$12 Billion In US Public Funding For "Carbon Capture", Fossil Hydrogen, Other Unproven/Flailing Climate "Solutions" [View all]

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The US has spent the most taxpayer money, some $12bn in direct subsidies, according to OCI, with fossil fuel giants like Exxon hoping to secure billions more in future years. The industry-preferred solutions could play a limited role in curtailing global heating, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and are being increasingly pushed by wealthy nations at the annual UN climate summit. But carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects consistently fail, overspend or underperform, according to previous studies. CCS – and blue hydrogen projects – rely on fossil fuels and can lead to a myriad of environmental harms including a rise in greenhouse gases and air pollution.

“The United States and other governments have little to show for these massive investments in carbon capture – none of the demonstration projects have lived up to their initial hype,” said Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “It is instructive that industry itself invests very little in carbon capture. This whole enterprise is dependent on government handouts.”

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Yet, experts warn that CCS technology is challenging and unlikely to deliver. “The history of CCS is depressing … and no significant innovations have improved CCS’s prospects,” said Charles Harvey, professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded the first private CCS startup 15 years ago. “Nonetheless, we are again wasting money on CCS that could be used instead to effectively cut emissions, distracting ourselves from the necessity of moving away from fossil fuels, and perpetuating a polluting industry whose local harms often fall on minority and economically disadvantaged communities.”

Hydrogen, which is currently mostly used for refining oil, fertilizers and processing metals and foods, could be green if companies chose to use water – not gas or coal – as the raw material, and power the process with renewables not fossil fuel. Yet globally, governments have spent $4.2bn on projects that aim to produce blue hydrogen from fossil fuels using CCS. The industry claims to have the technology to capture 90% to 95% of CO2, but in reality, it’s closer to 12% when every stage of the energy-intensive process is evaluated, according to peer-reviewed research by scientists at Cornell University. “The greenhouse gas footprint for this hydrogen is actually greater than if we were to simply burn natural gas for the energy,” said Howarth, a co-author of the groundbreaking study.

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/29/unproven-climate-solutions-spending