Dr Katherine Romanak : Pros & Cons of CCS SD 480p

Thank you all so much. I'm thinking you're seeing my big screen? We can see it. Great, thank you. If I could ask everybody to mute themselves so we don't get any background noise. Great, thank you. I am really excited to be here to talk about the pros and cons of CCS. I wish we were all in the same room and I could hear more from you all, but hopefully we'll have time for that in the discussion session. Thank you so much for having me today. It's a real pleasure. What I'm going to do is a little bit of introduction and scene setting, talk about the basics of CCS, and then bring in some potential pros and cons. We'll touch on safety, cost, and viability of the technology, and then hopefully we'll have time for a discussion and quiz. Sorry I left that out. Yes, I am from the University of Texas, the Bureau of Economic Geology at the Texas State Geological Survey. We are the state geological survey for Texas. Our mission is to serve society by conducting objective, impactful geoscience research on relevant energy, environmental, and economic issues and to inform people about that. Thank you for the opportunity to do that. Within that is the Gulf Coast Carbon Center. We conduct studies mostly on geological storage. We have a very large international and interdisciplinary team, including international research fellows, students, and postdocs. We work with emitters, regulators, policy developers, and environmental NGOs. What I'm seeing right now is a lot of misinformed opinion on climate change. Things seem to be going a little bit crazy with people coming up with all of these opinions. How are we going to wade through that? How are we going to really know what information we can trust and what is just rhetoric? There's a lot of energy being put into the space, yet we want to make sure we are informed and have an opinion that is informed. I think we start with what we agree on: we have a climate emergency and we need climate action now. We don't have a lot of time. Time is ticking. We need to get rid of fossil fuels, transition away from them, and do it in a just and equitable way. I think we all pretty much agree on that. How are we going to find the information we can use to understand these technologies? A great place to go is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Hopefully you know about this. It is the main international treaty to combat climate change. In this framework, 197 parties or countries meet yearly at something called the COP, the Conference of the Parties. We've been doing this since 1995. The last one was in Egypt in 2022. This is the framework where the Kyoto Protocol existed, and now we have the Paris Agreement. A lot of people complain about the UNFCCC, but it really is one of the most rigorous places to find correct information. It's heavily informed by the highly respected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency. A lot of people get frustrated feeling like not much gets done at these meetings, but I can tell you, because I've been in these meetings for the past 10 years, the people there are working really hard and they really care about the climate. I lost my train of thought there. They're working hard, they care about the climate, and the reason it's so hard to get anything done is because in this framework, 100% agreement is required. It is not a democracy. Imagine getting 197 people in a room to agree on something, and they have to get 197 countries to agree. It's not easy. Here is an example of some really good places to get information on what is going on with the climate and what we need to do about it. Some of these reports: the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C came out in 2018, and a series of publications are coming out now, the Sixth Assessment Report from the IPCC. These are rigorous. The 1.5 report was written by 91 scientists from 40 countries, referencing only peer-reviewed scientific literature, 6,000 of them. It concluded we need deep emissions reductions, rapid and far-reaching unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, and we're going to need removal because we're not doing this fast enough. We need technologies that will take CO2 out of the atmosphere. The Sixth Assessment Report was written by 234 scientists from 66 countries with 14,000 scientific references. The summary for policymakers had to be approved line by line by 195 governments. This is extremely rigorous. The outcomes are that we need to scale up emissions reductions, scale up resiliency because we're already going to have impacts of climate change, and we need to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Last time I looked, we were real close to 2030. We don't have much time. We need action among numerous dimensions. We have an emergency. As you probably know, three-fourths of the greenhouse gas emissions we need to cut come from energy, but we have other sources: industry like cement, iron and steel, and petrochemicals; waste such as landfills; and agriculture, forestry, and land use, which is also a large source. Most of the mitigation strategies within the IPCC and UN are around energy production. These are all the tools in the toolbox for fighting climate change: efficiency and conservation, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, nuclear, fuel switching from coal to gas, terrestrial sinks, and carbon capture and storage. Since the 1.5 report, we now have removals, which will be very important. Have you seen the wedge? If I were in the room, I'd see your faces and know how familiar you are with it. Here are the billions of tons of CO2 emitted over time. Emissions are going up and up. If we continue, they'll continue to go up, but we need them to go down. This wedge tells us how we need to decrease emissions. It is a wedge, so at the beginning we start small, but over time we need to ramp up. Efficiency will be about a third, renewables about a third of emissions reductions, fuel switching, nuclear a little bit, CCS at about 9%, and other. I'm not clear on what the other is, but we need at least 9% CCS in this scenario for energy. When you look at the full role of CCS, the reasons are to stop emissions from fossil fuels while we transition to 100% renewables, and as renewables increase, to make sure we have a little fossil fuel for dispatchable power to support renewables when they're not at full capacity, but with CCS so we don't have emissions. There's a lot of talk about hydrogen, and CCS can play a role there. Some industries like cement, steel, and petrochemicals inherently produce CO2 emissions; you can't produce cement without them. We will definitely have to capture those emissions because we don't have any other way right now. CCS is also needed to form the basis for large-scale removals such as bioenergy with CCS and direct air capture with CCS, which is basically putting air through a fan and collecting CO2 directly out of the atmosphere. We are losing our battle against climate change. Here's that wedge again. If you look at where we want to go and where we are, the red triangle represents all the things all countries have said they'll do to reduce emissions. All the pledges, promises, and plans only take us to about 3°C, and we need to get to well below 1.5°C. We are not doing enough. We need to upscale every technology drastically. What does that upscale look like for CCS? In 20 years of research and beginning development, we stored about a gigaton. We currently have about 20 operating projects storing about 0.04 gigatons per year. According to IPCC assessments, we need to upscale that by a hundred times, storing 4 gigatons per year by 2035. The total CO2 needed to be stored by 2070 is 220 gigatons, with 56% from power generation, 31% from industry, and 14% from removals. The upscale needs to be quite large to make our targets. Interestingly, CCS is accepted in the UN. I want to give you the history so you understand. A lot of people think CCS is a unicorn technology that doesn't exist, but there's a long history of assessing it. In 2001, the UN invited the IPCC to give information on carbon capture and storage. In true IPCC fashion, it was written by hundreds of scientific authors and had hundreds of reviewers. In 2005, the final report was approved. This report is available online. It was included in greenhouse gas inventories for accounting, but there was a debate on whether it should be included in the mechanism that funds activities for developing countries. For five years within the COPs, the inclusion of CCS in that mechanism was debated. They couldn't come to a decision until 2010, when the host for the COP was Mexico. They said, "This is ridiculous. We're either going to let it in or not, but we're not going to talk about it anymore." The countries said, "That's fine, but we still have questions on safety, liability, and viability." They made a workshop happen in Abu Dhabi in 2011 addressing all those issues in a venue where people could ask questions and start to talk about it. Then at COP 17, there was a vote. The vote was unanimous, because nothing in the COP can go through unless it's unanimous, that CCS would be allowed in the Clean Development Mechanism and supported for developing countries. Ever since, information is there for policymakers to make decisions. Regulations are in place for safe storage of CO2 in geologic formations. These multiple regulations and guidelines demonstrate that CO2 remains in the ground, ensure environmental protection, and account for emissions reductions if it were to leak. How does it work? There are many different sources where you can capture CO2. You use it on a stationary industrial facility: natural gas power plants, biomass power plants, coal, or gas processing, petrochemicals, cement plants. You put a scrubber on the flue stack, scrub the CO2 out, take it to a hub, compress it, and transport it to a geological formation for deep storage. But there's something very wrong with this diagram and most of these diagrams: scale. We're trying to show all these activities in a schematic. Some things could make you nervous about CCS because it looks like you're storing it in a cave two feet below the ground surface. In reality, a better depiction is something like this. We need to store CO2 at least 800 meters depth below the ground surface. It's injected via wells into the pore space of the geologic formation at least 800 meters below the surface. It's stored for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years and trapped by many different mechanisms. The CO2 goes into the formation, which has salty water. It pushes the water out of the way. The CO2 goes in between the grains, trapped by residual trapping or stratigraphic trapping. Because it's less dense than the salty water, it will rise up, so it's good to have a trapping formation above so it doesn't rise further. It will dissolve in the water, become denser, sink down, and then mineralize into a mineral. As time goes on, it becomes more and more secure. We have a workflow for this. We do site selection to make sure we find a place where CO2 will go in and stay. We do risk assessments with modeling to identify potential unwanted outcomes. We have to get a permit, so we need a high level of assurance to the regulator. We design the project to minimize potential risk and monitor throughout the entire subsurface. This doesn't happen for any other subsurface industry except CO2. There are rigorous regulations. We monitor in the deep subsurface to make sure the plume is behaving as expected, and also in groundwater, soils, and the biosphere to ensure nothing is happening to the environment. There is a lot of monitoring. Currently, there are 26 commercial projects operating worldwide, 13 in advanced development, and 21 in early development. It's happening and growing. We've had some long-running projects. One of the longest is in Norway, storing over 25 million tons, 1 million tons per year since 1996. Also in Norway, Snøhvit has stored over 10 million tons since 2008. In Canada, the Weyburn site stores 3 million tons per year in an EOR setting. You have to account for the fact that oil is being produced, so there's an accounting issue because producing more oil creates more emissions. We'll talk more about that. The Sacroc oil field has stored more than 80 million tons with no adverse reactions, no environmental impacts, and no leakage that we've seen. Because no leakage has happened, how do we study what would happen if it leaked? As a researcher, the main approach is to make a leak on purpose. We use controlled releases to study what would happen. This is an example of a controlled release experiment in Montana where they put a long pipe in a shallow groundwater aquifer and bubbled CO2 into it. Scientists from around the world came and monitored. Two have been done by the UK offshore, because CO2 can also be stored deep in sediments offshore. One was done in Scotland and one in deeper water in the North Sea. There has been a lot of study on the impacts. You might think, "What's the big deal? CO2 gets into groundwater, you get Perrier." No, it's not that simple. We're concerned about a decrease in pH of the groundwater, which would dissolve minerals and release heavy metals into the groundwater. That's the main concern for groundwater. The second thing is brine. Because we're injecting into salty water, we don't want to push that salty water up either, because too much salt makes groundwater undrinkable. We've been studying these groundwater impacts for 15 years. We put every scientific approach we could think of into this: laboratory experiments where we put aquifer material in a beaker and bubble CO2 through it, shallow controlled releases, natural analogs because there are many places where CO2 exists naturally in the subsurface, and modeling. After 10 years of research, we feel much better about the potential for metals impacts into groundwater. If it were to happen, it's extremely transient. It doesn't stay that way for long. Most of the time, if not all, we saw a small amount of metals that didn't take drinking water over standards. What about terrestrial ecosystems? If we were to have a leak, it would be a small spatial area. Here's an example of a natural analog where CO2 is coming up out of the ground. We found that because CO2 is in the environment anyway, plants and microbes have uptake mechanisms for it. They already have mechanisms to deal with too much CO2. The ones without well-developed root systems are most vulnerable to damage, but we saw a fast recovery. Same for storing it below the marine environment. If it leaked, bubbles would start rising as bubble plumes of CO2, then partition into seawater, and nitrogen would partition into the bubbles. Those bubbles would actually be nitrogen at a certain depth. CO2 would dissolve into the brine, go to the bottom as a dense plume. Most impact would be to immobile biota that can't run away, and to really young larvae of calcifying organisms. We saw some fish and sea urchins like the bubble streams, so there would be some damage, but it was transient and relatively small. Some people ask if we have enough space to store it. If we need to store 220 gigatons, we have about 8,000 to 55,000 gigatons of storage available. It might not always be in the right place; we'll need pipelines. Pipelines are another thing people are concerned about. We already have CO2 pipelines for EOR because we've been doing CO2 enhanced oil recovery since 1972. We have about 6,000 kilometers of CO2 pipelines, most mining natural accumulations of CO2 from the ground. Instead of using natural CO2, we could use anthropogenic CO2 for EOR, but EOR makes more oil, which makes more emissions. That's not going to go on much longer because we want to phase away from fossil fuels. For now, it's what makes CO2 storage economic. CO2 storage is waste disposal; there's nothing economic about it. It doesn't give you a product; you have to pay for it. For early stages, EOR has made it profitable to start demonstration projects. The assessment is we would need 80,000 new kilometers of pipelines to get to large scale. We currently have 800,000 kilometers of hazardous liquid and natural gas pipelines. That's the trade-off on pipelines. What about cost? It's very expensive. It's waste disposal, not economic at all. It's very costly right now. It's a very large-scale process. We've had two or three major projects on power. The first was Boundary Dam in Canada. With each deployment, we get lower and lower down the cost curve. It's a large technology, so it's costly to implement demonstration plants, but the price is coming down. I think about the evolution of solar. In 1970, it was $106 per watt. Each vertical line represents a doubling in installed capacity. Over 50 years of developing solar, we've gotten it down to massively cheap, 38 cents per watt. A great example of how technologies go down the cost curve and the innovation curve. Excuse me, doctor, can you confirm that the last slide was US dollars per metric ton? Yes, thanks. Thank goodness we didn't say in the 70s, "Solar is too expensive, we don't need it." I'm really glad we developed it. We already have some great innovations in capture because we're deploying the technology. When you think about technology development, at first it feels like science fiction and everyone says, "Why would we even do this?" Later, it's "Doable but too expensive." Then it makes sense in certain circumstances until it becomes routine and no big deal. Hopefully that's something we can do with CCS. But again, there are pluses and minuses. The International Energy Agency said about the expense of CCS: "High cost ignores the bigger picture." When I think about cost, I feel that way too. The cost of anything, when you realize what we stand to lose with climate change, all of a sudden cost is not as expensive because we would do whatever it takes to keep our biosphere. I'm not saying it's not important; it's absolutely important, but that's where I'm coming from. Achieving net-zero goals is virtually impossible without CCS. We're going to need it. It supports the integration of renewables, supports us growing renewables in a way that ensures we still have power when renewables are not at capacity. Costs are falling, but we need policy because there's no economic reason. I have to pay for someone to take my trash away. If CO2 were purple, people would want to pay to get rid of it, but because they can't see it and it's not affecting them now, it's probably not worth it to them to pay for it. An analogy: acid rain. We realized acid rain came from sulfur dioxide from flue stacks. We made a cap and trade system, said you can't let sulfur dioxide go into the atmosphere, and look at the change. We've gotten rid of it by putting scrubbers on and taking the sulfur dioxide out of the flue gas. The scrubber used to take sulfur dioxide out is basically the same way we take CO2 out. This is from the Boundary Dam power plant, peer-reviewed scientific literature on what they learned from the first deployment. They realized we have to take sulfur dioxide and particulates out to make this work. To do CCS, we're also taking a lot more particulates out, making the flue stack have fewer pollutants, improving air quality. Quickly about removals: removals take CO2 out of the atmosphere because we're not making our targets. There are many different ones, but the main ones being put into the COPs are land-based ecosystem reservoirs, better land management, reforestation, better agricultural technologies, and storing CO2 in soils. The other is technologies using CCS. For land-based reservoirs, nature-based solutions, we're currently removing 2 gigatons per year with permanence of about 100 years because trees die and there are wildfires. A landowner might do good farming practices, then they go away. But the ecological co-benefits are phenomenal. We've got to scale up nature-based removal solutions. We also need bioenergy with CCS and direct air capture. Currently, they're not doing much. Direct air capture is at the very beginning of development but is rapidly being upscaled. The IPCC potential for direct air capture and BECCS is 5 to 40 gigatons per year, which looks really good. Storage permanence is tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years because when we put CO2 in the subsurface, it stays down there. A couple of last slides. I think this is great because a lot of rhetoric says every fossil fuel company is greenwashing with this. I thought there should be a way to make sure that doesn't happen. How can we be sure when we say a company is greenwashing that we are being truthful? How can we keep fossil fuel companies' feet to the flame to make sure they're not doing this? These are great principles from the UN. We have to make sure they deliver significant near- and medium-term emissions reductions. We have to require them to do that because greenwashing isn't going to work either. An analogy: when we transitioned from the horse to the car, it took about 50 years. It looked a lot like what we're going through now. People were saying all kinds of things. Many professions completely disappeared. We went from about 14,000 carriage building businesses to only 90. The price of grain plummeted, and the US Census Bureau tagged this revolution as one of the main contributing factors to the Great Depression. Some people were in the wrong industry at the wrong time. Many jobs were lost, but more jobs were created. This is something to consider when we think about the transition. It's not going to happen overnight. My reflections: we need to realize this is an emergency. I don't want more pipelines personally. I'm not afraid of pipelines, but I don't really want them. When I realize what's at stake, bring them on. Bring on the pipelines, bring on the wind farms, bring it on, because we have to know what we have at stake. It's an emergency. Don't fall prey to biased rhetoric. We all need to make informed choices. The place to do it is the IPCC reports and the UNFCCC because it is a massively rigorous process. We need to keep up the pressure on fossil fuel manufacturers and for divestment. We need to transition away from fossil fuels, but it's not going to happen overnight. Whether we have CCS or not, the fossil fuels don't care. They will move forward with or without CCS. In my view, we need a double-pronged approach: stop the fossil fuels, but in the meantime, stop the emissions from the fossil fuels. Oil and gas workers have expertise directly applicable to carbon capture and storage. We can take those workers who will lose their jobs and put them on CCS to remove from industry like cement, iron, and steel, and also get our removals with DAC and BECCS. The other thing we need to do is have a conversation. We need to involve everyone in the conversation. There are calls to keep emitters out of the COPs. I don't know how we solve the problem if we don't involve the industries causing the problem. In my world, fossil fuel companies and emitters are paying for CCS to be developed. If we can get them to pay to reduce their emissions while they fade away, I think we go for it. That's my own opinion. Involve everyone in the conversation. We need rapid, far-reaching, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. Action is required along numerous dimensions. Let's work together and get it done. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. Thank you.

Oh, how awesome is that? I didn't know that. That's basically what we do: advocate for putting a price on carbon. I agree. Methane, right? Other gases too, but carbon. What do you feel about a price on carbon? Would that help?

Yes, we need policy implemented. Just like in the sulfur dioxide case, we absolutely need a price on carbon. There is something called the Carbon Take Back Obligation you might want to look up. It's another method people are talking about where you don't allow industry to do business until it gets rid of the emissions it's going to emit. If you're interested, look it up. There are a couple of TED talks on it. But absolutely, keep doing what you're doing because we need a price on carbon.

Thank you for being aware of that. It was definitely well received. Right now, a lot of people are at the beginning of the learning curve on CCS. It's a very complex, multi-dimensional thing. I saw a lot of people at the beginning of the learning curve trying to get up it. It was a very good event, and I was glad to be invited. Thank you.

Isn't that interesting? A lot of people see it as we need to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere, but one of the main reasons is to keep it out of the oceans. You're right, there's this equilibrium between the atmosphere and oceans. I agree with what you're saying. Also, if we take it out of the atmosphere, it's going to degas from the oceans, so we won't see the ppm in the atmosphere decrease right away. We need to monitor the oceans as well. But what's going to happen is if CO2 degasses from the ocean, we'll precipitate calcium carbonate. When CO2 goes in, it's buffered by the dissolution of calcium carbonate. Phytoplankton with calcium carbonate bodies get dissolved, so they're not surviving. It might help deacidify the oceans, but you're absolutely right, there's this equilibrium, so we have to be aware of that.

That's a really important question. Only in the past couple of years have we seen the pace of development increase massively. We're really happy about this. The reason is tax incentives, the 45Q tax incentives, which are incentivizing projects to move forward. In my view, that's not sustainable; we don't want the taxpayer to bear the long-term brunt of the cost. But it has caused massive momentum. We are so busy trying to help countries and companies do this. There was so much momentum in the US that countries like Canada and the UK are getting fidgety because all the business wants to come to the US, so now they're doing similar things. I'm seeing a global push. The main problem is a lack of workforce that understands it. I'm teaching professional development courses, talking as much as I can, teaching students, teaching summer schools because we don't have the workforce we need. The short answer is I'm feeling really good about the recent push I'm seeing.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes, there is a large energy penalty right now for CCS, mostly in the compression phases. It takes a lot of energy to compress that gas. The slides I put up on progress show that net power, if it works, will need zero compression. The other will need less compression. Right now, the energy penalty is terrible. What good is it if you're going to use all that energy? You'd have to burn more, so you're right. It's not good right now, but it's getting better. For direct air capture, since the stream is so dilute, the only power source that can be used is renewables, because otherwise it would make no sense.

You're absolutely right. Texas is moving towards primacy. It's a great idea; we need it. Louisiana is farther down the line than we are. We need primacy, and we're working on it. It's been slow going because we have two regulators in the state, and they had to figure out which one would regulate it. It will be the Railroad Commission. Right now, because of the Biden infrastructure law, which is opening up offshore leases, BOEM and BSEE, our offshore regulators, are working really hard to get regulations in place for the offshore. In Texas state waters, we would use Class VI, but they're trying to get regulations in place for the outer continental shelf. The regulators are drinking from fire hoses; they're doing a lot of work right now.

Exactly. I agree.

Great question. The answer may surprise you. The 45Q tax credit gives more credit if you store in a saline reservoir than in an EOR reservoir. Most companies are going for saline reservoirs. However, we also see companies with different risk appetites. In a depleted field, the old wells are the biggest risk factor for a leakage pathway to the surface. The risk for saline storage is that you don't have information on the formation. From a depleted oil and gas field, you have production history and know exactly how things go in the subsurface. When you move to a saline leg, you have to drill a well or get more information. Those are the two risk factors. Some companies say, 'We don't care about the wells; we'll deal with that,' and go into the depleted field. Others want to get as far away from the wells as possible. In general, we're seeing more companies targeting saline formations.