Is Carbon Capture Just Climate Delusion?

A newly opened facility in Iceland that will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been heralded as a hopeful turning point in the urgent fight to stop climate catastrophe. In reality, it is further evidence of a new type of techno-optimism that is not quite old-fashioned climate denial, but something you might call climate delusion.

On its face, the technology known as direct air capture (DAC) seems like a plausible, painless solution to the climate crisis: Giant machines pull greenhouse gasses out of the air, and they are either injected underground or integrated into consumer products.

For years, we have been hearing that a massive breakthrough is just around the corner. The clamor grew much louder when the Climeworks facility in Iceland came online. It is the world’s largest DAC facility—and yet is designed to capture just 36,000 tons of CO2 annually—which is, for the sake of comparison, just one percent of the pollution generated by a single coal power plant. There are much larger DAC plans in the works: Occidental Petroleum is part of a group building a facility in Texas that they claim will capture 500,000 tons of CO2 per year.

Handing out free money to polluters is not only broadly unpopular, it is also terrible public policy. Congress must stop the public funding and support for these climate scams.

And while that theoretical capability sounds impressive, it is still less than 0.01 percent of annual U.S. carbon emissions. And these projections become even less impressive when we consider the track record of carbon removal so far. Another recent Occidental project, the Century carbon capture facility, failed to capture more than a third of its capacity before they liquidated this asset.

There is another more fundamental problem with most of these carbon removal technologies: When the captured carbon is used to squeeze out oil from existing wells (a process known as enhanced oil recovery), is it of any climate benefit at all? There is no doubt that Occidental sees direct air capture as a tool to help it continue extracting fossil fuels; when they are touting ‘net zero oil,’ one cannot escape the conclusion that the goal is to greenwash oil extraction as a climate solution.

Breaking ground on the world's largest DAC facilitywww.youtube.com

To hear proponents of DAC explain it, science tells us this technology is a necessity at this stage in the race to stop climate catastrophe. This is misleading; there is a wide range of modeled pathways for slowing down the rate of global temperature increase, and they do not all rely on carbon removal that have not been shown to work.

Even if DAC was shown to be effective, its costs are astronomical. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the cost range of early-stage DAC plants is $600-$1,000/ton of carbon dioxide; and operating DAC at a meaningful scale would consume an estimated one-sixth of the world’s energy output.

By promoting the adoption of technologies they insist will eventually work as advertised, fossil fuel giants can delay the transition away from fossil fuels.

Instead of viewing techno fixes like DAC as a necessity, many in the scientific community warn that reliance on DAC is a risky move that could “obstruct near-term emissions reduction efforts.” This is exactly what makes DAC and carbon capture so appealing to major polluters: By promoting the adoption of technologies they insist will eventually work as advertised, fossil fuel giants can delay the transition away from fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, U.S. taxpayers are funding these false climate solutions; billions of dollars in subsidies are available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and similarly lucrative corporate tax credits are a major part of the Inflation Reduction Act. There is ample evidence that this is a poor investment. A 2020 Treasury Department Inspector General investigation found that nearly 90 percent of tax credits claimed for carbon capture operations were done so with no accompanying verification that any carbon was actually being captured.

Instead of taking corrective action, Congress massively expanded these tax credits, making this scam even more lucrative than before. To make matters worse, the IRS will not release information about which companies are benefiting from this billion dollar taxpayer-funded boondoggle.