Why the oil industry's pivot to carbon capture and storage – while it keeps on drilling – isn't a climate change solutionhttps://theconversation.com/why-the-oil-industrys-pivot-to-carbon-capture-and-storage-while-it-keeps-on-drilling-isnt-a-climate-change-solution-171791Seven large-scale CCS projects have been attempted at U.S. power plants, each with hundreds of millions of dollars of government subsidies, but these projects were either canceled before they reached commercial operation or were shuttered after they started due to financial or mechanical troubles. There is only one commercial-scale CCS power plant operation in the world, in Canada, and its captured carbon dioxide is used to extract more oil from wells – a process called “enhanced oil recovery.”
In industrial facilities, all but one of the dozen CCS projects in the U.S uses the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery.
This expensive oil extraction technique has been described as “climate mitigation” because the oil companies are now using carbon dioxide. But a modeling study of the full life cycle of this process at coal-fired power plants found it puts 3.7 to 4.7 times as much carbon dioxide into the air as it removes.
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A National Academies of Sciences study of direct air capture’s energy use indicates that to capture 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide per year, this type of direct air capture system could require up to 3,889 terawatt-hours of energy – almost as much as the total electricity generated in the U.S. in 2020. The largest direct air capture plant being developed in the U.S. right now uses this system, and the captured carbon dioxide will be used for oil recovery.