Can we capture carbon and store it Efforts challenges
Context:
- Climate change is one of the most significant issues at present. An essential instrument to stop climate change is costly and has consistently fallen short of the outcomes that fossil fuel companies promised.
- Carbon capture and storage is a technique for trapping and burying a gas that warms the planet, according to researchers. It is imperative to reduce pollution in sectors where other green technologies are further behind.
What is storage and sequestration of carbon?
- A procedure known as carbon capture and storage (CCS) can be used to capture and store carbon underground.
- While some of the techniques are comparable, carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which includes removing carbon from the atmosphere, is different.
- The primary difference between CCS and CDR is that whereas CCS in fossil fuel plants and factories prevents the gas from escaping in the first place, CDR lowers the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, cooling the earth.
CCS has to be a significant element in factories.
- In its most recent review of scientific findings, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that both solutions will be required for emissions that are difficult to reduce.
- There aren’t many ways to quickly capture CO2 or later remove it from the atmosphere for chemical processes that emit it.
- According to scientists, CCS will be crucial in factories that make cement and fertiliser as well as those that burn rubbish.
- Whether it makes sense to use it to generate steel and hydrogen is a topic of debate among specialists because there are some more environmentally friendly alternatives.
Efficacy of the CCS approach in terms of costs:
- Since there are already better, less expensive choices like wind turbines and solar panels, the majority of their pessimism focuses on carbon capture during energy production.
- Theoretically, especially in countries that are still building fossil fuel plants today, it might be used as a backup in gas plants when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, but it would need to quickly become more efficient and economical.
What is the CCS’s efficiency?
- Engineers have been removing the carbon from concentrated gas streams, pressing it into tanks, cleaning it up and either using it in industry or burying it underground.
- Some bioethanol plants assert that they have already collected more than 95% of the carbon emissions when the gas stream is pure.
- When it comes to absorbing carbon from dirtier gas streams, such those from factories and power plants, CCS projects have routinely overpromised and failed short.
- As a result, to capture carbon, a special kind of chemical is needed. This technique has undergone successful testing, although it has not yet received widespread commercialization.
- Despite a few laboratory facilities being able to recover more than 90% of emissions from particular filthy gas streams, commercial operations have been impeded by problems. Some of them have broken down or weren’t designed to run continually. Certain alternative technologies can only catch a small part of the total emissions.
- Because businesses have no incentive to collect their pollutants, researchers contend that economic factors rather than technical ones are to blame for CCS’s failures.
Why is CCS a controversial subject?
- Activists have criticised energy firms for doing little to capture carbon while both searching for oil and fighting legislation that would restrict the production of fossil fuels.
- CCS also provides access to politicians and a “social licence to operate” for companies who oppose the burning of fossil fuels.
- CCS is criticised for being used to improve extraction rather than as a carbon capture strategy to combat climate change.
- The time has come for policymakers to prioritise cultural changes over faulty technologies, such as reducing energy consumption.
- The industry’s commitment to its objectives has also been questioned by scientists. Despite decades of advancing the technology, there are currently only 30 CCS plants that are operating.
How could CCS operate more efficiently?
- Experts claim that carbon capture development is starting to pick up speed.
- For e.g. The largest industrial company in Germany, Heidelberg Materials, is building the first facility in Norway where cement-related carbon will be absorbed and underground stored. The company claims that a capture rate of almost 100% is reasonable. Even yet, it only plans to take in 50% of the emissions from the property.
- According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), new enterprises are focusing on certain components of the problem, like transport and storage.
Conclusion:
- The way we combat climate change will be completely transformed by CCS, which uses cutting-edge technology to capture and store carbon.
- To speed the development of CCS, however, industries must be granted subsidies because it requires a substantial capital investment.
