San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fully phase out fossil fuels
Gov. Gavin Newsom made headlines early last month when he signed a historic package of climate change legislation designed to advance California’s climate goals.
The newly signed legislation will, among other things, require the state to become carbon-neutral by 2045, produce 90% of its electricity from clean sources by 2035, and establish health and safety perimeters around oil and gas wells near homes.
While there is much to laud in the “climate package,” it has one significant flaw: it endorses and codifies carbon capture, a favored climate ploy of the fossil fuel industry.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is the process of capturing carbon dioxide before it enters the atmosphere, transporting it and storing it underground indefinitely. Despite being portrayed — often by the fossil fuel industry — as a necessary tool to address climate change, it actually is not.
And as far as being an important tool for meeting the state’s goal of becoming carbon-neutral, CCS is an unproven technology at best. At worst, it’s ineffective and potentially dangerous.
That’s a hell of a bet to place the future of the planet on.
Despite billions of dollars in investment, CCS has not had much success. Since 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy alone has invested more than a billion dollars in 11 CCS projects. According to a December 2021 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, most of those projects have failed. Of the 8 coal projects, for example, only one — the Petra Nova plant in Texas, was ever completed. But it closed in 2021. Although some cite the pandemic as the reason for its closure, the plant had chronic mechanical problems and routinely missed its capture targets well before then. In fact, the GAO report indicated that many of the CCS projects were “unlikely to succeed” from the start.
As for the two industrial projects that were completed, neither is very effective at carbon capture. According to one analysis, one plant captured less than half its emissions while the other captured only a small fraction of its emissions.
These, as well as poor outcomes for CCS projects globally, have led many climate experts, including
scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to warn repeatedly that CCS is unproven and does not work at scale.
Moreover, carbon capture poses real threats to humans and the environment. Leaks during the transporting and storage of CO2 are possible. In 2020, a carbon pipeline ruptured in Satartia, Miss., sending a thick fog of carbon dioxide into town, causing asphyxiation, disorientation and nearly killing several residents. Add in that California is an earthquake-prone state and that risk of leaks climbs even higher.
So why does the fossil fuel industry love CCS?
For the same reason many environmental, climate justice and community organizations have long opposed it: it gives the industry a lifeline to continue operating and distracts from the only real way to effectively address climate change — by phasing out fossil fuels completely.
It’s not hard to see why, when faced with those two options, the fossil fuel industry is all in with CCS.
A recent memo to the U.S. House Oversight Committee revealed how oil and gas companies have knowingly used carbon capture as a smokescreen for the continued use of fossil fuels.
For instance, internal documents from the oil giant Shell show how one company executive advised an employee to “be cagey about project specifics” regarding carbon capture. A memo from another oil giant, BP, underscored to its corporate leadership how carbon capture can “enable
the full use of fossil fuels across the energy transition and beyond.”
This is why the fossil fuel industry “is at the forefront” of CCS, as a 2021 fact sheet from the Western States Petroleum Association, a mouthpiece of the petroleum industry, put it. The industry is pouring millions into lobbying for the use of the technology with various stakeholders. Exxon Mobil, the leading oil producer in the U.S. and a key supporter of carbon capture, spent close to $4 million in the first six months of 2022 lobbying federal targets. In California, fossil fuel giants Chevron, SoCalGas and Aera Energy spent a combined $2.2 million in just the second quarter of 2022 alone, pushing CCS with state lawmakers and agencies like the California Air Resources Board, which is currently responsible for charting the state’s path to carbon neutrality by 2045 — a plan that will be some combination of eliminating or capturing greenhouse emissions.
While CCS is already built into the state’s plans, the governor can stop carbon capture from becoming a pillar of California’s climate policy.
In his July letter to the air resources board, Newsom urged them to “supercharge” their efforts in combating climate change. As the board works to finalize its scoping plan, the governor can follow-up that directive to guide the board away from carbon capture.
If he doesn’t take action, the governor risks undoing all the progress of his “climate package” in favor of Big Oil’s profits.