By ignoring global
warming, the U.S. is painting itself (and the world) into a bad corner. But now the
fossil fuel industry has prepared an escape for us. You may not have heard of
it, but the escape is called "carbon capture and storage" or CCS for
short. It has never been tried on anything like the scale needed to limit
global warming, so it's a colossal experiment with the future of civilization
at stake. More on that in a moment, but
first let's look at the corner we're in --
** The chief economist of the
International Energy Agency (IEA) recently said, "The world
is perfectly on track to 11 degrees Fahrenheit increase in temperature, which
is very bad news. And everybody, even school children, know this will have
catastrophic implications for all of us."
** We face unprecedented
tornadoes like the one that ripped away much of Joplin, Missouri May 22, 2011;
** Parts of our Southwest (and Mexico) are now dryer than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, with irregular
snow pack in the Rockies disrupting water supplies and reducing crop yields. By
all accounts, the future of water in the Southwest is grim. (Lohan, 2010, and deBuys, 2011)
** Drought-induced
insect infestations are destroying forests across the western states and mega-wildfires are increasing on every continent except
Antarctica;
** Record floods disrupted the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys during
2011, not to mention Biblical floods in Australia, India and Pakistan where tens of
millions of people were displaced.
And we're just in the
early stages of climate chaos. As the song says, "You ain't seen nothing yet."
The 2005 Plan of Action
You don't hear much about it, but Bush-Cheney in 2005 endorsed a plan to bail
us out of this mess and we're still following their script. Back then, the G8 nations, led by the U.S.,
formally adopted a "Plan of Action."
In it, the G8 (Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the
U.S.) committed to building a global infrastructure for "carbon capture
and storage" (CCS), which means burying carbon dioxide (CO2) in the
ground. Now, seven years later, that infrastructure is being
built worldwide.
The centerpiece is the Global CCS Institute created in 2009.
(The "S" in CCS can stand for "sequestration" or
"storage" but it's the same thing -- burying pressurized CO2 in
liquid form about a mile below ground.)
Carbon Storage by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
CCS is by no means the only strategy in the 2005 Plan of Action -- there's plenty about efficiency (doing more
with less) and renewable energy (solar, wind, and so forth). But the U.S. is
playing down efficiency and renewables in favor of fracking for natural gas and mountaintop removal mining for coal, both of which produce CO2. Therefore the plan says we'll develop CCS,
which is a get-out-of-jail-free card for the fossil corporations. With CCS, we
could continue burning fossil fuels as long as they last and pass the CO2 on to
our grandchildren's grandchildren to worry about, manage, and pay for.
CCS is being readied for
that time when the chaos, heat and misery from global warming become intolerable and people start begging (or rioting) for relief -- say, sometime between 2015
and 2030. If history is any guide, the
1% will use the crisis to
stampede us into paying for their escape plan, which they're quietly preparing now.
Although there are very few actual
in-the-ground demonstrations of CCS today, in preparation for large-scale
operations there are now hundreds of regional consortiums; research groups; think
tanks; policy initiatives; interdisciplinary collaborations; engineering firms;
trade associations; consultants; risk assessors; mathematical modelers;
environmental impact assessors; public opinion managers; professional conferences;
technical workshops; national laboratories; other federal, state and provincial
government agencies; international agreements and treaties; summer schools;
university degree programs; environmental
organizations; and philanthropic
foundations -- all committed to the plan
to bury CO2 in the ground.
Impediments
Two things are blocking
the road ahead for CCS -- lack of funds and a skeptical public. The fossil
corporations don't want to pay to bury CO2 -- that's for taxpayers, as they see
it. And members of the public living near proposed burial sites are simply
asking, "Are you crazy?" Yes,
CO2 is familiar as the fizzy in soda and beer (and yes, you exhale CO2 as you
breathe), but when CO2 gets loose in concentrated form it creates an invisible
puddle on the ground, which excludes oxygen, rapidly killing everything in its
path. A rare natural eruption of CO2 from the bottom of Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 asphyxiated 1,746 people in
their sleep. Few people want to live anywhere near a huge, buried puddle of
liquid CO2 that might one day leak.
Burying CO2 in the ground is sometimes called "clean coal" but it's
much bigger than just coal.
It means capturing CO2 gas from industrial sources like power plants, cement
kilns, oil refineries, and garbage incinerators, compressing it into a liquid,
and pumping it a mile or more below ground, hoping it will stay there
forever. It's a gigantic experiment,
with the future of civilization in the balance.
The first full-scale industrial plant designed for CCS is supposed to start up
in Linden, New Jersey in 2017, though it hasn't yet broken ground (and may never).
It's called PurGen, and each year it would convert 1.6
million tons of coal into 600,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer, plus generate
some electricity during hours of peak demand.
PurGen is a "clean
coal" plant that would release at least 1.7 million pounds of noxious air
pollutants each year just a few hundred yards upwind of Staten Island, N.Y.,
home to half a million people. The area around Linden and Staten Island already
fails to meet federal health-based air standards. In addition, N.J. state government
has officially designated Linden an "environmental justice"
community because its population is disproportionately black and Hispanic, with
high asthma rates.
PurGen would capture
much of its own CO2, plus gather CO2 from other industries in north Jersey,
compress it into a liquid, then pipe it out to sea for permanent
storage below the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
The 2-foot-diameter pipe carrying liquid CO2 would extend 140 miles from
Linden (at Exit 12 on the N.J. Turnpike) to a spot 70 miles offshore from
Atlantic City, where a permanent platform similar to an oil rig would pump a
total of 500 million tons of CO2 a mile below the seabed, 10 million tons per
year for 50 years.
And PurGen is just the
beginning. Implementation of the 2005 plan calls for (large PDF) construction of
3,400 full-scale CCS burial projects between 2020 and 2050, some beneath land,
some beneath the ocean, with 1,200 of them in G8 countries and another 2,200 in
China, India, Russia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Another estimate, by Harvard's
Daniel Schrag, sees as much as two trillion tons (or more) of pressurized
liquid CO2 being buried this century. If
that happened, even low leakage rates could release tonnages of CO2
sufficient to create a new global-warming threat.
As with fracking, CCS has created a chasm of suspicion and mistrust within the
environmental movement. The Big Green
environmentalists with offices in Washington, D.C. favor
fracking to produce natural gas,
so long as it's subject to "the best regulations," whatever that
means. Unfortunately, no matter how
strict the regulations may be, burning natural gas inevitably produces CO2, so
Big Green also favors burying CO2 in the ground. Big Green assumes we face a fossil-fueled
future and therefore we need CCS.
Unfortunately, Big Green's support of CCS becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy,
helping create a fossil-fueled future.
The fossil corporations are already using the promise of CCS to lobby powerfully
against investments in efficiency or renewables, locking us into a fossil
future.
But not everyone is
buying it. Grass-roots groups -- led by people living near the fracking rigs,
the coal plants, and the CO2 burial experiments -- oppose CCS and favor
aggressive energy efficiency. They argue
that huge improvements in efficiency (doing more with less) are affordable
(even profitable) and available off the shelf today. Further, they argue,
efficiency can create tens of thousands of good jobs almost immediately and can
save trillions of dollars, which in turn can pay for a modern renewable-energy
economy based on even greater efficiency plus solar, wind, geothermal,
biofuels, hydro, tidal power and a modernized electric grid. David Goldstein,
who won a MacArthur "genius" award, has spelled out the realistic
possibilities of efficiency in his book Invisible Energy.
Goldstein argues that it would be easy to run the U.S. economy with only
half the energy we currently use.
Running the economy on only 20% of current energy (or even less) would
be more difficult, but is doable, Goldstein argues. And he's not alone. (See also Sovacool, 2008.)
Of course the fossil corporations don't want efficiency -- they want to sell
product. They favor creative ways to mine and burn oil, gas and coal, burying
the hazardous waste CO2 below ground. In supporting CCS the fossil corporations
are joined by major fossil users -- car companies, electric utilities, the
mining and mining-services industries, and the railroads. Together they form a
potent political force with essentially limitless funds with which to buy elections. So, yes, Barack Obama favors offshore oil,
coal, fracking, and CCS. So long as we allow big money to influence our democratic
institutions (legislatures, courts, and elections) any president will have to
fall in line.
A Letter to Lisa Jackson
Recently CCS has been
critiqued by a group of environmental justice advocates, joined by scientists
and engineers from Harvard, Georgia Tech, University of South Carolina, and
Dillard University, calling themselves the Environmental Justice and Science
Initiative. In April, 2011, 18 members
of the Initiative signed a long letter to Lisa Jackson, chief of the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) opposing the PurGen proposal in Linden and spelling out
a host of technical concerns about CCS. (Full disclosure: I signed the letter.)
The Jackson letter makes some of the following points, among others:
** A CCS industry large
enough to make a real difference in global warming would have to be
enormous. Burying one-eighth of global
CO2 emissions today would require an
infrastructure the size of the global petroleum industry.
** CCS only buries CO2 and does not address the other health or environmental
effects from mining, transport, processing or burning of fossil fuels.
** A CCS system requires
large amounts of energy to operate. When equipped with CCS, an industrial plant
requires 25% to 40% more fossil fuel than the same plant without CCS. In other
words, for every four power plants fitted with CCS, we'd need a fifth plant
just to run all the CCS equipment. This large "energy penalty" for
CCS contributes to high costs, excessive wastes, and more human disease from
mining and burning fossil fuels.
(Related to coal, see Lockwood, 2009 and Hendryx and
Ahern, 2009.)
** An industrial philosophy that promotes wasteful technologies violates the
principles of both green
chemistry and green
engineering;
** Every dollar spent on CCS is a dollar that can't be invested in a modern
energy system based on maximum efficiency and renewables. The International
Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that a CCS system large enough to manage 20 percent of global CO2
emissions in 2050 would cost $45 trillion.
And sooner or later, we'll run out of affordable fossil fuels, so
eventually we'll have to pay to develop renewables anyway. Why not skip the
costly, experimental CO2 burial stage and go for efficiency and renewables now?
** Leaks and releases of
concentrated CO2 are toxic to plants and animals, including humans. (Fogarty and
McCally, 2010 and IPCC, 2005 pgs. 248-249 [large PDF]).
** Long-term leakage to the atmosphere will be an ongoing concern for
millennia. CCS sites would have to be
monitored for leakage for something like 4,000 to 10,000 years, with
someone standing ready all that time to plug leaks (if plugging is even
feasible). Humans have never created a
watchdog agency intended to last for millennia.
And this watchdog would have to coordinate operations at thousands of
CO2 burial sites in dozens of countries, essentially forever. Does this sound like something humans can
manage?
** Judging by the PurGen
example, CCS plants may tend to end up in communities of color already burdened
with pollution. EPA should oppose any
such trend, and should definitely oppose the PurGen project, the letter said.
This, then, is the escape plan that the fossil corporations say will ensure our future (and their outsized profits). Congress, President Obama, Big Green, and everyone else chasing a slice of the $45 trillion CCS pie are all betting the future of civilization. They say long-term leakage can be managed and nothing can go seriously wrong. Hmmm. What if it turns out they were mistaken?
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A version of this essay appeared on Alternet Feb. 15, 2012.
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