How CCS became the fossil fuel industry’s favourite ‘escape hatch’

A technology designed to extract more oil from oil fields does not sound like the most auspicious start for a solution to climate change.

But carbon capture and storage (CCS) – a means of capturing CO2 as it is released and stashing it away – has become an increasingly loud answer to the question of how we will keep the planet habitable. 

The problem is, experts say, it is being overinflated to the detriment of genuine climate action – aided by a lack of public understanding. Here we take a look at what CCS is exactly, where it started, and where the industry is trying to take it next.

A huge carbon capture and storage scale up is on the horizon

There are currently 50 commercial CCS facilities around the world, capable of capturing around 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year (Mtpa) according to Statista. That’s only 0.1 per cent of the record 36.8 billion tonnes belched out in 2023.

Despite this poor track record and unproven potential, CCS is becoming a load-bearing part of global climate plans. At the UN climate summit last year, CCS proponents (largely tied to fossil fuel industries) scored a significant win with the endorsement of “abatement and removal technologies” in the agreement. Around 500 CCS lobbyists turned up to COP29 last month.

For climate campaigners with an unblinking eye on global heating, this wider shift to talking about ‘net’ emissions – instead of cutting emissions at source – is a deeply dangerous one. 

“CCS, the industry’s lifeline and latest delay tactic, is a smokescreen we must not fall for,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL)’s fossil economy programme.

Public awareness of CCS is hazy. But with vast plans to upscale, the infrastructure is set to get a lot more physically present in people’s lives. Most importantly, we all have a stake in its bearing on climate change.

What is carbon capture and storage?

Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing some of the carbon dioxide generated by big industrial sources before the gas can be released into the atmosphere. 

It is then compressed into a liquid state, transported via pipeline (or ship, rail or road tanker) and injected into an underground storage site. Most sites are made of porous rocks topped by impermeable rocks to try and keep the CO2 locked in; they include depleted oil and gas fields, coal beds and deep saline aquifers.

CCS is associated with a suite of other techno-fixes. It’s often used interchangeably with carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) – which also covers the use of the captured CO2 to make products like concrete, chemicals, plastics, fertilisers and fuels.

In contrast to combustion emissions, the process emissions needed to make these things are often presented by companies as unavoidable pollution, which can only be salved by CCS.

Where did carbon capture and storage come from?

Normally when CO2 is separated from ‘natural’ gas, it is simply vented into the atmosphere. In 1972, West Texas oilmen discovered they could inject captured CO2 into an oil reservoir to push out more oil. This process of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) still accounts for around 73 per cent of captured CO2 use, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

But in 1976, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti theorised a more beneficial direction for CO2: storing it underground or at sea to avoid changes to the Earth’s climate. For more on those who knew about fossil fuels and climate change in the 1970s but didn’t raise the alarm, see also: ExxonMobil.

It wasn’t until 1996 that the first big CCS project aimed at reducing emissions was launched in Norway. The Sleipner gas field, located in the middle of the North Sea, still captures the most CO2 in Europe. It’s been joined by just a handful of sites since: Snøhvit, another offshore Norwegian project with some shaky foundations, Orca in Iceland (DAC+S), and Ravenna CCS in Italy. 

Given this low profile, the question remains: why has CCS burst back onto the scene in a cloak of saviourism?

How has carbon capture and storage risen up the agenda?

Belén Balanyá, researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), has been tracking the lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry for 25 years – leading to her more recent focus on CCS. 

“You look at what’s on the agenda and it’s always escape hatches to stay in business,” she tells Euronews Green. “It’s where they move when they’ve been forced to – when there’s more knowledge and more acceptance about climate change and their role and that they have to decarbonise.”

CCS: A node in net zero

Balanyá sees a number of factors behind the “revival” of CCS in recent years, but primarily traces it to the net zero drive. 

With the climate crisis worsening – and governments reluctant to oversee the deep emissions cuts needed – policymakers are having to lean ever-more heavily on techno-fixes in service of ‘climate neutrality’ in the future. 

Tasked with analysing CCS, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has included the tech in its more recent reports – creating a kind of feedback loop of legitimacy that the industry is using to strengthen its case. But scientists foresee only a limited role for it on a 1.5C-aligned pathway, in contrast to renewable energy and other major solutions.

Remarkably, it’s only in the last several years that the sheen has worn off fossil gas as a ‘clean’ fuel (and subsequently a ‘bridge’ to renewables). Industrial hopes now lie with hydrogen gas – which is only as clean as the fuels that produce it. Blue hydrogen involves CCS, and so has helped hoist the tech back into frame – through its starring role in the European Green Deal, for example.

As part of this, the EU’s industrial carbon management strategy (ICMS) plans to capture 450 Mtpa CO2 by 2050 – a staggering increase on its current 1 Mt a year, according to Corporate Europe Observatory recent ‘Carbon Coup’ report. As the Global CCS Institute also stresses, this will require a “massive scale up” across Europe – of transport and storage infrastructure, funding, and public buy-in. 

Caught between Chinese competition and US investment

In total, the Global CCS institute reports there are now 186 commercial CCS projects underway in Europe.

The resurgence of CCS in the EU is also partly in reaction to America’s Inflation Reduction Act, which significantly increased government subsidies for the carbon capture industry.

European politicians were keen to catch up, Balanyá suggests, especially having already lost major clean tech races like solar to China. The fossil fuel industry and their lobby arms were ready and waiting for the opportunity. 

CEO’s report exposes an uncomfortable closeness between industry-dominated groups and EU bodies. Set up by the European Commission in 2021, the CCUS Forum (now the Industrial Carbon Management (ICM) Forum) is an annual event with working groups that feed directly into EU policymaking. 

But every group has been co-chaired by the fossil fuel industry or associated organisations.

Having followed the most recent ICM Forum in the small French town of Pau in October, Rachel Kennerley, international carbon capture campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law, was struck by a point of agreement between campaigners and lobbyists: there is no business case for CCS. Despite accepting this fact, lobbyists say that the EU must create the market, including through public funding to “derisk” developments.

How is the carbon capture industry trying to influence the public?

The EU’s Industrial Carbon Management strategy promises to use the ICM forum to “stimulate public debate and increase public understanding and awareness on industrial carbon management.”

Yet the working group on public perception’s first paper last year reveals a more specific intention to “establish the legitimacy of CCUS technology among the public”. 

This discrepancy between informing and persuading people is echoed in other parts of the CCS discussion. In Pau, Kennerley heard panellists workshopping the best ways and times for promoters to go public with projects in order to get local communities on side.

“The carbon capture industry is using the term “carbon management” as a smokescreen. It sounds benign but in reality we cannot ‘manage’ away emissions,” she says.

“The scale of CCS infrastructure that would be needed for Europe’s plans is massive, including thousands of kilometres of pipelines across land and in coastal and deep water. The technical and safety challenges of this are formidable. The industry will be pushing a boulder uphill forever to convince the public that this is a good idea.”

At Euronews Green, we’ll be taking a closer look at some of these projects and the PR strategies designed to carry them through in the coming months.