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The Challenges in Scaling Up Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage Technologies
- Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) refers to technologies that reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by extracting carbon dioxide (CO2) from the emission and exhaust streams of fossil-fuel production and use, to be compressed, reused, transported, and stored in underground geologic formations.
- CCUS differs from prior approaches to controlling greenhouse-gas (mostly CO2) emissions, which focused on mandating reductions in production and use of oil, gas, coal, and combustion of other carbonaceous materials such as wood, paper, and so on.
- CCUS technology is not new. It has been tested and deployed in numerous projects spanning many years. Most of the experience with CCUS however (73%) has been to facilitate enhanced recovery of oil and gas for commercial purposes. Approximately 27% of CCUS use has been dedicated to capturing and storing carbon dioxide as a protection from climate change.
- Because of the fundamental properties of hydrocarbon energy, CCUS systems require pipeline and storage infrastructure as large as, or larger than, the infrastructure required for oil and gas production itself. Hence, CCUS cannot realistically be expected to sequester more than a small fraction of CO2 emissions from Canada’s overall energy sector.
- While CCUS technologies have been demonstrated, they have consistently underperformed predictions, routinely capturing less than 80% of predicted capture levels and quantities.
- While CCUS has proven economically viable for private-sector enhanced recovery of oil and gas, its economic viability for use in long-term sequestration of greenhouse gases in large quantities has yet to be determined.
- Based on prior experiences with building pipelines in Canada, which have similar environmental impacts and risks, development of CCUS infrastructure at scale will be subject to significant political constraints as well as economic and physical constraints.
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