14 votes

Carbon dioxide pipelines and underground injection can cut greenhouse gas, but community opposition is fierce

Posted by skybrian
Tags: usa, emissions.carbon, greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, carbon capture, infrastructure, author.evan halper, source.the washington post, paywall
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/05/11/carbon-capture-climate-change-exxonmobil-montana/

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Title
Biden and oil companies like this climate tech. Many Americans do not.
Published
May 11 2024
Word count
185 words

8 comments

  1. [6]
    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link
    From the article: … … … … … It’s an odd situation. If climate change is an emergency then I guess we should be on ExxonMobil’s side? At least in the US, these huge projects aren’t going to get...

    From the article:

    […] proposals to divert carbon dioxide from smokestacks to vast subterranean wells are regarded by the White House, the United Nations and the International Energy Agency as crucial to preserving any hope of meeting the world’s climate goals. The Biden administration’s plan to zero out emissions from the power grid by 2035 increasingly hinges on the success of colossal carbon capture deployment. The government has made billions of dollars of incentives available to motivate companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron to rapidly develop it.

    …

    In Montana, the federal Bureau of Land Management in 2022 identified the Snowy River site as one of the first stretches of public land that may be suitable for carbon sequestration. ExxonMobil wants to inject 450 million cubic feet of carbon dioxide per day into the ground. The company is not identifying where that gas would come from, but one likely source is a carbon dioxide pipeline currently used to support oil and gas extraction projects (the pressurized gas is used to force fossil fuels to the surface).

    That pipeline is connected to a large ExxonMobil natural gas plant 500 miles away in Wyoming. ExxonMobil says Snowy River’s storage capacity is equal to a year’s worth of polluting greenhouse gas from 1.6 million cars.

    Legacy energy companies like ExxonMobil are eager to deploy technologies that could extend the life of fossil fuels by mitigating their role in global warming. Plus, federal incentives are potentially lucrative. The single Montana project could generate as much as $12.7 billion in federal tax subsidies. ExxonMobil took it over when it acquired carbon capture and pipeline developer Denbury for $4.9 billion in November.

    …

    An ambitious proposal in the Midwest recently collapsed. The proposed 1,200-mile Heartland Greenway pipeline was supposed to span five states, bringing 15 million tons of carbon dioxide captured at ethanol plants each year to storage sites where it would be buried.

    …

    Navigator CO2 canceled the Heartland Greenway project in October. It blamed “the unpredictable nature of the regulatory and government processes involved.”

    Armstrong is one of many energy executives who said the project faltered because the developers spent too little time educating communities about the technology and talking through concerns. Companies more practiced in securing permits for pipelines, it was argued, would win local buy-in.

    But it is not turning out that way for ExxonMobil in Montana.

    Assurances from ExxonMobil that disruption would be minimal are met with worries that the project will disrupt the ecosystem, leave water tables vulnerable to the leaching of carbon dioxide, and create a safety hazard.

    A rupture in the existing pipeline several years ago left one Carter County ranch looking as if a meteor had hit it. Pictures from 2018 show a deep, truck-size crater in the ground covered with what looks like dry ice residue, caused by the compressed carbon dioxide’s combustion.

    Since that time, another major pipeline accident had dire consequences for the town of Satartia, Miss. The pipeline was also owned by Denbury, the ExxonMobil subsidiary.

    The 2020 rupture filled the air above a section of the pipeline with dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide, resulting in a medical emergency that sent 45 people to the hospital with respiratory and other problems, according to a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation.

    …

    Energy companies say they are undeterred.

    Among the projects inching forward is one on a 140,000-acre coastal stretch between Houston and the petrochemical facilities of Port Arthur, Tex., called Bayou Bend, where Chevron plans to store as much as 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide. The company is hoping the proximity to factories will make the project more palatable to regulators and landowners.

    …

    Developers promoting the projects are adamant that most of the work will happen out of sight, with the carbon buried as deep as 10,000 feet and hardly any industrial activity above ground.

    “This has to happen,” said Chris Powers, Chevron’s vice president for carbon capture, utilization and storage, pointing to the forecasting models showing that carbon capture is crucial to curbing global warming. “To make this grow at scale, it is going to take hundreds of projects.”

    It’s an odd situation. If climate change is an emergency then I guess we should be on ExxonMobil’s side? At least in the US, these huge projects aren’t going to get done without big energy companies doing them.

    7 votes
    1. [4]
      updawg
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      No, this is not how we should stop climate change. We should stop it by cutting carbon emissions in the first place. Anything else is just a Band-Aid. Unfortunately, being realistic, we need to...

      No, this is not how we should stop climate change. We should stop it by cutting carbon emissions in the first place. Anything else is just a Band-Aid. Unfortunately, being realistic, we need to use a lot of Band-Aids. But that in no way means that we are on their side because they absolutely are not on ours.

      Edit: not

      17 votes
      1. UP8
        Link Parent
        The argument for it is that, in the long term, some industrial processes will be hard to decarbonize and carbon capture and storage will be necessary somewhere. In the short term the oil refinery...

        The argument for it is that, in the long term, some industrial processes will be hard to decarbonize and carbon capture and storage will be necessary somewhere.

        In the short term the oil refinery is the economically most attractive platform for this because the CO2 separation technology is the kind of chemical factory process which is already running 24-7 at the refinery (unlike many power plants that start and stop.) Around 10-20% of the CO2 emitted from diesel or gas comes from operations at the refinery so this could take a big chunk of CO2 out in a small footprint. On top of that, people in the US South are already gonzo for running pipelines and drilling holes and have been pumping CO2 sideways since the 1980s.

        That might still happen. But the plans to expand projects like this

        https://www.adm.com/en-us/standalone-pages/adm-and-carbon-capture-and-storage/

        where they capture CO2 from fermentation at an ethanol plant in the US Midwest have been already shot down. The economics for this are particularly good because the CO2 from fermentation is basically free from atmospheric nitrogen and doesn't need expensive separation to be clean enough that to behave properly when compressed to 1500+ psi and injected into a pipeline. Trouble is it is connected to a corn-based ethanol plant which (like the oil refinery) is not an ecological positive.

        Frankly anything that involves transferring money through taxation or markets is pretty fraught. One of the better answers would be to impart a carbon tax of about $100 a ton of CO2 which adds about $1 to a gallon of gas. Close to that price it ought to profitable to add CCS to oil refineries and power plants. This scheme in general though is particularly fair in that it rewards you for riding a bicycle or taking the bus as much as it does for some plan that 'picks winners' such as electric vehicle subsidies. Politically it's tough to implement so we get stuck with policies such as subsidizing a particular carbon pipeline network.

        13 votes
      2. skybrian
        Link Parent
        I don't mean on their side in general, just for these particular projects. The question is whether to be in favor of the carbon capture schemes that the Biden administration wants to do.

        I don't mean on their side in general, just for these particular projects. The question is whether to be in favor of the carbon capture schemes that the Biden administration wants to do.

        5 votes
      3. carsonc
        Link Parent
        We should cut climate emissions, but future reductions don't make prior emissions disappear. We have subsidized the oil industry to make the climate hotter. What if we developed air capture...

        We should cut climate emissions, but future reductions don't make prior emissions disappear. We have subsidized the oil industry to make the climate hotter. What if we developed air capture technology that would allow us to subsidize them to make the climate cooler by sequestering atmospheric CO2? That would be quite the grift, no? First we pay them to take the carbon out of the ground then we pay them to put it back? That doesn't sound fair at all.

        Well, what about growing trees and dumping them into the ocean? Or using sustainable farming to sequester all the anthropogenic carbon as soil? Although these carbon sequestration methods are certainly ethically and aesthetically attractive, they don't compete with CCS on scale.

        As a result, while CCS poses rightly objectionable local environmental and ethical hazards similar to oil production, it will eventually be the only viable option to reduce existing greenhouse gas concentrations and reverse global warming. I mean, aside from nuclear winter, of course.

        5 votes
    2. Captain_calico
      Link Parent
      The problem lies whether if methodology can safely sequester carbon dioxide and if we can trust these companies in the first place. Personally, I don't have too much trust in these companies. They...

      The problem lies whether if methodology can safely sequester carbon dioxide and if we can trust these companies in the first place. Personally, I don't have too much trust in these companies. They have plenty of smart engineers and geologist working for them. But we have seen time and again that they have lied and mismanaged many projects and the science.

      I'm not too fond in simply siding with ExxonMobil to geoengineering our way out of this. But not because of the technology itself but rather a poor implementation of said technology can cause more harm then good.

      That said. I would need to look into this more closely to make an informed opinion.

      6 votes
  2. SuperNed
    Link
    These projects are the biggest boondoggle ever. We have to stop using Fossil Fuels first, then we can think about sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere. Doing it the other way around means we will...

    These projects are the biggest boondoggle ever. We have to stop using Fossil Fuels first, then we can think about sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere. Doing it the other way around means we will NEVER stop using fossil fuels.

    6 votes