Can carbon capture really be part of the solution?
Every year, humans pump around 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. According to numerous successive and increasingly forceful reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to avoid the worst effects of a warming planet, that number needs to fall to zero by 2050.
But after decades of inaction in the face of this scientific consensus, emissions have grown so high that reductions from things like increasing energy efficiency and transitioning to renewable electricity will only get us so far.
Nearly two decades ago, Jennifer Wilcox realized that removal would be key to getting to netzero emissions.
As a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford
University, Wilcox recognized that naturebased solutions — planting trees and rehabilitating wetlands, both of which are really good at absorbing carbon dioxide — could only do so much: Carbon would also need to be captured from the air. So, in 2012, she wrote the textbook on how it is done. The National Academies of Science came around to Wilcox’s point of view in 2018, reporting that technologies would need to be developed and advanced to remove the amount needed.
Wilcox, 45, now has a leading role in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, where she is charged with doing just that.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q: What’s holding back carbon capture and storage today? Is it the technology?
A: Types of carbon capture are often conflated with each other. There’s point source carbon capture, which is retrofitting an existing facility and avoiding emissions from entering the atmosphere. Then there’s carbon dioxide removal — direct air capture. Technology for both approaches exists.
But then there’s the question of, what do you do with all the CO2? The one approach that scales is the depleted oil and gas reservoirs: injecting it deep underground. So to me, it’s absolutely not the technology.
Q: Is underground storage safe, achievable and cost-effective in the long term?
A: Deep underground storage of CO2 is not new — the oil industry has been doing it for nearly 40 years through enhanced oil production, which is a commercialscale activity today. Through this industry, we have gained expertise in safe and secure storage, and the same skills, workforce, and expertise will apply for dedicated CO2 storage projects.
Q: Where do you think carbon capture and storage will be in 10 years?
A: I see CCS in a decade being deployed on industrial point sources that are hard to decarbonize today — cement, primarily, and in some cases, steel. Carbon capture on a cement plant really helps to drive down the carbon intensity of that product. And we’re looking at pulp and paper as well.
Q: Do customers want to purchase lowcarbon paper?
A: Yes. Apple, Amazon — anybody that uses a lot of paper. They’re willing to pay for low-carbon supply chains, but those don’t exist today. So they have to pay for very highpriced carbon removal.
And my point is: How about financing the lowcarbon cement, low-carbon steel, low-carbon paper by adding CCS to their production? It’s a lot cheaper to avoid the emissions than taking it back out afterward. I don’t think those sectors are hard to decarbonize today.
Q: What do you see as the challenges for widespread deployment?
A: The lack of education and effective communication. An example that I have in my textbook is that the same chemistry that captures CO2 also captures the acid rain gases, sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, which also affect human health. The first stage of carbon capture is actually cleaning up the particulate matter.