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Global Witness Exposes The Lie
Behind The Carbon Capture Scam
Earth to fossil fuels:
“You’re choking me to death with your carbon and methane emissions!”
Fossil fuels to Earth: “Stop making such a fuss. We’re working on a
solution that will allow us to continue burning fossil fuels forever.
It’s called carbon capture and it’s the greatest thing since
pasteurized milk.”
That’s the story the fossil
fuel companies are selling to avaricious politicians and a flaccid
news media. But it’s a lie, a dodge, a stall, one designed to
bamboozle the gullible and preserve industry profits.
Climate Change & Carbon Capture
In 2015, Shell installed a
carbon capture facility at its Scotford refinery northeast of Edmonton
in Alberta. According to
Dezeen, the system was designed to eliminate
emissions from hydrogen production. And lo and behold, Shell is
trumpeting the fact that it actually captured close to five million
tons of carbon dioxide over the course of 5 years. Great news, right?
No, says
Global Witness,
which claims the facility actually
released more carbon emissions than it captured — 7.5 million tons
worth, equivalent to the the carbon footprint of 1.2 million cars. The
greenhouse gases emitted included highly potent methane, which in the
short term has a more than 80-times higher global warming potential
than carbon dioxide.
Global Witness
argues that this casts doubt on the messaging pushed by the oil and
gas industry that
carbon capture and storage technology makes it possible for
hydrogen derived from natural gas to be used as a “low emissions” fuel
to help the world reach its net zero goals. “Fossil fuel companies see
fossil hydrogen as a way of continuing to make profits from extracting
and burning fossil gas, whilst greenwashing it at the same time,” the
report says.
Most hydrogen today is
actually refined from fossil fuel sources, natural gas in particular,
and in the process emits around 830 million tonnes of carbon dioxide
every year — as much as the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined. The
kind of “blue hydrogen” production that is being used at the Scotford
facility — which is partially funded by the government — is being
pushed by oil and gas companies who say they will capture these
emissions at the source and store them underground.
Process Emissions
According to Global
Witness, the facility is only capable of capturing so-called
process emissions — the emissions that are generated when natural gas
is heated by steam to produce hydrogen while releasing carbon monoxide
and a relatively small amount of carbon dioxide. It totally fails to
capture the flue gas emissions from powering the equipment for this
process — which account for 40% of the plant’s carbon footprint — as
well as the emissions from running the CCS system itself. The onsite
carbon capture system also does not prevent methane emissions, which
are generated at every stage of the refining process before the fossil
gas even gets to the facility.
Taking all this into
account, Global Witness says the Scotford plant is only
capable of capturing 39% of the greenhouse gases that are generated
along its supply chain. The industry claims the technology captures
90% of emissions, which leads to this question, why aren’t industry
leaders in prison for fraud?
The
Howarth/Jacobson Report
Recently a report by Robert
Howarth and Mark Jacobson, entitled How Green Is Blue Hydrogen?,
and published in the journal
Energy Science and Engineering found that blue
hydrogen actually has a 20% greater greenhouse gas footprint
than simply burning natural gas for heat! Think about that for a
minute.
Blue hydrogen is worse from an emissions standpoint than just
straight up burning natural gas. Once again, why are people not in
prison over this wide-scale fraud? Here is a portion of the abstract
that accompanies that report:
“Hydrogen
is often viewed as an important energy carrier in a future
decarbonized world. Currently, most hydrogen is produced by steam
reforming of methane in natural gas (“gray hydrogen”), with high
carbon dioxide emissions. Increasingly, many propose using carbon
capture and storage to reduce these emissions, producing so-called
‘blue hydrogen,’ frequently promoted as low emissions.
“We undertake the first effort in a peer-reviewed paper to examine the
lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of blue hydrogen accounting for
emissions of both carbon dioxide and unburned fugitive methane. Far
from being low carbon, greenhouse gas emissions from the production of
blue hydrogen are quite high, particularly due to the release of
fugitive methane.
“Perhaps surprisingly, the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen
is more than 20% greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat and
some 60% greater than burning diesel oil for heat, again with our
default assumptions. In a sensitivity analysis in which the methane
emission rate from natural gas is reduced to a low value of 1.54%,
greenhouse gas emissions from blue hydrogen are still greater than
from simply burning natural gas, and are only 18%-25% less than for
gray hydrogen.
“Our analysis assumes that captured carbon dioxide can be stored
indefinitely, an optimistic and unproven assumption. Even if true
though, the use of blue hydrogen appears difficult to justify on
climate grounds.”
Blue
Hydrogen Is A Lie
“Fossil hydrogen is part of
the fossil gas industry’s strategy to prolong its life, despite the
urgent need for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels in order to meet the
Paris Agreement goals,” the Global Witness report concluded.
“The lesson from [Scotford] should be loud and clear for governments
all over the world. Do not invest in a technology that is not only
failing to deliver any effective action in tackling the climate crisis
— but is in fact contributing to it.”
Even if modern blue hydrogen
plants could achieve capture rates of over 90% onsite, that would
still not take into account emissions generated along the fossil fuel
supply chain, says Global Witness. Rather than funding carbon
capture and blue hydrogen projects, it argues governments should focus
on renewable energy infrastructure and electrification as well as
green hydrogen, which is not made from fossil fuels.
This isn’t the first time
the oil and gas sector has been accused of using the hype around
carbon capture technologies to justify its continued use of
non-renewable, emissions-intensive fossil fuels. The industry has also
been promoting carbon capture, storage and utilization (CCUS)
projects, Dezeen says, which use captured industrial
emissions and pump them into depleted reserves to flush out the
remaining oil deposits in a process known as enhanced oil recovery.
In other words, they are
blowing sunshine up our skirts as they wiggle and squirm to prevent
the inevitable collapse of their industry, even though their business
activities threaten humans with extinction. Tell us again why the
leaders of the these massive international corporations are not in
prison?
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
Spokane, Washington. 99212
www.exactrix.com
509 995 1879 cell, Pacific.
Nathan1@greenplayammonia.com
exactrix@exactrix.com
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