Kerry challenges oil industry to prove its promised tech rescue for climate change

WASHINGTON — Oil and gas producers talk up technological breakthroughs they say will soon allow the world to drill and burn fossil fuels without worsening global warming. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry says the time is here for the industry to prove it can make the technology happen — at scale, affordably and quickly — to stave off climate disaster.

And Kerry says he has “serious questions” whether it can.

Kerry’s comments came in an interview with The Associated Press on one of the most crucial topics in the fight to slow global warming: the argument from oil and gas producers that they will soon have technology in place to extract the climate-damaging gases that make fossil fuels the main culprit in climate change, allowing companies to keep pumping crude and natural gas worry-free.

Kerry said the ideal solution is a fast global switch to renewable energy, but oil and gas states and companies have a right to give their claim of technological rescue a try.

“If you’re able to abate the emissions, capture it,” Kerry said this past week at his climate team’s offices at the State Department. “But we don’t have that at-scale yet. And we can’t sit here and just pretend we’re going to automatically have something we don’t have today. Because we might not. It might not work.”

Globally, the point matters because oil and gas companies point to the hope of technology that can one day scour away most of the climate-wrecking carbon to stave off public and government pressure for the world to pivot faster away from fossil fuels and to solar, wind and other cleaner energy.

“What they’re banking on is that they’re going to be able to do the emissions capture,” Kerry said of oil and gas companies. He ticked off the stages of operations that would involve.

“If you can do those things, you may be able to make it economically competitive,” he said, adding, “I have some serious questions about whether it will be price-competitive.”

Especially since 2015, when the United States and nearly 200 other governments committed to cut emissions to avoid the most disastrous scenarios of global warming, oil producers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in public campaigns portraying themselves as climate-friendly. Industry ads and social media campaigns often suggest the carbon-purging technology is already on the job, extracting the climate-damaging gases from oil and gas facilities’ around the world.

“CO2 capture and transportation technologies have been operating safely across the globe and in the US for many years,” the website of oil giant BP says.

“Technologies capture CO2 emissions at source or directly from the air,” Saudi state oil giant Aramco says, describing the carbon then being stored safely underground or turned into “useful products.”

In reality, the technology to capture one major climate-damaging gas, methane, from oil and gas operations does exist, and is awaiting investment to roll out at scale. But the technology to capture the biggest climate agent, carbon dioxide, remains limited in scale and costly, and often energy-intensive in its own right.

The International Energy Agency, some national governments globally, and many climate scientists and advocates are adamant that while carbon-capturing technology will play a role, oil and gas production itself must be phased out.

“Actual experience has been that commercial-scale carbon capture projects have fallen far, far short of the claims,” said David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis research group.

“I just think it’s foolish to think that we can keep pumping the stuff, CO2, methane, into the atmosphere, and that at some point we’ll be able to capture it,” Schlissel said.

A spokeswoman with the American Petroleum Institute trade group declined comment. An industry study group in 2019 called for heavy government funding to capture a quarter of current greenhouse gases within 15 years.

Kerry said the deadline to watch is 2030. By then, the U.N.’s top climate panel says, the world will need to have nearly halved climate-damaging emissions to stave off the more devastating scenarios of global warming.