The carbon capture industry is smarting from the Trump administration’s determination last week that their product is not ready for prime time and looking to prove that it is feasible and worthwhile to trap carbon emissions from power plants and industries.
“The Trump administration is implying that carbon capture is not achievable,” Matt Lucas, an associate director at Carbon180, a nonprofit group pushing the technology, told the Washington Examiner. “That’s not consistent with 25 years of experience with major carbon capture projects, including those in the power sector.”
The Environmental Protection Agency last week proposed weakening an Obama-era rule that would have effectively required new coal plants in the U.S. to be built with carbon capture and storage, also known as CCS, in which carbon emissions can be caught, cooled, and injected as a liquid underground.
Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, in announcing the proposed rule, said his agency is “encouraging” the development of CCS, but would not require it because the technology has not been “adequately demonstrated” on a commercial scale.
Industrial officials and other supporters say Wheeler is wrong.
“Of course, CCS has been adequately demonstrated,” Julio Friedmann, former principal deputy assistant of the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy, told the Washington Examiner. “We know the costs, performance, risks, and timeline for construction. How much demonstration do you need?”
The rule, if finalized, is expected to have minimal or no practical impact, because utilities are not expected to build new coal plants, with or without CCS, due to cheaper alternatives from natural gas, wind, and solar.
Critics, however, worry the Trump administration’s move sends the wrong signal about CCS, which experts say is crucial to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, since the world still gets about 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels.
“This is the perfect time to do strict emissions standards on new coal plants, because it drives the development of new cleaner innovations,” John Thompson, director of the Fossil Transition Project at the Clean Air Task Force, told the Washington Examiner. “As an investor, I am now going to look at nuclear, natural gas, or maybe storage for renewables.”
Carbon capture technology is not limited to coal. A new report issued Tuesday by the Global CCS Institute, in conjunction with a United Nations international climate meeting this week in Poland, said that carbon capture has a “vital role” in decarbonizing more “difficult” industrial sectors, such as cement production and steelmaking.
The industrial sector emits 21 percent of global greenhouse gases.
“We have to decarbonize the industrial sector to meet our carbon goals,” Lucas said. “That makes carbon capture not only this thing that makes coal less dirty, but also an inspirational technology that actually help us reverse climate change.”
Eighteen large facilities around the world, including two at coal power plants, currently capture and store 30 million tons of carbon each year.
The underpinning technology has existed since the 1970s. Costs have dropped by more than 50 percent over the past 10 years, according to Friedmann, who is now a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
This is true, even though CCS projects, unlike solar and wind, haven’t been supported by policies like renewable portfolio standards and investment tax credits, until recently.
Some technologies can use captured carbon for other energy uses, giving it commercial applicability that drives additional investment.
For example, the Petra Nova coal plant outside Houston, America’s only successfully running carbon capture facility, sends the carbon dioxide via pipeline to nearby oil fields, where it is used to assist in the extraction of crude oil. The sale of carbon dioxide as a commodity for use in products like cement, plastics, fuel, and carbon fiber helps to offset the added cost of the CCS technology.
Another example: The Boundary Dam power station in Canada, a coal power plant, in 2014 became the first in the world to successfully retrofit CCS, which is more expensive than starting from scratch with a new facility.
There are more carbon capture projects coming, encouraged by expanded tax credits passed into law by bipartisan margins in Congress last year and signed by Trump.
Net Power, a North Carolina-based energy startup, successfully launched in May a $140 million, 50-megawatt demonstration facility in La Porte, Texas, for what would be the world’s first zero-emissions carbon capture and storage natural gas plant.
If proven successful, Net Power hopes the technology powering the facility, designed by one of the company’s investors, 8 Rivers, can be used to capture and store carbon in other power plants around the world, mostly ones generating natural gas — which is simpler and cheaper — but also coal.
“Cheap, clean, and always-available technologies like [ours] make it harder to build fossil fuel plants that don’t address their carbon emissions,” Bill Brown, CEO of Net Power, told the Washington Examiner. “Anyone looking at building new coal or natural gas is at least considering how to do it with carbon capture. This EPA announcement does not change that.”
Net Power says the 8 Rivers system uses a turbine built by Toshiba to produce energy more efficiently, allowing it to capture emissions at effectively no cost.
The company projects its carbon capture technology will be deployed commercially in late 2021 or early 2022.
To be sure, the Trump administration is not abandoning carbon capture. Steve Winberg, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for fossil energy, stressed Monday during a panel event the the climate conference in Poland that the U.S. “commitment to CCS remains strong.”
But critics say the Trump administration is undermining those goals by its policy decisions and rhetoric and making it harder to transfer cleaner American fossil fuel technology to parts of the world that need coal more than the U.S. does, such as China and India.
“It makes sense for the U.S. to field carbon capture technologies, reducing their costs, and enabling a globally competitive market,” Friedmann said. “That will ultimately serve the country well.”
