carbon capture and storage

‘Gamechanger’ Study Warns Carbon Capture May Fall Short of Expectations, Citing Storage Location Dangers

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https://www.desmog.com/2025/09/23/gamechanger-study-warns-carbon-capture-may-fall-short-of-expectations-citing-storage-location-dangers

Carbon capture faces significant skepticism from environmentalists who note that the industry’s past is littered with failed projects, missed targets, and an overall net increase in emissions. Credit: Matt Hrkac (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) NDLA, 

CCS can “no longer be considered an unlimited” climate solution, researchers caution after concluding most storage options are in risky regions

As the Trump administration seeks to wipe away environmental rules covering the oil, gas, and coal industries, fossil fuel producers and sellers are reassuring buyers that carbon capture and storage (CCS) could slash climate-altering emissions from a growing range of fossil-fuel projects — like blue hydrogen, LNG export terminals, and data centers.

“That’s right: data centers,” fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil wrote in December, adding that the need for more data centers for AI could represent a fifth of the world’s demand for carbon capture by 2050.

Carbon capture already faces significant skepticism from environmentalists who note that the industry’s past is littered with failed carbon capture projects, missed targets, and an overall net increase in emissions.

Now, a study published in the journal Nature calls attention to another issue that could loom in the future if CCS were to really take off — a lack of easy-to-develop locations where captured carbon can be buried underground.

The vast majority of places where you can find the kinds of sedimentary rocks that allow carbon dioxide to be stored underground sit in higher risk zones or in areas like the Arctic that are potentially off-limits for practical or political reasons, the study found.

That has big implications for the energy transition, since once carbon dioxide is put into storage, it’s supposed to stay there for as long as possible. Any storage sites we use today can’t be expected to be available for future generations — not just the children and grandchildren of people alive today but “more than ten generations into the future,” the study notes.

“This study should be a gamechanger for carbon storage,” coauthor Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said in a statement when the study was announced. “It can no longer be considered an unlimited solution to bring our climate back to a safe level. Instead, geological storage space needs to be thought of as a scarce resource that should be managed responsibly to allow a safe climate future for humanity.”

In fact, there may be only enough practical storage to potentially reverse between 0.4 and 0.7 degrees Celsius of warming — a tiny fraction of the five or six degrees experts previously estimated, the researchers said.

The carbon storage that is available “should be used to halt and reverse global warming,” Rogelj added, “and not be wasted on offsetting on-going and avoidable CO2 pollution from fossil electricity production or outdated combustion engines.”

On Track to ‘Overshoot’

International plans to limit climate change tend to assume that we can “overshoot” on climate pollution, pushing the Earth’s climate into dangerous territory past 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming. That’s because, the argument goes, carbon capture and storage could come to the rescue if we go too far, letting us draw carbon dioxide levels back down.

The new study calls that assumption into question, highlighting uncertainty about how effective carbon removal will be at curbing climate change, in addition to concerns over difficulties in accessing underground carbon storage.

“With current trends suggesting warming up to 3°C this century, using all of the safe geological storage wouldn’t even get us back to 2°C,” said lead author Matthew Gidden, research professor at the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland.

Industry estimates, like those from the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), suggest the world has plenty of storage potential to keep 14,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide buried below ground and out of the atmosphere.

That would be “more than enough to meet projected needs for CCUS [carbon capture, use and sequestration] over the coming century,” the OGCI wrote in a 2023 report it called a “playbook for regulators, industrial emitters and hub developers.”

The new study, however, takes a closer look at where that storage is located — and in particular whether it’s in regions at higher risk of earthquakes or groundwater contamination like locations deep in the ocean, or in the Arctic and Antarctic circles. The study concludes that nearly 90 percent of that storage capacity is in less-than-desirable locations.

The researchers estimate there’s just 1,460 gigatons worth of “prudent” storage available worldwide — a tenth of the industry estimates.

Some earlier estimates stretch even higher, suggesting there’s around 40,000 gigatons of CO2 storage capacity worldwide.

“These estimates are also important as they remove all the technical constraints from assessment and assume that cost and engineering challenges will pose no issue in the future,” coauthor Siddharth Joshi, a research scholar at the Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group, told DeSmog, adding that “the shock value of technical potentials is enough to sometimes drive an industry forward.”

At the same time, focusing only on larger capacity estimates can create a “false sense of abundance,” Gidden noted, if policy-makers think the world has more room for overshoot than carbon storage can really offer.

The Nature study raises big questions about how the world’s carbon storage should be used long term.

“As [the study authors] point out, if we act to reduce emissions now, we probably have enough storage, but that ceases to be true really, really soon,” Rob Anex, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches carbon capture technology, told Canada’s CBC News. “Global emission rates are so high that the window of time in which geologic storage is practical is shutting really, really fast.” 

Trump Backs Carbon Capture Subsidies

Despite the federal government’s retreat from climate action, including Trump’s January executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the Trump administration has moved to protect and expand some federal subsidies for CCS.

Lucrative tax credits for using captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery were expanded this summer as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Given this political climate, experts didn’t expect to see a major direct impact from the study for blue hydrogen projects and other proposals aiming to use carbon storage.

“The pragmatist in me says it’s unlikely,” Anika Juhn, energy data analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), told DeSmog. “I don’t see government taking those kinds of steps.”

The Nature study follows a precautionary approach to carbon storage, she noted. “The precautionary principle says if we don’t really know about it, then maybe we shouldn’t be rushing headlong into just applying this technology everywhere as fast as possible,” she said. “I think that’s really where the strength of it is, saying if you are interested in doing it safely, here are some key aspects that you should really focus on.”

“Because their estimate is so prudent, it really doesn’t reflect at all current industry practice,” Juhn noted.

So far, there’s not a lot of carbon storage operating worldwide, with the Nature study pointing out existing projects currently store just 49 megatons per year, with 416 megatons worth “either planned or in construction.” Meanwhile, annual global emissions from fossil fuels topped 37,400 megatons last year, according to the World Meteorological Organization, another record high.

But that small CCS industry has already caused significant safety incidents — including well blowouts and a major 2020 CO2 pipeline leak that hospitalized dozens of people. 

Concerns over the potential for groundwater contamination — one of the factors highlighted in the Nature study — have already begun curbing real-world carbon storage availability at the state and local level.

Take, for example, Illinois, home to the nation’s first dedicated carbon storage project, the Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) carbon storage site in Decatur, Illinois.

Carbon injections were halted at ADM’s site a year ago, after the company discovered leaks below ground. “Given the extreme depth and the multiple layers of shale and other confining rock up to the surface, at no time was there an impact to the surface or groundwater sources, nor any threat to public health,” ADM said at the end of August, announcing the restart of operations at its Decatur site.

But the incident appears to have hit a nerve in the state, where nearly a million people rely on the Mahomet Aquifer in Champaign, Illinois, as their sole source of drinking water.

This summer, Illinois passed a law banning carbon storage below that aquifer, making roughly 15 percent of the state’s counties off limits for carbon storage. ADM’s leak had reached within about six miles of the Mahomet Aquifer, Taxpayers for Common Sense notes.

The Nature study notes that most of the carbon storage in operation today doesn’t actually offer any net climate benefit — because it’s used for enhanced oil recovery, which, the researchers wrote, “overall results in net-positive CO2 emissions.” 

“After decades of bold projections, only around 10 million tons of CO₂ are captured and permanently stored each year (excluding enhanced oil recovery), representing less than 0.03% of annual global fossil fuel emissions,” Kevin Anderson, professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester, said in a statement responding to the study. “Rather than serving as a credible mitigation technology, CCS has largely functioned as a rhetorical device to delay robust fossil fuel regulation.”

https://www.desmog.com/2025/09/23/gamechanger-study-warns-carbon-capture-may-fall-short-of-expectations-citing-storage-location-dangers

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Continue Reading‘Gamechanger’ Study Warns Carbon Capture May Fall Short of Expectations, Citing Storage Location Dangers

Carbon Capture ‘Not Going to Happen,’ Top Fossil Fuel Advocate Predicts

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Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

Canada Energy Minister Tim Hodgson (left) and climate crisis denier Bjorn Lomborg (right). Credit: Dan Lofton (CC BY-NC 2.0) and CPAC / YouTube

In audio obtained by DeSmog, Bjorn Lomborg told a Fraser Institute event in Vancouver that the technology is way too expensive to be viable.

Bjorn Lomborg has for years promoted the idea that fossil fuels are crucial for humankind through syndicated newspaper columns, best-selling books and appearances on TV shows including HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

He’s been called a “friend” by Trump administration energy secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright and helps advise an anti-net zero organization known as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) created by the Canadian conservative podcaster Jordan Peterson.

Yet the Danish political scientist — who acknowledges that climate change is real but denies that it’s a serious crisis — has a dim view of the oil and gas industry’s preferred solution to climate change: carbon capture and storage.

That technology is favored by Alberta premier Danielle Smith and Liberal energy minister Tim Hodgson, both of whom recently floated the idea of a “grand bargain” where Canada’s oil and gas industry gets approval for new pipelines in exchange for moving forward with a $16.5 billion carbon capture project.

It might seem that a prominent fossil fuel advocate like Lomborg would support technology loudly touted by major oil and gas producers and their political allies. But speaking at a private event last week in Vancouver, exclusive audio of which was obtained by DeSmog, Lomborg argued that “carbon capture will always be a net cost” to oil and gas producers and the taxpayers that subsidize it.

“In realistic terms, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen,” he added, referring to the prospect of prices for the technology coming down low enough that it can be rapidly and cost-efficiently deployed worldwide.

On that point Lomborg might actually be in agreement with climate policy experts who are also critical of carbon capture. “There’s a lot of federal money and provincial money that could be thrown at this thing,” Dave Sawyer, principal economist at the Canadian Climate Institute, recently told DeSmog. “We’ve been looking at this option for almost 20 years and it hasn’t happened.”

Speaking at the Fraser Institute

Lomborg was in the west coast Canadian city to speak at a private luncheon hosted by the Fraser Institute, a free-market organization with a long history of disputing the scientific reality of climate change that has received funding from the likes of Exxon and the charitable foundation of oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch.

It’s a leading member of Atlas Network, an influential coalition of more than 500 groups worldwide that promote free-market policies and whose partners in Canada have developed political strategies for fossil fuel expansion. 

“Yes, global warming is real. It’s man-made, but it’s often also vastly exaggerated,” Lomborg claimed at the Fraser Institute luncheon, the same day that the United Nations warned that global temperatures were likely to breach the crucial warming threshold of 1.5 degrees within the next five years. 

During the event he was asked for this thoughts about carbon capture, a technology that Canada’s largest oil and gas companies have for years argued is crucial for achieving “net zero” emissions in their operations.

Those companies, via an industry group called Pathways Alliance, are currently in talks with the federal and Alberta governments to build a multi-billion dollar carbon capture project in the heart of the Canadian oil sands which could be subsidized heavily by taxpayers.

“The problem is you need to store it underground,” Lomborg said, referring to the carbon dioxide captured by the technology. And to do that on a meaningful scale worldwide, he argued, “you have to build at least an infrastructure equivalent to the infrastructure that we built in the last hundred years for oil and gas. And remember back then, we did it because it was incredibly profitable. This time we would just have to pay for it.”

Current costs in Canada could be as high as $150 per tonne of CO2. Lomborg noted that for direct air capture projects — which Pathways Alliance is also proposing and involve sucking carbon emissions from the atmosphere — the costs could be as high as $600 per tonne. At those price points, widespread deployment is “not going to happen,” he said.

Growing rightwing backlash to CCS

Climate experts such as University of Pennsylvania scientist Michael Mann have for years argued that carbon capture and storage is a false solution to the climate crisis that allows oil and gas companies to suck up huge amounts of public money while continuing to pump fossil fuels. “It’s not a meaningful climate solution and it displaces meaningful climate solutions like clean energy, renewable energy,” he told a U.S. House panel in 2022.

But recently there has been growing backlash to the technology from conservatives and fossil fuel advocates, some of whom see it as an egregious government waste.

“We might as well take tax money at gunpoint and burn it,” Peterson, the conservative podcaster, wrote last year on X in response to a CCS project in Wyoming.

At Peterson’s ARC conference in London this February, the climate crisis denier Robert Bryce told DeSmog that carbon capture “will never work at scale.” He added, “Once you get that CO2 super-compressed and you’re pushing it down underground, there are very few places where you can actually sequester it. So it’s a lot of money wasted.”

That skepticism is now translating into federal U.S. policy, with Wright’s Department of Energy recently canceling $3.7 billion in decarbonization awards for carbon capture projects from Exxon and other fossil fuel producers. 

Canada is still pushing ahead, however. Recently appointed Liberal energy minister Hodgson, a previous board member of oil and producer MEG Energy, said during a speech in Calgary in May that “All of us, governments and industry, need to get the Pathways [carbon capture] project done.”

During his Vancouver talk, Lomborg argued that the main reason oil and gas companies are pursuing such prohibitively expensive climate projects is so they can be generously supported by governments.

“What you can do is you can get a lot of subsidies,” he said.

Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

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Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
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Continue ReadingCarbon Capture ‘Not Going to Happen,’ Top Fossil Fuel Advocate Predicts

Exclusive: Norway’s Equinor Forced to Withdraw Key Carbon Capture Claim

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Original article by Edward Donnelly republished from De Smog.

Equinor’s Sleipner offshore gas field. Philip Stephen/ Nature Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo.

Oil company was storing a fraction of advertised amount of CO2 at offshore project, data shows.

This story is the tenth part of a DeSmog series on carbon capture and was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.

Equinor has retracted a claim that it stores about a million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually at its flagship carbon capture project after DeSmog obtained data showing the real figure was as little as a tenth of that amount. 

The Norwegian oil company scrubbed the estimate from its website in November, when presented with official figures showing that it captured 106,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) at its Sleipner carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility in 2023. 

Equinor has not captured 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year at the site since 2001, according to the data, provided by the Norwegian Environment Agency.  

The company put the reason for the discrepancy between the official figures and its public-facing claim to be capturing “about 1 million” tonnes of CO2 a year down to a failure to update a “static” webpage.

“We have now removed this error from our website and updated this section with the correct information,” Equinor spokesman Gisle Ledel Johannessen said via email. 

Equinor has been capturing CO2 from a gas processing plant at the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea since 1996. The field has particularly high concentrations of CO2, which Equinor filters out during the gas purification process and then injects below the seabed. 

The project has been cited by carbon capture advocates, and Equinor itself, as evidence that the technology is reliable enough to help meet global climate goals, despite its long history of cost-overruns and failed targets.

A screenshot of Equinor’s website, taken on 13 October, 2024 Credit: Edward Donnelly.
The claim has since been removed.

Expansion Plans

Equinor is positioning itself to play a key role in the European Union’s plans to massively increase carbon capture. The bloc has adopted an official target to deploy an annual 50 million tonnes of CO2 storage capacity by 2030 from roughly three million tonnes available across the continent today, though the pace of the existing roll-out is nowhere near on track to achieve that goal.

Norway, not an EU member, is home to almost all of Europe’s operational carbon capture capacity, which is comprised of Sleipner and a similar project also operated by Equinor at its Snøhvit gas field in the Barents Sea. The two sites stored a total of 763,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2023, according to the Norwegian Environment Agency figures, less than half of their combined capacity of 1.7 million tonnes of CO2.

Equinor’s statement that it was capturing “about 1 million tonnes of CO2 each year” at Sleipner alone appears to have first been published on the company’s “carbon capture and storage (CCS)” webpage in 2022, according to archived internet data. That year, the Sleipner field captured 260,000 tonnes of CO2, according to the Norwegian Environment Agency, which regulates the oil and gas industry.

DeSmog asked Equinor for its data on carbon capture at Sleipner in October. When the company declined to provide it, DeSmog obtained the figures from the Norwegian Environment Agency, which collates companies’ self-reported data. 

Equinor spokesman Johannessen said that Sleipner had been capturing less CO2 in recent years because of declining gas production at the site.

Credit: Sabrina Bedford.

Broken Equipment

Equinor had previously acknowledged that faulty monitoring equipment at Sleipner caused it to over-estimate the amount of CO2 it was capturing at the field for several years, as DeSmog reported in October. During a more than four-year period from January 2017 through March 2021, the company said that it had captured a cumulative total of about 2.7 million tonnes of CO2 at the site. Equinor later amended the figure to 2.1 million tonnes, about a 28-percent decrease. 

The gulf between Equinor’s public claims and Sleipner’s actual performance underscores concerns among climate advocates that the oil industry is hyping the potential of carbon capture as a climate solution to deflect pressure to cut production of fossil fuels. 

At least 480 carbon capture lobbyists attended the latest annual UN climate conference in Azerbaijan in November, according to the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law. In October, DeSmog revealed that Equinor had been holding more meetings with ministers to lobby the UK government over CCS than any other company, part of its plans to play a leading role in the country’s carbon capture plans. 

Equinor suggested that carbon capture could be the “best-kept secret” for climate action in a 2019 video, concluding that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar were “not enough.” In sponsored content currently viewable on the Financial Times website, Equinor says that CCS “has emerged as one of the key technologies in mitigating global warming” and addresses “misconceptions,” such as concerns over high costs and links to continued oil and gas production. 

Ketan Joshi, an Oslo-based climate consultant, said that the way Equinor presents its CCS operations as a climate solution is “misleading” because its existing projects only capture a small proportion of emissions, while total fossil fuel emissions in Norway remain high. 

“Equinor uses ‘ambitious’ CCS targets as a way of simulating action without actually performing it,” Joshi said. “They report the amount of CO2 they capture each year and it does not increase.” 

*A screenshot of a table showing the amount of CO2 captured at Sleipner provided to DeSmog by the Norwegian Environment Agency. The agency noted in an email that the 2021 volume should be 260 kilotonnes and not 322 kilotonnes, and that it will correct the figure in the next edition. The 106 kilotonne figure (106,000 tonnes) for 2023 was provided separately by email.

CO2 Tax

The Sleipner CCS project was devised by Equinor (then Statoil) in the mid-1990s as a way to reduce its exposure to Norway’s newly implemented CO2 emissions tax. The company established its CCS project at Snøhvit in 2008 also to reduce its tax burden from CO2 released during gas processing.

“Sleipner and Snøhvit are CCS projects with high quality that rightly enjoy worldwide recognition from academia, industry, governmental bodies and science institutions as proven and safe CO2 storages over decades where Equinor and our partners so far have stored over 25 million tonnes of CO2 since 1996,” said Equinor spokesman Johannessen.

He added that over the past five years, the company has “injected 99.7 percent of the CO2 that has been captured on Sleipner into the ground.”

The amount of CO2 captured by Equinor’s two CCS projects is dwarfed by the emissions released by burning the oil and gas sold by the company. In 2023, Equinor recorded a total of 262 million tonnes of CO2 emissions — including the emissions produced by its operations, and the emissions from burning the oil and gas those operations extracted, according to company sustainability data. 

In contrast, the company captured and stored a total of about 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 at Sleipner and Snøhvit, more than 300 times less than the amount emitted into the atmosphere by burning its products. 

And even with a functioning carbon capture facility onsite, net CO2 emissions at Sleipner far exceeded the amount of the gas that was stored. 

The Sleipner offshore platform provides power to several nearby gas fields by burning gas in turbines — a process that released 658,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023, according to the company’s sustainability reporting. That’s more than six times the 106,000 tonnes of CO2 that Equinor captured and stored from gas processing at Sleipner that year. 

To reduce the offshore platform’s CO2 footprint, Equinor announced last April that it would introduce an electrification plan for Sleipner, rather than opting to expand CCS operations at the field. The company is also planning an electrification project to reduce emissions from the gas export facility at Snøhvit.

Government Subsidies

In September, Equinor and partners Shell and TotalEnergies inaugurated the Northern Lights CO2 transport and storage facility near the Norwegian port of Bergen, which the companies say will store 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 a year from industrial sources on the Norwegian mainland at full capacity when it starts operations.

The project is mostly financed by $1.2 billion in Norwegian government subsidies, with an additional $141 million pledged by the European Union.  

By 2035, Equinor says it aims to store 30 to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year from new projects announced in Norway, Denmark, the UK, and the United States — an exponential increase from its current capacity.

While Equinor has signalled that it will need substantial subsidies to go forward with its CCS plans, the company continues to direct most of its investments into extracting more fossil fuels. In August, chief executive Anders Opedal announced up to $6.7 billion a year to fund new Norwegian oil and gas drilling until 2035.

In contrast, Equinor said in November that it will cut its renewable energy division’s workforce by 20 percent — about 250 jobs — citing economic headwinds in the sector.

“At the most basic level, Equinor presents CCS in a similar way to many other major oil and gas companies: a ‘necessary’ part of the climate solutions mix,” said Joshi, the climate consultant. “This is presented alongside the company’s aggressive expansionist agenda: opening many new oil and gas fields.”

Original article by Edward Donnelly republished from De Smog.

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Continue ReadingExclusive: Norway’s Equinor Forced to Withdraw Key Carbon Capture Claim

Pathways Carbon Capture Project Is Not Viable, Expert Warns

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Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from De Smog.

‘Public funding of CCS is a costly gamble,’ said IEEFA energy finance analyst Mark Kalegha. Credit: IEEFA

New report says CCS proposal is a subsidy-dependent ‘financial risk’ with ‘limited revenue potential.’

Pathways Alliance’s flagship carbon capture and storage project is not financially feasible without massive and consistent subsidies.

This is according to the most recent analysis of the venture, conducted by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), which identified multiple financial challenges.

The Pathways Alliance, a lobby group representing Canada’s six largest tar sands oil producers, proposed a massive carbon capture and storage (CCS) hub based near Cold Lake, Alberta, in 2022. The build-out includes a 400-kilometer pipeline network connecting the CCS hub with 13 tar sands facilities. The group’s members are responsible for approximately 95 percent of the tar sands’ annual output.

“The growing realization that carbon capture and storage projects are likely to require permanent government subsidies resets the discussion about the viability of CCS as a tool to effectively reduce carbon emissions,” Mark Kalegha, the IEEFA’s energy finance analyst for Canada and author of the report, said in a statement. 

“Public funding of CCS is a costly gamble that may not yield tangible returns on Canada’s journey towards achieving net-zero emissions,” Kalegha stated. 

“This is a financial risk the government should reconsider taking on.”

Among the study’s key findings, the IEEFA determined that the total costs — such as interest, insurance, depreciation, and taxes — for existing commercial-scale carbon capture plants in Alberta are approaching thresholds that threaten profitability. In addition, operating costs are increasing at roughly twice the rate of the amount of carbon dioxide that’s captured. 

Critics argue that Pathways will actually use the project for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which is what carbon capture technology was initially developed to do in the 1970s. Companies have used other notable CCS projects explicitly in this way. In fact, Pathways Alliance has publicly stated on several occasions that it hopes its decarbonization efforts could result in increased oil production. Critics argue the oil industry proposes using carbon capture for EOR as a means to prolong fossil fuel production while appearing to work towards emissions reduction. Canadian federal and provincial governments have enthusiastically supported carbon capture initiatives by the oil and gas sector, despite the concerns and objections of environmentalists. 

But Kalegha is not convinced the Pathways project would be used for EOR. Instead, he believes the alliance’s business case is based on the use of Emission Performance Credit (EPCs) under Alberta’s TIER (Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction) carbon pricing system. That said, the IEEFA isn’t certain the necessary operating revenue will manifest.

“An effective cap on emission performance credit (EPC) pricing of $170 (CAD) per tonne limits project revenue potential, while a looming oversupply of carbon EPCs is an example of risks to project cash flows,” the IEEFA report states. 

The report further notes that the option to combine Clean Fuel Regulation credits with EPCs is available to the ACTL (Alberta Carbon Trunk Line—one of the two operational carbon capture projects the IEEFA study investigated), but that this significant financial benefit is not currently available to the Pathways project.

The report warns that “without substantial efficiency improvements, the cost per tonne of CO2 captured is likely to exceed the revenue that the project can generate for each tonne captured.”

Kalegha noted that there is no guarantee carbon credits will trade for $170 and their value could face a limitless fall. “There is a severe oversupply risk, and over time, operating costs will likely increase while potential revenue will be stagnant,” he said.

The report indicates that an underperforming and unprofitable carbon capture project would invariably “struggle to bring lasting positive economic benefits to host communities and become dependent on external financial subsidies to maintain operations.”

Even under optimal conditions, “the Pathways project may struggle to break even,” the IEEFA noted. It further stated that real-world carbon capture operations are rarely optimal, echoing analysis by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), which also concluded carbon capture’s costs are persistently high in Canada, and unlikely to come down. 

Though details about Pathways’ project are scant — which the IEEFA noted in its report — the institute determined that Pathways could have an estimated annual carbon dioxide storage capacity of 10 to 12 million tonnes. If completed, it would be among the largest carbon capture facilities in the world.

Safety Risks

Whether storing such a large amount of CO2 is safe is a vitally important but unanswered question. The release of an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 tons of CO2 at Lake Nyos, Cameroon, in 1986 killed about 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock animals. The rupture of a CO2 pipeline near Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, resulted in dozens of hospitalizations, the town’s evacuation, and a chaotic emergency response that underlined the public’s unfamiliarity with large-scale carbon dioxide poisoning.

A May 2024 article in The Narwhal revealed that Pathways Alliance made it clear to the federal government that it fully expects to depend on federal government subsidies in the tens of billions of dollars. 

In a letter to several federal ministers — including then-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault — Pathways requested the government cover 50 percent of its estimated operating costs. The same letter also asked if the project would be eligible to generate Clean Fuel Regulation (CFR) for bitumen and crude oil exported using carbon capture technology. Pathways also demanded the federal government forgo an environmental impact assessment. At the provincial level, Pathways broke its project into 126 parts to avoid triggering an automatic environmental assessment.

Despite the growing body of evidence against the plan, it nonetheless maintains considerable political support in Canada. In October 2024, the Globe and Mail reported that the Canada Growth Fund (CGF) proposed funding support for the project. The CGF is a public fund of $15 billion (CAD) that supports implementing new technologies to reduce emissions, managed by the Public Sector Pension Investment Board.

“The Pathways Alliance has been in negotiations with the CGF for over a year, and wants the CGF to provide carbon contracts to mitigate financial risks and guarantee revenues,” Julia Levin, associate director of national climate with Environmental Defence, wrote in a statement to DeSmog. Levin noted that those negotiations ramped up last fall, and a decision is expected soon.

Despite Pathways’ request to abandon the environmental impact assessment, Levin also noted that the federal government is reviewing the project.

“In late November, following the Government of Alberta’s denial to conduct an impact assessment of the project, eight First Nations submitted a request that the federal government exercise its discretion to designate the Pathways Project for a federal impact assessment, given their concerns about the project impacts and the lack of a robust regulatory framework,” said Levin. “Minister Guilbeault has until the beginning of March to decide whether or not to designate the project.”

Little evidence exists showing carbon capture is effective at reducing emissions among Canada’s few extant commercial CCS projects and CCS projects worldwide.

Video rendering of Shell’s Quest carbon capture project. Credit: Shell / YouTube

“Neither Quest nor the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) have managed to keep up with projected capture rates,” said Kalegha during a recent IEEFA webinar, referring to Shell’s massive Quest CCS facility in Alberta. “Boundary Dam is struggling as well,” he added, referring to the Saskatchewan coal plant that received a $1 billion retrofit to capture carbon. The IEEFA estimates that the Boundary Dam CCS effort has never exceeded a 60 percent capture rate, despite claims by CCS advocates that it captures carbon at a rate exceeding 90 percent.  

“There’s a global trend of underperformance when it comes to carbon capture,” he noted.  

Kalegha’s analysis also points to considerable risk factors. He said that operating costs at ACTL and Quest appear to have doubled, while capture rates at both facilities have remained relatively flat. In addition, Pathways Alliance’s project will have to grapple with the combined performance of 13 separate carbon capture facilities.

While the oil and gas industry claims carbon capture technology is improving, Kalegha doesn’t see any data to support this.

“Current CCS projects in Canada are heavily subsidized by the public, anywhere between 50 to 85 percent,” he said during an IEEA online seminar. “This is a very expensive, subsidy-dependent technology experiencing severe technological challenges. The question is who should bear this risk?” 

Julia Levin is doubtful the Pathways Alliance partners are sincerely interested in committing any of their own funds to the project. She noted in a statement to DeSmog that Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) only committed $90 million to carbon capture in its 2025 budget, compared with $45 million to move offices.

“CNRL’s 2025 budget reveals that the Pathways Alliance has no plans to invest their own funds into carbon capture and storage, instead insisting the public cover over $12 billion of their costs,”  Levin noted. 

“Ninety-million dollars is an insignificant amount of money, compared with the cost of carbon capture projects, as well as CNRL’s operating budget and yearly profits,” she added 

“If these companies seriously believed in carbon capture as a waste management solution for their operations and were intent on moving these projects forward, they would be willing to invest more of their own funds,” Levin pointed out. “Instead they’re using the promise of capturing emissions one day as a rationale to delay the energy transition and weaken climate policy.” 

Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from De Smog.

Continue ReadingPathways Carbon Capture Project Is Not Viable, Expert Warns

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Climate Adam discusses climate capture and storage. The video is over a year old and Adam refers to COP28 while COP29 was the most recent. Does he mention that there are huge fossil fuel subsidies from governments to the fossil fuel industry for CCS i.e. yet more profit on top of huge profits for destroying the climate and planet?

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