Congress has recently provided billions of dollars to support the growth of carbon capture technology. If the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules go into effect, many fossil fuel plants could be forced to use carbon capture technology.
However, carbon sequestration has met with considerable criticism as a costly and wrongful distraction in the fight against it global warming.
The National Carbon Capture Center, located along the Coosa River in Alabama, is a research facility affiliated with the coal and gas-fired power plants operated by Southern Company. It resembles a large laboratory where carbon emissions have been measured for more than ten years. John Northington, site manager, said it represented the culmination of 135,000 hours of testing and more than 70 years of expertise.
“Our main goal here is to measure air capture,” Northington said.
Coal and gas-fired power plants are responsible for about 60% of the electricity generated in the United States, and are the nation’s second largest source of greenhouse gases. Carbon capture technology aims to prevent CO2 emissions from being released into the atmosphere by capturing them with chemicals and storing them underground.
Northington said the technology works, and about 95% of the time.
But the global implementation of carbon capture has faced challenges.
The Petra Nova coal-fired power plant near Houston was the first and only commercial facility in the US to use carbon capture. It faced technical difficulties and high costs, and was finally replaced in 2020. The owner is currently trying to revive the plant.
Critics who include MIT Professor Charles Harvey argue that carbon capture and storage, also known as CCS, is not economically viable because it costs less to build new energy projects like wind and solar than to use existing coal sites.
“A dollar spent on renewable technology will avoid more emissions than CCS would,” Harvey said.
He says that the capture of air makes the industry to continue to depend on oil, and even the carbon captured from the Petra Nova plant was used to remove more oil under a process called oil enrichment.
“The sad thing is that there is an easy way out and that is to stop using fossil fuels,” said Harvey. “We have the technology to do that right now and I don’t think we should mess with it.”
Although skeptical of CCS, Harvey believes that direct carbon capture, also known as DAC, which removes CO2 from the atmosphere, can help combat climate change.
The ClimeWorks plant in Iceland, operated by the Swiss company ClimeWorks, is the world’s largest DAC facility. It captures CO2 from the atmosphere, separates it and injects it into rocks for permanent storage. However, these DAC devices can only remove a fraction of the CO2 emissions they produce each year.
“Every ton of CO2 removed is a ton that is helping to combat climate change and not contribute to global warming,” said Julie Gosalvez, Chief Marketing Officer of Climeworks.
But it can remove about 4,000 tons of the roughly 40 billion tons of CO2 that humans pump into the atmosphere every year. It is working to increase that investment and, in the meantime, a larger facility, including the one in Texas, is also under construction.
“I’m excited,” Northington said. “I think there’s a lot of potential.”
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