 

There are therefore strong arguments to be made, on climate policy grounds, for reduced speed, at least while the majority of vehicles are petrol or diesel. But, at least for the UK, climate has never been the most significant consideration. The drivers for speed limits have always been road safety, and, more recently, air quality.

 

Once again truth is the first casualty of today’s politics, so we might note, inter alia, that:

 

·      Most Tory members of the Welsh Senedd supported the 20 mph default limit.

·      It is subject to local decision making and is not a “blanket” limit.

·      Minimal analysis shows it has almost negligible effects on most journey times.

·      There is no evidence that it has caused congestion or traffic problems.

·      There is evidence that lower speed limits reduce injuries and fatalities.

 

Significant emissions reductions could, fairly obviously, result from limiting higher speeds, for example on motorways, or from enforcement of existing limits, but this is not currently a plank of policy in the major parties. Meanwhile the 20 mph limit has already been widely extended to English cities, with little comment.

This issue, bizarrely given its relative insignificance in relation to either economic activity or climate, is the one that has produced the most insane claims of economic damage, with Welsh Tories claiming it could have economic impacts on the Welsh economy of between two and nine billion pounds. We await any form of explanation for this number.

 

Heat pumps and the end of gas boilers

 

This is perhaps one of the hardest energy sector transitions for the UK, and heat pump issues are hard to cover adequately in a short post. But there are a few important points to note. The first is that major infrastructure transformations are possible in the UK, for instance in the rapid conversion from town gas to natural gas. A second is that we should expect further efficiency improvements and cost reductions for heat pump technology, and a third is that the era of cheap gas (from the 90’s onwards) is coming to an end, reducing the cost barriers for consumers wanting to switch to heat pumps.

 

Of equal importance is the need for tariff reform so that the price per additional kwh of electricity use more closely reflects the actual incremental cost of supply. This would have a dramatic effect on the competitiveness of heat pumps against gas. It implies a radical restructuring of electricity tariffs to change the way that fixed and legacy costs are recovered, but this simultaneously provides an opportunity to deal with some of the other issues on the distributional impact of current tariff structures. 

 

 

Less meat and dairy consumption

 

This really is a major lifestyle choice that would have a major impact on emissions, given the amount of land used for raising crops that are then used as animal feed. It’s potentially much larger in scale than what we have discussed above and will persist as a significant question even after transport has been fully decarbonised.

 

It is also, undeniably, a social trend that many more people are choosing to eat less red meat, in particular, on health grounds, and that vegetarian food has become more popular.

This is certainly an important area of debate for the future, although even the greenest of climate campaigners tend to focus on reducing meat consumption rather than eliminating it. We also know that some meats are intrinsically less carbon intensive than others. And it’s quite clear that none of the major parties in the UK are currently in a hurry to demand meat bans or meat taxes.

 

Looking ahead we might expect that the pressure on food resources, especially if accentuated by a changing climate, will increase the price of many important commodities, including both grains for human consumption and animal feed, and this will affect the price of meat and hence consumption. In terms of lifestyle changes, this really is a huge question, affecting as it does national and global agricultural systems as well as personal diets and elements of social life. Agriculture and land use is also a hugely complex subject.

 

Time for an intelligent conversation

 

It is time to step back from the more hysterical arguments that attempts to limit environmental damage somehow threaten important personal freedoms of all kinds, or the fundamentals of modern life. There are undoubtedly potential conflicts, although, as shown above, few if any lifestyle initiatives have so far been driven primarily or at all by climate objectives. Health and safety have been far more salient factors. 

 

But this may need to change, and it would be good to see more serious discussion of the choices that we may in future have to make as the existential threats of climate change become increasingly apparent, and alarming.

MORE DISINFORMATION ON NET ZERO. COINCIDENCE OR CONSPIRACY?

Sadly we have become accustomed to the routine parade of untruths in government. But what should concern us almost as much is the peddling of ridiculous theories, misleading statistics and nonsensical arithmetic by bodies that pretend to offer some kind of independent analysis. Nowhere is this more evident than in the numerous self-styled

think-tanks and “expert” groups that set out to dispute the scientific consensus over climate science, or the relative costs of climate change versus mitigation policies.

 

One such has been the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Fuel, a lobby group composed of numerous climate sceptic MPs. (It should be noted that APPGs do not have an “official” parliamentary status and are very different from the Parliamentary Select Committees who do excellent work and produce well-researched reposts. They are in fact often just lobby groups for MPs pursuing particular agendas). I dealt with some of the “analysis” provided by this APPG in earlier posts.

 

THE CASE FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLES IS STRONG ENOUGH TO SURVIVE ATTACK FROM THE ICE LOBBYISTS, 

 

and

 

COSTING AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE FUTURE. IGNORE THE ALARMISTS.

 

The latter showed the lobby report had got its numbers wrong by a factor of 50, largely because of a failure to understand either elementary physical principles of energy or the units of measurement it chose to employ.

 

This level of incompetence was however surpassed by another “think-tank”, Civitas, which was sufficiently shamed to withdraw its report on account of “factual errors” after a withering assessment by Simon Evans in the Guardian. Some of the “errors” in this case were of the order of millions. 

 

How a think tank got the cost of net zero wildly wrong

 

Losing six or so zeros might merely be seen as carelessness. But as the Evans article demonstrates, it indicates a much deeper failure of understanding. It is failure to grasp the difference between power (kW) or capacity, on the one hand, and energy (kWh), on the other. This translates, unsurprisingly,  into order of magnitude errors on cost. For those not familiar with the units used for electricity, this is akin to confusing the cost of a button with the cost of the factory that produced it.

 

There seem to have been other errors in the report, such as an equally inexcusable failure to understand the difference between the total cost of investments made under a particular policy, on the one hand, and the net costs or benefits of that policy as a whole.

 

We await with interest the revised report. Civitas, on its website, claims to “… strive to benefit public debate through independent research, reasoned argument, lucid explanation and open discussion. We stand apart from party politics ….”

Odd, then, that this report should appear immediately following Sunac’s alteration of course on UK net zero. Readers will no doubt form their own view of its “independence”, as well as the competence of its authors.

THE TRUE COST OF DELAYED ACTION ON EMISSIONS AND CLIMATE

The recent move by the UK Prime Minister to dilute policies aimed at reducing emissions is controversial. He has justified it, in essence, by reference to the cost to consumers, the cost of living crisis, and the cost to the UK economy. But this is short-termism of an extreme kind. Any consideration of our medium term future indicates the possibility of truly massive future financial bills arising from delaying our course of action. 

Sunac’s avowed commitment to a 2050 target is quite worthless. Even to take it at face value is to stretch credibility.  Postponing the end of petrol and diesel car sales will hinder progress to meet what is already an ambitious and challenging target. This is the view of much of an industry already heavily invested in the transition, as well as many bodies such as the Grantham Institute .

 

Moreover the volte-face on the means, promoting the decarbonisation of transport, must cast doubt on the seriousness of any commitment to the ends, of avoiding climate catastrophe, or of maintaining the pretence at international leadership on the issue. 

 

Kicking the can down the road can be continued as an action avoidance strategy almost indefinitely, at least until 2050 arrives, emphasising yet again one of the reasons why strategy should not be built around arbitrary emissions numbers for an arbitrary year. As argued repeatedly in this blog the true objective indicated by climate science is not a particular figure in a particular year but total cumulative emissions. This can be presented as a global carbon budget responsibility for which individual nations can negotiate or be allocated their own national responsibilities.

 

It is cumulative emissions that cause global warming. So let’s just imagine a rational world in which each country is required to keep its cumulative emissions, let us say from 1990, or even from now, within an agreed limit. Failure to meet that target would require removal of that excess CO2, or payment to someone else to perform that task through sequestration of CO2 from the atmosphere. There is a set of plausible but expensive technologies for this purpose, so we do have some idea of a plausible cost per tonne, and this could arguably be brought down to about £ 250 per tonne.

 

Under such a scenario of internationally agreed targets, not wholly implausible as the impact of climate change becomes increasingly an existential and dangerous threat, we can see what the true financial and economic cost to the UK of the Sunac volte face might be. The government has offered no estimates of the extra emissions resulting from its relaxation of policy, but others have made provisional estimates of hundreds of millions of tonnes additional emissions. 

 

Current UK CO2 emissions from the transport sector are about 112 million tonnes annually. So, for example, postponing by one year a programme scheduled to deliver a constant 5% (of base year) reduction in emissions generates an extra 100 million tonnes over 20 year. A two year delay results in an extra 200 million tonnes and so on.

 

On the basis of our sequestration costs even one hundred million tonnes extra would imply a cost of £ 25 billion, a significant number to factor into any cost benefit analysis of the policy change. But the implications of the Sunac delay seem likely to be much larger than that.

COP27. REPARATIONS AND CLEAN DEVELOPMENT

Historic guilt and reparations are a hard sell, for obvious reasons, but self-interest points in the same direction. But aid will have to be consistent with climate-related objectives.

 

COP27 has just ended, and the failure to do better on targets for phasing out fossil fuels will be widely regarded by many as a possibly disastrous failure for humanity. Its most substantial success appears to have been in recognition of the necessary financial transfers from rich nations to poorer ones. Even this, however, faces some serious headwinds in implementation, based, as it has been, on the linked concepts of “reparations” and “historic responsibility”. Neither will be straightforward.

 

Beginning with historic responsibility, this should clearly be a measure of cumulative emissions, but there are multiple hard to resolve questions. One is, in a world of international trade, whether responsibility lies with the country where the fossil resource was extracted, where it was refined or converted, the domicile of the owners of energy industries or their bankers, or where the final products were consumed. In other words is it producers or consumers who are responsible? In a world of complex supply chains, this is problematic.

 

A second question, for the legitimate assignment of responsibility, is to choose an appropriate starting date from which to measure cumulative emissions? The date matters a lot in terms of assigning responsibility, particularly for the relative contribution of China and India. 

 

1992 was the year of the first earth summit in Rio de Janeiro, which led to the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  1990 was the baseline chosen for the Kyoto Protocol targets. So it equates, approximately, to the time when the climate science began to offer irrefutable evidence of the causes and dangers of unmitigated climate change, and their recognition by governments.  

 

Arguments that measurement should start from earliest recorded history ignore the uncomfortable truth that energy use, especially via electricity, is responsible not just for economic growth but for most of the positive features of the modern world, including science and medicine, as well as its problems. Without those advances in science and measurement we would not even be aware of the problem we have.

 

As difficult as measuring historic responsibility is the assignment of moral responsibility, at the level of the nation state, for historic events. Apart from factors such as migration, are individuals really responsible for their nation’s past? And what responsibility do we assign for current and past population growth, the elephant in the room for political discussions, but a prime cause for a substantial part of actual emissions growth over recent decades, as well as “baked in” future emissions? 

 

Finally a massive share of responsibility for current atmospheric concentrations rests with those parties, governments (most notably of fossil-rich states), businesses, other vested interests, and individuals, who have sought to subvert and delay effective action. Few of them are volunteering to make “reparations”. In the case of businesses, the feasibility of extracting compensatory sums on any scale is low or negligible.

 

For all these reasons the terminology of reparations and historic guilt will make transfers a hard sell politically in the developed world, and even more so given perceptions of energy and financial inequality even within that world.  A more easily justifiable and politically more saleable argument for financial transfers from rich to poor, though, should be simple self-interest. 

 

We are facing the increasing likelihood, post COP27, that targets for cumulative emissions consistent with a liveable human environment will not be met, and the only remedy left will be direct extraction of carbon from the atmosphere.  Inevitably the only parties capable of mustering the financial resources for this are the same wealthy nations called upon to pay for “loss and damage”. 

 

But viewed in cost benefit or cost effectiveness terms, the promotion of clean development will almost always prove to be much cheaper than having to pay for direct air carbon capture (DACC), the ultimate fall-back as climate change becomes an existential threat. A good example is provided by the theoretical case for financial support of rural electrification to limit use of charcoal and firewood, a major source of both emissions and environmental degradation across developing economies, and the subject of a previous post. This is easily justified in global cost benefit terms, but of course with a global externality like CO2 emissions, the benefits are global, but the costs local.

 

What this means is that there is a clear self-interest for the wealthiest countries to provide financial support for clean development. Of course it also means that donors will want to ensure that support is directed towards climate related objectives, and not seen simply as a payment in compensation for loss and damage. This could have major implications for the governance and direction of any new dedicated fund, as donors will demand a say in how funds are spent, but the likely outcome is perhaps that there will be relatively few specific alterations to processes and priorities due to “loss and damage” per se.

The massive tasks of mobilising aid and finance for mitigation, adaptation and clean development, much of which is “behind the scenes”, should, and indeed must, continue.

 

HOPES AND FEARS FOR COP 26

 

Alok Sharma, acting as President for COP 26, will no doubt do his best for positive outcomes from this climate summit, not least by announcing his personal conversion to vegetarianism in the interests of our planet, or rather human and animal life on it. 

Climate politics has shifted. The rapid increase in public awareness and concern, both in the UK and internationally, and resulting pressures on governments, make the very real issues impossible to ignore. And as I indicated in my last post, the current government deserves some plaudits at least in respect of the late conversion of its members to acceptance of the climate science, its proposed general direction of travel to net zero, and against the many residual sceptics and deniers in its own party.

But there are big areas for concern.

UK leadership. The Brexit legacy is a first order disaster.

More than most general international agreements, progress and action on promises of emissions reduction depend heavily on a high degree of trust between major players. For COP 26 the behaviour and standing of the host nation are important. We have come a long way down since Tony Blair put the UK on the moral high ground as the first nation to enshrine serious climate targets in law. In particular the UK has    

·         shown a willingness to break solemn treaty commitments (the NI Protocol) within months of signing

·         seeks trade deals with major climate culprits Australia, without climate conditionality, and

·         ignores consequence of substantial additional carbon emissions from shipping, with such deals

·         chosen to support an extremist Polish government of climate denialists against the EU

·         has been at best ambivalent over development of its own coal, oil, and gas resources.

·         chosen in the last week to reduce taxation on internal flights

·         wasted time and goodwill on an irrelevant and trivial spat over fishing rights with a supposed ally

The Big Emitters. China, India, Russia and the USA.

China and India have huge populations and the potential for disastrous levels of future emissions. The USA, as the biggest historical emitter, remains an equally serious concern, mainly because of the irresponsibility of Trump and the American Right, while Russia is another major power with huge fossil fuel interest. But for all these countries COP 26 sits in the frame of other internal and external political agendas.

If the world’s biggest polluters – America, China, industrial Europe, India, Russia and others – meet their responsibilities fully then the worst of the climate catastrophe can be averted. (Independent)

And there are causes for hope. India and China are also among the countries at the greatest risk from the impacts of climate change, and are perhaps making more progress than is normally recognised in the Western media. Russia has a 2060 net zero target and argues correctly that cumulative emissions matter more than arbitrary dates for zero. Whether all this translates into meaningful headline commitments at Glasgow is much more doubtful.

All about the money. Jeffrey Sachs: ‘I see no financial obstacles to getting to net zero by 2050’

A consistent theme in international climate negotiations has been the necessity for large scale financial transfers to the Global South. Since the responsibility for limiting climate change to 1.5^o or 2.0^o will ultimately and inevitably fall on the wealthier countries with the deepest pockets, aid to support low carbon initiatives will turn out to be more cost effective, for the donors of aid, than the ultimate alternative of direct carbon capture. The issue here is not whether those transfers happen, but how large they need to be, division of the burden, and how we can be sure the resources are deployed effectively.

The other financial dimension will be domestic resources for low carbon infrastructure – for decarbonising power, electric vehicles and low carbon heat systems. But, as discussed previously, the scale of this is of similar or lower order than many other challenges such as late 20^th century oil price shocks. There will be similar “Who pays?” questions but they sit within the wider framework of policies to limit inequality and protect the poor.

One easy win. But will we get it?

Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies impose huge carbon footprints for activities with no real value. International agreement in Glasgow to discourage these should be a simple win-win agreement between governments. But will it happen?

The last chance saloon?

Huge hopes are invested in COP 26, but whether it succeeds or fails, itself hard to measure, it will not be the end of the story. With "success" it may perhaps be the end of the beginning. But "failure" will just mean the issues will just need to be pushed with even more persistence in the years ahead.