Unworkable climate change solutions

From Michael Barnard: "Promoted by numerous attention-grabbing headlines of late, the technology called Air-carbon capture (ACC) is having a moment in the sun. But all the hype is encountering dark clouds of technical and economic viability, not to mention poor environmental outcomes.  A study shows that the most successful air carbon capture project to date ended up releasing 25 times more carbonthan it captured.  One Canada-based company, Carbon Engineering (CE), has been lauded as the future of air carbon capture. They’ve recently received $80 million in funding, most of it coming from a handful of wealthy investors and three major fossil fuel companies -- Chevon, Occidental, and BHP.  The idea of Air-carbon Capture as a climate solution is based upon an extremely challenging technical proposition -- separate out very diffuse carbon dioxide gas suspended in the air we breathe, and capture it using a variety of technologies or biological processes, theoretically at much faster rates than the Earth’s carbon cycle would naturally remove. In order to pull off this feat of molecular wizardry vast amounts of energy would be required. Rendering of one small section of Carbon Engineering’s air-carbon capture plant in British Columbia, Canada. CE’s solution would require the equivalent natural gas use of 70,000 Canadian homes for one year just to capture 1 million tons of CO2. Capturing that 1 million tons would require a wall of fans 65-feet high, 25-feet thick, and 2 kilometers long-running 24/7 without interruption for 365 days.  Its operation would create half a million tonnes of new CO2 from burning fossil fuels to power the technology. The company claims that they are using all this carbon to make replacement synthetic fuels. But a gallon of this fuel would cost about 20 times more and result in 22-35 the CO2e emissions associated with using conventional electricity to drive an electric vehicle. Compared to regular gasoline, the cost to drive “clean” air capture fuel would be roughly three times as much as the US average pump price.  Of the roughly $80 million CE has received to date were used to build a wind farm, a 40 MW facility of wind turbines could have been built, generating about 150 GWh of zero-carbon electricity every year. The electricity from that wind farm would enable about 35,000 Tesla Model S or X cars to drive the average distance traveled by US drivers annually, with virtually no emissions.  There is only one explanation for why investors and fossil fuel companies continue to pour money into ACC – to keep the ailing fossil fuel industry alive, despite the fact that renewable energy is now cheaper and more reliable. Let’s dig into just why carbon capture is so difficult to achieve."

Beyond the Hydrogen Mirage: A Candid Conversation with Joe Romm Recently, I had another enlightening conversation with Dr. Joseph Romm, whose 20th-anniversary edition of The Hype About Hydrogen is now available. Our discussion on 🎙Redefining Energy - Tech tackled the persistent myth-making around hydrogen, carbon capture, and their practical realities. Transcript, lightly edited: https://lnkd.in/gJsccd5G Apple: https://lnkd.in/gUXhiwQD Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gDCqjpNc Hydrogen's challenges are severe. Despite optimistic narratives from oil and gas companies, "green hydrogen" struggles economically, leaving the industry largely reliant on methane-based hydrogen, with notoriously poor carbon capture track records. Sleipner’s North Sea project, long touted as a best-case scenario for carbon capture, was recently found significantly underperforming, reinforcing doubts about the viability of long-term storage. The new Northern Lights project in Norway epitomizes this expensive illusion. Massive infrastructure — ships, undersea pipelines, elaborate engineering — funded by fossil-fueled sovereign wealth, highlights both technical complexity and questionable economic logic. We also delved into hydrogen's hidden risks, notably leakage, safety, and its alarming 20-year global warming potential (GWP) now estimated around 35. Real-world leakage data from California to South Korea consistently shows troublingly high rates, undermining hydrogen's climate credibility. Romm emphasized the logistical and energetic absurdity of hydrogen: converting renewable electricity into hydrogen to reconvert later into power or fuels incurs massive efficiency penalties. It's fundamentally thermodynamic folly. Hydrogen has industrial roles as a feedstock, but using it for energy applications is economically and environmentally flawed. Direct electrification is vastly more efficient, scalable, and affordable. Our conversation underscored one clear point: we must focus investments on immediately scalable climate solutions rather than costly illusions. Electrification is our practical path forward.

I've been covering climate disinformation for a very long time and something that's been stuck in my craw the past couple of years is the fact that people often talk about it as something that happened in the past. But with so many of the climate "solutions" the fossil fuel industry proposes, the exact same issues are continuing to play out: they know these aren't really solutions, they know that they will never scale, and that is why they push them. It's part of the "discourses of delay" that social scientists talk about, or what Alex Steffen calls "predatory delay." The industry spends billions of dollars a year to fund university research, lobbying, advertising, and PR campaigns that create the illusion that its preferred "solutions" will work, even as its own scientists and technologists are telling it they won't. They hire management consultancies to draw up charts and graphs that lend credibility to these "solutions" too, and then those consultancies can throw up their hands and say "we just did the analysis they asked for, we didn't know they were going to use it to obstruct climate action!" Over the course of this summer we'll be running a new investigative series at Drilled Media digging into these efforts. Loads of both web and audio stories coming your way, but first up, a deep dive from me and Andy Rowell on how U.S. LNG producers are trying to position liquefied natural gas—a fossil fuel—as a climate solution, and use that "green" cred to lobby both EU and US politicians on increasing U.S. LNG exports to Europe. https://lnkd.in/gbFWNpcb