It is bad enough that 2024 was a record high for global greenhouse gas emissions. It is extra bad because the number we’ve ended up at is higher than all of the old projections of what this year would end up at. That is to say: we are overestimating our ability to stop using fossil fuels.
There have been incredible advances in renewables and climate policies, but also, “fossil fuel subsidies remain at an all-time high and funding for fossil fuel-prolonging projects quadrupled between 2021 and 2022”. Why? What is justifying this weird refusal to back away from the fossil fuel economy?
It’s many things, but a big one is the false promise of a machine that cleans up fossil fuels, rather than us needing to find a replacement for them.
Back in 2022, I contributed an essay to Greta Thunberg’s Climate Book. It was about the weaponised false promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS). I wanted to talk about it not as a technological phenomenon but a rhetorical one. A tactically deployed promise that is never meant to come true. Failure as a feature, not a bug.
The second coming hasn’t come yet
After a surge of planned projects in the late 2000s and early 2010s failed to turn into operational carbon capture sites, there was a lull. But since 2020, the volume of planned CCS has increased very significantly, as we can see from the latest update from the Global CCS Institute (GCCSi), a CCS reporting and advocacy group that publishes annual data:
As with so many previous years, the change in “operational” CCS is small. The pipeline for CCS has been surging for a half-decade now, and the amount of operational CCS has only grown by a few megatonnes of capacity. We were promised a CCS revolution, and we aren’t getting one.
Each year’s database puts an estimated “start date” on these CCS projects, so if we compile every report from each year, we can get an idea of what should be operational, and compare it to what is:
In 2024, the amount of operational CCS should be several times higher than it actually is, based on the promised start dates of projects in older reports. Some projects are being cancelled, others are pushing out those dates further into the future due to frequent delays. Carbon capture isn’t a technology that likes to be built.
It’s almost a cruel chart to make, but compare the percentage growth in operational CCS to the growth in wind and solar over the same time, and you get an idea of the different dynamics we’re dealing with here:
Why do we keep believing the promise when it keeps failing to materialise? There are many reasons, but I want to dive into a specific one in this post: a range of different future scenarios, from a range of different sources, has leant hard on CCS as a way to minimise projected reductions in fossil fuel use, and therefore politically soften any potentially scary visions of the “disruptive” elimination of fossil fuels.
What the future looks like
Fossil fuel companies (both power generation and extractive) love using the false promise of CCS to justify massive, high-emitting projects. It’s worth diving into this incredible July 2024 investigation by Drilled’s Amy Westervelt, specifically on how fossil fuel companies were actively aware that their promises on CCS were hollow.
Fossil fuel companies have, for a long time, performed a sort of strategic science fiction exercise, where they publish fossil-heavy and CCS-reliant scenarios to try and own the space of what the future looks like.
Using the data made available in the latest Global Energy Outlook, I’ve made a little illustration of how fossil fuel companies use assumptions about CCS in their scenarios that are weirdly disconnected from the material realities of ultra-slow deployment:
Equinor, my friendly local state-owned fossil fuel company, are comfortably the worst offender here. From 2018 to 2021, their CCS projections were verging on possible. In 2022, 2023 and 2024, the 2030 assumptions for CCS are deeply bonkers and far exceed Shell and British Petroleum’s assumptions. This is despite Equinor being notably off track even for their own company CCS targets.
Consider the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) “World Energy Outlook”, a major annual global energy system model, whose future scenarios drive investment decisions and government policies.
I’ve created a compilation of each year’s recent CCS assumptions in their most-ambitious “net-zero” scenario, and you can immediately see that as far as CCS is from even realising its own pipeline of planned projects, the gap between the assumptions in the IEA’s net-zero scenario is significantly worse:
If CCS development were truly following the IEA’s 2022 net-zero scenario, operational capacity today would be about 12 times what it ended up being this year. The IEA’s 2024 scenario, released a few weeks ago, assumes that CCS capacity will be around 25 times greater in 2030 than it is today.
It’s worth acknowledging the IEA can be circumspect about this. Its 2020 “CCUS” report looked back on an old ambitious scenario:
CCUS deployment tripled over the last decade, albeit from a low base — but it has fallen well short of expectations. In 2009, the IEA roadmap for CCUS set a target of developing 100 large-scale CCUS projects between 2010 and 2020 to meet global climate goals, storing around 300 MtCO2 per year. Actual capacity is only around 40 Mt — just 13% of the target.
The IEA’s net-zero scenario was a big deal, when they first gave it a go in 2021 after pressure from climate groups. It was the first scenario the group published that started with a temperature goal, and then solved backwards. But to solve that equation, it has consistently relied on a volume of CCS deployment that doesn’t seem to be matched by real-world manifestation — and models need to change to reflect the persistent reality.
To continue the comparison with wind and solar, these two technologies exhibit the exact opposite effect: the IEA’s scenarios have historically underestimated the deployment of the technologies (across all their scenarios). The two graphics below compare the 2014 “World Energy Outlook” scenarios, and their assumptions on wind and solar power generation, to the 2024 edition’s projections, overlaid with what both actually generated each year:
Again, it’s worth defending the IEA here. It is keenly aware of how the technology is being proffered particularly by the fossil fuel industry in an absurd, over-stated context. It said as much in its 2023 “oil and gas transitions” report, where it pointed out CCS in a scenario with no change to the oil and gas produced would require “26,000 terawatt hours of electricity generation to operate in 2050, which is more than global electricity demand in 2022”, and would also require “over US$3.5 trillion in annual investments all the way from today through to mid-century, which is an amount equal to the entire industry’s annual average revenue in recent years”.
The IEA has also been at pains to point out it is not the worst offender when it comes to leaning on CCS to model climate ambition, showing that its reliance on CCS in net-zero models is a lot lower than the IPCC’s reliance on CCS. It’s not wrong.
To give you an idea — here are 146 1.5c-aligned IPCC scenario assumptions showing the total amount captured by CCS each year, compared to the actual installed capacity from the GCCSi database:
A recent study by Tsimafei Kazlou, Aleh Cherp and Jessica Jewell published in Nature showed that if you consider a reasonable but optimistic feasibility of CCS growth, that is still significantly slower than what 90% of IPCC 1.5c mitigation pathways assume (noting that the recent AR6 report does go to some lengths to include some CCS-free scenarios). “We show how realistic assumptions about failure rates, based on the history of CCS and other historical benchmarks, can identify a feasible upper bound of CCS capacity in 2030 (0.37 Gt yr)”. That is, to give you an idea, about 10 times smaller than the amount of CCS Equinor assumes in its “ambitious” climate scenario.
The net result of a heavy dose of CCS assumptions in authoritative scenarios, projections and models — one that doesn’t reflect the real-world dynamics — is a significantly increased risk of missed targets, and a false impression of ambition. I have truly lost count of the number of times a fossil fuel company references either the IPCC, or the IEA, when justifying heavy, load-bearing promises on CCS.
Here’s one nice, recent example. This is from ExxonMobil’s latest “Global Energy Outlook”, showing carbon capture growing at three times the rate of wind and solar, from 2022 to 2050. This isn’t Exxon’s own scenario assumption — this is ExxonMobil referencing the IPCC’s “below two degrees” scenarios:
“See?? Even the climate scientists that you love and trust agree with us that leaning heavily on carbon capture is a totally fine thing to do”. I don’t know if it’s well recognised in the climate modelling community just how widespread stuff like this is, within fossil fuel company climate and sustainability claims.
This is a truncated extract of a recent blog post by Ketan Joshi. Read the full version here.
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