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The Whole System Is Important or Carbon Capture to Drill Oil [1]

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Date: 2025-01-14

I have, because I am a giant nerd, been doing some research on carbon capture. I have seen it mentioned more and more as climate disasters like the LA fires come to the fore, but rarely at a level that really helps understand the real effect of carbon capture.

I am not anything close to even resembling an expert on these matters. I do not pay one on TV and I did not stay at a Holiday Inn express last night. Everything I am about to write may be off in ways I have yet to discover. I would welcome any real experts weighing in. But we have the misfortune to live in interesting times, and as members of what is still a democracy, we, I think, have an obligation to at least try to understand what we are being asked to approve or pay for. And right now, largely because of capitalism, I am not sure that carbon capture is deserving of support.

Carbon capture, for those who do not know, is the process of capture carbon pollution, usually from the producing system themselves, and store it, usually underground. It sounds great — capture a bunch of carbon and story it away. But it hasn’t worked all that well in practice. According to a recent research study, eighty percent of these installations fail before or soon after launch. The technology is new enough to still have a lot of bugs to work out, and, apparently, absent government subsidies, there are enough commercially viable options to use the stored carbon to make these projects viable, especially the large ones. The picture is even worse of you remove carbon credits from governments.

Which leads to another potential problem — one of the most viable ways to make money from carbon capture is to use it to assist in harvesting more oil. The carbon is stored in depleted oil reserves, making it easier to extract the oil. The problem with this should be obvious. Once the oil is extracted, it is going to be burned. And burning oil obviously leads to more carbon in the atmosphere. So, any good you are doing with carbon capture is at least, and possibly entirely, offset by the damage that you do by burning the oil you make easier to extract via your carbon storage system.

None of this is to argue that carbon capture cannot or should not be a part of solving the climate crisis. It is merely to point out that technological solutions are not golden bullets, generally. I am sure that a lot of people are attracted to carbon capture because of the idea that it can save us without much change in your energy systems or lifestyles. That is a seductive and often wrong attitude toward technological solutions. Like any other policy, they have issues and tradeoffs, and we should not be dazzled by the idea of new technology saving us. Technology is generally hard, and new technology generally has difficulties as new situations are encountered and systems attempt to scale up. There are a lot of fossil fuel companies pushing carbon capture and their projections tend to be rosier than the reality.

We need to keep in mind that not every problem has a technological solution. Sometimes, oftentimes, the best solutions are policy changes and regulations. Those inevitably involve politics and politics is messy. Easier, one imagines, to rely on the promise of technology to save us. And maybe it will. But we cannot assume that the robotic cavalry is coming over the hill. Sometimes the hooves we hear clanking are technologies set to burn down our villages and steal our crops.

Okay, the metaphor got away from me there a bit, but the point stands. We need to ensure that we make the right choices, not the easiest choices. And carbon capture looks, to me, now, as an easy choice. Not a correct one.

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