How carbon capture and storage and nuclear are adding little to decarbonisation compared to solar and wind

We’ve heard a lot in the news recently about how carbon capture and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) is a major solution to decarbonisation. But the global figures suggest otherwise. The results so far are that this is having an almost insignificant effect on global decarbonisation. Rather it is looking like CCS funding from Governments is a good way of funneling money into the fossil fuel and chemicals industry with very little to show for combatting climate change. Indeed this CCS sector is eerily technologically redundant in many of the same ways as nuclear power.

You can see this in the chart below. This shows the respective global contributions to carbon dioxide abatement from three sources a) solar plus wind power, b) nuclear power and c) carbon capture and storage (CCS).

I have taken global capacity figures for CCS from the Global CCS Institute (HERE). They have data available for the period since 2010 showing how the global capacity for CO2 removal has changed. I have used data on carbon intensity of global electricity production drawn from Ember (See HERE) to determine how much CO2 is saved by each unit of nuclear, solar and wind generation. Then I combine this with data on nuclear, solar and wind electricity generation from the Energy Institute (See HERE).

The result is a calculation of the annual carbon dioxide saved by global solar plus wind generation, nuclear generation and CCS (since 2010). There is a notable caveat with regard to the CCS figures. Whilst I have confidence in the reported production figures from solar, wind and nuclear power, I have no information that the ‘capacity’ of CCS reported is actually being completely filled each year. Therefore the CCS annual capacity figures must each be regarded as a ‘maximum’.

It is apparent that whilst solar and wind are increasing rapidly, and nuclear production has stagnated, CCS contributes a very small amount to world carbon removal capacity by comparison. There are some bigger plans for expansion. However, the extent these might be fulfilled (and fulfilled in a timely fashion) is questionable because of the technical and economic barriers that the projects tend to face, and also a history of failure to complete projections (rather like nuclear power in fact!). There are certainly big projections for future solar and wind development - plans which given the recent history have tended to be overshot.

In the (second) chart below I break down global solar and wind power growth by plotting changes in annual production in TWh per year -starting in 2010. As you see electricity from wind (blue) and solar (orange) is rapidly increasing.

What’s the point of CCS?

CCS projects which are being funded (in particular by the UK) fall into three basic categories. First, removal of carbon dioxide from industrial processes, second removing the C02 directly from power station emissions and third, making so-called ‘blue hydrogen’ from methane through a ‘reformation’ process (and removing the C02 produced from that). Commercially there seems little point to the CCS industry outside of making fossil fuels much more expensive in ways which invariably offer little hope for technological optimisation into anything useful. There is limited support amongst ecologists for the technology.

Meanwhile, technologies, which do stand a chance of being optimised and do not involve fossil fuels or nuclear power are ignored. Recent UK Government announcements talk of around £20 billion being made available for CCS activities over the coming years. Yet there is no direct budget to develop deep underground or closed loop geothermal energy, new technologies, which have seen considerable technical interest in recent years (see HERE and HERE).

One issue that has been missed about public spending on CCS is that substantial amounst of money have already been devoted to the technology in the UK - £630 million according to the UK National Audit Office (See HERE). However, I can find no record of any operational (as opposed to ‘potential’) carbon dioxide storage capacity being created. This trend of low output compared to public money spent seems likely to continue for many years to come!

CCS - eerily like nuclear?

What is striking about CCS processes is that they are seriously dogged by environmental problems - the biggest of all simply being the fact that they do not capture all of the carbon produced from the fossil fuels that the technologies they are ‘cleaning’ use. So far the power plant that have been operational have struggled to get close to the target of 90% CO2 removal that their design specifications have involved (See HERE). Yet 90 per cent removal is simply not good enough in a world where we are looking for zero greenhouse outputs.

There will be increasing pressures to improve this outcome so that the removal rate approaches 100 per cent. But doing this will increase costs. A similar problem afflicts the production of so-called blue hydrogen from methane. Proponents of the technology argue that the CO2 capture rates can be improved beyond 90 per cent. That may well be the case. But the issue here is that this will be at extra cost. The result will be, in commercial terms, a rate of negative productivity for CCS technology.

Moreover the whole fossil fuel CCS activity adds no intrinsic value to the product - energy services - that is being sold already. Indeed the various add-ons only reduce the efficiency of use of the raw materials (the fossil fuels) in the first place to generate useful energy. The technology starts off as an inferior commercial proposition to conventional fossil fuel commercial activities, and the pressures for improvements are going to increase costs, not reduce them. Have we heard this before? Well, yes.

This is actually much the same general problem that nuclear power has faced. Nuclear power is a mature technology relying on a low-productivity construction industry. On top of this its costs have increased since its inception because of the need to build-in safety requirements. New designs have tended to be made with safety in mind (eg ‘passive’ safety designs) rather than improvements in economic productivity. This, in general, is the same sort of problem that fossil fuel CCS faces. See my earlier blog post on nuclear’s productivity problems HERE. Like nuclear CCS is forced to pursue non-market objectives rather than improve productivity to reduce costs of production.

The contrast with solar and wind is staggering. These technologies can devote their efforts into reducing costs and improving productivity. Solar panels today are made with a small fraction of the polysilicon used in the past. The production lines are much longer and efficiently organised and the machines to make the panels are much better and cheaper etc etc. In the case of wind power the wind capture rates have been improved through computer-aided design of the turbine blades, making the machines of lighter material and also making them a great deal bigger etc etc.

CCS, like nuclear is going not very far in terms of future increases in decarbonisation capacity, but it will be at very great cost to taxpayers. No commercial operation is going to contract for the CCS ‘product’. There is a very limited market for CO2 itself and no commercial market for storing carbon dioxide outside of direct Government support. For how long can this drain on our public spending resources carry on?