Oil giants see carbon capture as way to help bury pollution
During more than three decades in the oil and gas business, Andy Lane has managed the construction of enormous facilities for extracting and transporting natural gas, in places like Trinidad and Indonesia.
Now he is working in his native England, taking on a complex and expensive venture that essentially aims to reverse what he has spent much of his career doing.
Lane’s newest assignment is designed to collect carbon pollution from a group of chemical plants in northeast England and send it to a reservoir deep under the North Sea.
The multibillion-dollar project could be a breakthrough for a technology known as carbon capture and storage, a concept that has been around for at least a quarter-century to reduce the climate-damaging emissions from factories.
The idea sounds deceptively simple: Divert pollutants before they can escape into the air, and bury them deep in the ground where they can do no harm.
But the technology has proved to be expensive, and it has not caught on as rapidly as some advocates hoped.
Still, lots of attention is being paid to carbon capture as a way to meet the targets in the 2016 Paris climate agreement.
As a candidate, President Joe Biden promoted carbon capture’s promise; last month, Exxon Mobil announced a $3 billion investment in low-carbon efforts, including carbon capture; and a week later, Elon Musk promised to put up $100 million for a contest seeking the best carbon-capture technology.
The project in England, in an area called Teesside along the River Tees, is
led by the oil giant BP and expects to have size on its side: The area is home to one of the country’s largest clusters of polluting factories and refineries. By linking them together — collecting all their emissions by pipeline, and charging them a fee — BP hopes to achieve sufficient scale to make a profitable business of tackling their pollution.
Teesside “has quite a lot of the big industrial emissions sources in the U.K., and that is why this project makes sense,” Lane said.
It is also fast becoming a focal point of attention in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, which is eager to cement support in the onetime Labour Party stronghold. The area’s turn toward the Conservative Party helped it win big in the 2019 national election.
BP and its partners propose to build a large electric power station fueled by natural gas near the mouth of the river. The plant would help replace Britain’s aging fossil-fuel-burning power stations and provide essential backup electricity when the country’s growing fleet
of offshore wind farms are becalmed. Equipment would remove the carbon dioxide from the power station’s exhaust.
Pipes would run through the area rounding up more carbon dioxide from a fertilizer plant and a factory that makes hydrogen, which is winning favor as a low-carbon fuel.
BP also expects to connect other plants in the area. Pipes would take the carbon dioxide 90 miles out under the North Sea, where it would be pumped below the seabed into porous rocks.
Four other oil giants — Royal Dutch Shell, Norway’s Equinor, France’s Total and Italy’s Eni — are also investors in the plan, although the final go-ahead awaits a financial commitment from the British government. The price for the initial stage could approach $5 billion.
About two dozen carbon capture projects are operating globally, but the technology has struggled to overcome high costs and worries about liability if the carbon dioxide somehow escaped.
From the time Europeans arrived in North America, some of them made a practice of killing wolves. Some 2 million wolves once ranged across the continent, but incessant slaughter, with guns, traps and poison, came uncomfortably close to eradicating them. By 1965, they had almost entirely disappeared from the upper Midwest. That might have been fine with many of our forebears, including Theodore Roosevelt, who called the species “the beast of waste and desolation.”
Restoring the gray wolf to that part of America was a long and difficult but ultimately successful mission. There now are hundreds in Michigan and more than 2,000 in Minnesota. As of last year, there were more than 1,000 in Wisconsin. To nature lovers, this sounds like nothing but good news. But to those who regard wolves with fear and loathing, it’s just the opposite — and that group had its way last month in Wisconsin.
In its final days, the Trump administration removed gray wolves from the list of endangered species protected under federal law. It was a dubious decision, given they number just 6,000 in the lower 48 states and are still absent from the vast majority of their historic range. The delisting opened the door to travesties of the kind seen last month in Wisconsin.
Under an unusual state law, Wisconsin was required to allow a wolf hunting season once the animal was taken off the protected list. The Department of Natural Resources wanted to postpone the hunt until November to give it time to determine a sensible quota and confer with Native American tribes, which regard the wolves with reverence. But a lawsuit by an out-of-state group, Hunter Nation, prevailed in court to force the agency to allow the hunt in February — during the animals’ mating season, when they are particularly vulnerable.
The hunt unleashed a frenzy of killing with most hunters using dogs and some using snowmobiles. The state set a quota of 119 wolves for hunters obtaining permits and 81 for Native American tribes. The tribes chose not to use theirs — but the other hunters vastly exceeded their limit, liquidating at least 216 and prompting the DNR to stop the hunt in less than three days instead of the seven originally planned.
Adrian Treves, an environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and founder of the
Carnivore Coexistence Lab, estimates that another 115 were likely killed by poachers. That would mean a third of the state’s wolves were wiped out in under 60 hours. “There’s a very real risk that we are jeopardizing the stability of our wolf population across the state,”he said in an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio.
Those defending the hunt insist that wolves are a menace to livestock and therefore must be kept to a minimum. But there were only 86 instances of such wolf predation last year in Wisconsin — a minuscule number in a state with 3.45 million beef cattle, 75,000 sheep, 72,000 goats and 179,000 horses. The owners of livestock killed by wolves are entitled to compensation from the state, which last year paid out $1.8 million.
Proud hunters used social media to post photos of wolf carcasses piled up like firewood. But they clearly have shot themselves in the foot. The Biden administration was already considering whether to restore the gray wolf ’s federal protection from hunting. The Wisconsin hunt makes a powerful argument to do just that.