fossil fuel industry

Canceled Canadian CCS Project Deemed ‘Not Economically Feasible’

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Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from DeSmog.

https://www.desmog.com/2024/05/06/capital-power-generation-genesee-power-plant-canceled-canadian-ccs-project-not-economically-feasible/

Capital Power Generation pulled the plug on a $2.4 billion carbon capture and storage project at the Genesee Generating Station. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Repeal accompanies a new report that confirms existing carbon capture projects continue to underperform.

Capital Power Generation has canceled a $2.4 billion carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at their Genesee Generating Station, claiming it is “technically viable but not economically feasible.”

The project aimed to capture and sequester up to 3 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from the Genesee Power Plant, located southwest of Edmonton, Alberta, a plant that’s in the process of being converted from coal to natural gas.

Julia Levin, associate director of National Climate with Environmental Defence, characterized the cancellation as yet another failure for carbon capture.

“This decision is just the latest failure in carbon capture’s terrible track record,” Levin said in a statement. “It should serve as a lesson for governments on how reckless it is to be using taxpayer dollars to subsidize these projects.”

She indicated that the project had already received $5 million from the Government of Alberta, and was further eligible for additional tax breaks from both the federal and provincial governments.

“Carbon capture has not been successfully used in the power sector,” said Levin. 

“Most projects never make it off the ground,” she added. “The few that do, like the Boundary Dam coal plant, capture a fraction of the promised rate.” Levin also noted that equipping power plants with carbon capture makes fossil fuel-generated power even more expensive, while the cost of renewable energy has plummeted.

The Boundary Dam carbon capture and storage facility in Saskatchewan never met the 90 percent capture rate originally promised. Credit: SaskPower/Flickr

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) recently released new research that shows the failures of carbon capture in the Boundary Dam coal facility. After nine years and $1 billion spent retrofitting the plant with CCS equipment, the facility never met the 90 percent capture rate owner-operator SaskPower originally promised. 

Moreover, all the carbon that Boundary Dam captured was used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a process where carbon dioxide is pumped into old wells to extract otherwise unobtainable oil. The IEEFA study further reveals that the Boundary Dam facility’s carbon capture rate is below 60 percent in total over nine years of operation.

“Canadians should not be proud of the money and resources wasted on carbon capture, and they should be especially concerned about the billions of dollars now earmarked for additional carbon capture investments,” said the IEEFA report’s authors, David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis at the organization, and Mark Kalegha, an IEEFA energy finance analyst, in a statement. 

“Carbon capture is not a solution to the world’s climate crisis, especially when coupled with enhanced oil recovery,” they said. 

Part of a Decarbonization Plan

Capital Power Generation is an independent power company based in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital city. The company has described the Genesee plant’s conversion from coal to natural gas as part of its decarbonization effort. The company set a goal to decarbonize by 2045. The conversion is also in line with the coal phase-out goals of the Canadian government.

Despite claims by politicians and industry that natural gas is a bridge fuel, or that it is cleaner than coal, the reality is that natural gas is not a carbon-neutral energy source, nor a viable method of decarbonizing the energy grid. Rather, natural gas is a destructive fossil fuel. Research from Robert W. Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, shows that methane emissions from natural gas is on par with coal’s.  

Natural gas is not considered a viable method of decarbonizing the energy grid. Credit: Felton Davis/Flickr

Emissions Reduction Alberta, a government funded group, previously claimed that the Genesee repowering and carbon capture projects could potentially remove about 6.4 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, with CCS projects handling about half that amount.

Though Capital Power Generation justified its decision to cancel the project by stating it wasn’t financially feasible, news reports show the company was holding out for additional financial support from various levels of government. As Global News reported, Altius Royalty Corp., owner of the coal mine that feeds the Genesee plant, had demanded $190 million in compensation from the federal and provincial governments to phase out coal. It argued that government efforts to terminate coal production for health and environmental reasons was equivalent to expropriation.

Altius filed the claim in 2018, and it was rejected by the Court of Appeal of Alberta in April.

In March, the Globe and Mail reported that Capital Power was considering shelving the Genesee CCS project because it couldn’t come to an agreement with the government to provide revenue certainty. The Canada Growth Fund (CGF), a $15 billion federal financing agency, is tasked with guaranteeing a minimum value for emissions-reduction credits earned under Canada’s industrial carbon-pricing system. The March news report claims that representatives from Capital Power argued that negotiations with the CGF had not produced a structure or price that would allow them to proceed with the project. A CGF representative countered that such frameworks and prices had already been negotiated with other companies.

Regardless of what specifics led Capital Power to cancel the Genesee CCS project, the fact remains that CCS is expensive, is often used for EOR, and has a long, well-documented history of under-delivering on the crucial issue of capturing carbon dioxide. Critics say the considerable amount of financial resources already dedicated to CCS have effectively been wasted, particularly when the means to cheaply decarbonize the grid – such as solar panels or wind turbines – are already available.

“The most effective way to deal with carbon dioxide emissions is to prevent them from ever being created,” said Levin with Environmental Defence, “rather than trying to pluck them from the air or smokestacks and inject them underground.”

Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingCanceled Canadian CCS Project Deemed ‘Not Economically Feasible’

Climate Justice Groups Confront Chevron on San Francisco Bay

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06052024/san-francisco-bay-kayaktivists-confront-chevron/

Grassroots “kayaktivists,” the Rich City Rays, challenged tankers that import crude oil for Chevron and ship its refinery products around the world.

A generation of Richmond’s children, now grown, took to San Francisco Bay in nearly five dozen kayaks Sunday morning, in the shadow of Chevron’s massive refinery, headed for tankers controlled by the oil giant in an act of resistance, prayer and joy. 

After singing a ceremonial song led by a local Indigenous leader, activists launched their kayaks around 9:30 a.m. from the shores of Point Molate, 20 miles north of San Francisco, to protest the environmental and health harms caused by Chevron’s Richmond Oil Refinery. 

By noon, a core group of the Rich City Rays, a coalition of grassroots community groups based in Richmond, a San Francisco suburb where most residents are Asian, Black or Latino, had entered restricted waters alongside two giant tankers docked at the Chevron Long Wharf. Once activists in about 20 kayaks had jockeyed into position, side by side, they unfurled a banner with “Abolish Chevron” written in bright red letters, as the rest of the flotilla erupted in cheers.

…

Activists with Rich City Rays took to San Francisco Bay near Chevron’s Richmond Refinery to protest the oil giant’s impacts on communities of color around the world. Credit: Brooke Anderson

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06052024/san-francisco-bay-kayaktivists-confront-chevron/

Continue ReadingClimate Justice Groups Confront Chevron on San Francisco Bay

‘An Affront to the World’: Shell Posts Billions in Profits as Planet Burns

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Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)

“The grotesque wealth that this Earth-wrecking company continues to accumulate is something we cannot allow ourselves to accept as normal,” one campaigner said.

Oil major Shell announced $7.7 billion in profits during the first quarter of 2024 on Thursday, as well as a $3.5 billion share buyback program.

The news comes as every month covered by the period was the hottest of its kind on record. The three-month period also saw the second-largest wildfire in Texas history, extreme heat in West Africa and the Sahel, and the beginning of the Great Barrier Reef’s fifth mass bleaching event in eight years. Scientists have clearly linked global heating, and the weather disasters it exacerbates, to the climate crisis driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.

“As extreme weather accelerates and the cost-of-living crisis rumbles on, Shell’s latest billion-pound profits are an affront to the world,” Izzie McIntosh, climate campaign manager at Global Justice Now, said in a statement. “The grotesque wealth that this Earth-wrecking company continues to accumulate is something we cannot allow ourselves to accept as normal.”

“This is the sad irony of the global energy system in which those causing chaos are the ones getting rich.”

Shell’s profits for the first three months of 2024 were around 20% lower than for the same time in 2023, CNBC reported. However, the company brought in $1.2 billion more than analysts had predicted. The world’s largest oil firms, including Shell, saw record profits in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the energy crisis that followed.

“Shell has beaten expectations by a reasonable margin, despite the impact of lower gas prices during the first quarter,” Stuart Lamont, an investment manager at RBC Brewin Dolphin, said in a statement shared by CNBC.

Global Witness pointed out that Shell’s earnings to date amounted to over $58,000 a minute, more than the average U.K. nurse makes in a year.

“Shell continuing to rake in huge sums of money shows us that huge polluter profits were not a one-off but are the twisted reality of an energy system that benefits climate-wrecking companies to the cost of everyone else,” Global Witness fossil fuel campaigner Alexander Kirk said in a statement.

Shell announced its profits one day after the U.S. Senate held a hearing on how large oil and gas companies, including Shell, have continued to deceive the public about the dangers of their products, moving from outright climate denial into making commitments they don’t intend to keep or touting false solutions like carbon capture and storage that they then fail to develop. Shell, according to the testimony of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), spent only 11% of its capital on low-carbon technologies between 2009 and 2023.

The hearing sparked calls for accountability from the fossil fuel industry—such as mechanisms to make climate polluters pay for the transition to renewable energy—and the news of Shell’s profits generated more.

In the U.K., Labor Shadow Energy and Climate Minister Ed Miliband proposed increasing the tax on energy company profits. Shell paid the U.K. government around $1.4 billion in taxes in 2023, of which around $300 million went to the Energy Profits Levy, according toThe Guardian. Also last year, it paid its shareholders $23 billion, nine times more than it invested in its “Renewables and Energy Solutions” program.

“These results show yet again why it is so damning [that Prime Minister] Rishi Sunak refuses to bring in a proper windfall tax on the oil and gas giants,” Miliband said. “These are companies that have made record profits at the expense of working people. Labor says tax these companies fairly so we can invest in clean homegrown energy that will end the cost of living crisis and make Britain energy independent.”

Greenpeace U.K. called Shell’s latest profits “shameless.”

“Their reckless hunt for profits needs to end,” the environmental advocacy group wrote on social media. “When will world leaders find their backbone and make polluters pay?”

When one commenter suggested governments held back out of desire to keep collecting Big Oil’s taxes, Greenpeace fired back, “What taxes?” and noted that Shell avoided paying U.K. taxes for years.

“At the end of the day we want clean, cheap renewable energy not to face the worst impacts of climate change,” Greenpeace continued. “Solutions exist, we just need the political and industrial will to get them in place.”

Global Witness and Global Justice Now also took the opportunity to call for an energy transition.

“This is the sad irony of the global energy system in which those causing chaos are the ones getting rich,” Kirk said. “This spiral won’t stop until we make the urgent switch to a fairer renewable energy system that puts both people and planet first.”

McIntosh concluded: “We urgently need to bring a fair and organised end to the fossil fuel era, and that means companies like Shell must stop trying to extract new oil and gas, and start paying what they owe for the loss and damage they’ve caused. Profit announcements like this for a corporate dinosaur like Shell need to become a thing of the past.”

Original article by OLIVIA ROSANE republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘An Affront to the World’: Shell Posts Billions in Profits as Planet Burns

Congressional Investigation Reveals New Evidence of Big Oil’s Decades-Long Campaign to Deny Climate Science

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Original article by Adam M. Lowenstein republished from DeSmog.

An ExxonMobil refinery on the banks of the Mississippi River. Credit: Terekhova/Flickr (CC CREATIVE COMMONS INFO)

Oil and gas companies and their top trade groups were aware for decades that carbon emissions contribute to climate change, according to a scathing new report from congressional investigators. Moreover, industry giants knew that many of the technologies they presented publicly as solutions to the climate crisis – such as algae-based biofuels and carbon capture and storage (CCS) – were neither as green nor as feasible as they promised, the study reveals.

The Senate Budget Committee and Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability published the report and related documents on April 30, three years after launching a joint investigation of Shell, Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, and two leading industry trade groups..

Fossil fuel obstructionism has evolved “from denial to duplicity,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), in a May 1 congressional hearing based on the report.

Both the hearing and the report capture what Whitehouse described as “climate denial lite,” in which the industry pivots “to pretending it is taking climate change seriously, while secretly undermining its own publicly stated goals.”

The investigation reveals that for ExxonMobil and other leading fossil fuel companies in the report, the perception of taking some sort of action on climate appears to have been as high a priority as actually taking action.

For example, for years, Exxon sought to associate its brand with algae-based biofuels. In a 2019 video, the company claimed these biofuels “would one day power planes, propel ships, and fuel trucks – and cut their emissions in half.”

Closeup of biofuel in a laboratory. Credit: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Between 2009 and 2023, Exxon spent some $175 million on algae-related marketing like this video – almost half as much as the company spent working on the technology. (Exxon and other industry leaders largely stopped funding for algae biofuel research by 2023.)

Even as the company publicly touted algae biofuels as a climate solution, the company knew the technology remained unproven – and, moreover, that Exxon was not investing nearly enough money if it were serious about developing algae as a viable technology.

In an email made public by the committee, an Exxon employee noted that one of the company’s executives had “made comments about us getting too far out there on the original algae ads.”

In an Exxon document released by House investigators with the header “Algae Biofuels Program Talking Points,” the company noted, “ExxonMobil’s analysis has concluded that final development and broad deployment of algae-based biofuels by the company would require future investments of billions of dollars” – orders of magnitude more than the $350 million that Exxon eventually spent.

Repeating Patterns

Congressional investigators identified a similar pattern in industry responses to a 2019 decision by Andrew Wheeler, then the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Donald Trump, to roll back a rule designed to reduce methane emissions.

Internally, BP agreed with Wheeler’s decision. In a 2019 email published by the committee, one executive noted that Wheeler’s “legal theory … for rolling back direct regulation of methane” was “aligned with our thinking.” The American Petroleum Institute (API), the leading trade association for the oil and gas industry, which counts BP as a dues-paying member, lobbied for the rollback.

In public, however, BP and other oil giants claimed to be disappointed by the Trump administration’s decision. David Lawler, then-chairman and president of BP America, said publicly that “direct federal regulation of methane emissions is essential.”

“Time and again, the biggest oil and gas corporations say one thing for the purposes of public consumption, but do something completely different to protect their profits,” Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee and one of the leaders of the investigation, said in his prepared testimony.

“Company officials will admit the terrifying reality of their business model behind closed doors, but say something entirely different, false, and soothing to the public,” Raskin said.

Yet, even as Raskin and Whitehouse were able to reveal damning new evidence of this corporate doublespeak, they pointed out that a complete public reckoning remained impossible, since the industry refused to fully engage with investigators.

Denying Reality

In a pattern that echoes the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long efforts to deny the reality of climate change and, more recently, to portray oil and gas companies as committed to solving the crisis, the four companies and two trade groups that received congressional subpoenas appear to have withheld meaningful information while simultaneously flooding the committees with “hundreds of thousands of generic and non-responsive documents,” Raskin said.

Many documents submitted by the API were almost entirely redacted. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce produced only 24 documents that congressional investigators considered within the scope of the subpoena, including an invitation to a virtual meeting about “the future of natural gas infrastructure.”

Fossil fuel interests “completely obstructed the committees’ investigation,” Raskin said in a video played at the hearing.

During the hearing, this disinformation effort was assisted by congressional Republicans.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) read into the record debunked right-wing claims that carbon dioxide is good for the climate because it is “plant food.”

Source: Senate Budget Committee on X

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) spent significant time alleging that Dr. Geoffrey Supran, a University of Miami climate disinformation expert who testified at the hearing, wrote tweets that Supran did not, in fact, write.

“These are not my tweets, these are retweets,” Supran attempted to explain when he was finally shown the tweets, as Kennedy continued to speak over him.

“I’d like to make very clear that this form of character assassination is characteristic of the propaganda techniques of fossil fuel interests,” Supran added.

Supran’s point, however, was mostly obscured by Kennedy’s ongoing hectoring from the committee dais.

In a more productive exchange, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) asked Raskin about the argument Exxon put forth that the investigators’ subpoena was “designed to intrude on ExxonMobil’s First Amendment activities, including its constitutionally protected right to petition the government.”

“That would obviously lead to the end of our civil and criminal discovery system, if the first amendment gave you the right not to turn over documents,” Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, replied.

“When an objection is made – if it is an extremely unpersuasive, novel, imaginative, unsupported objection – you can always tell, there’s something they really don’t want you to see,” Kaine noted. “I can only imagine the extent of the iceberg under the water that you were not allowed to see.”

The fossil fuel industry’s refusal to respond adequately to congressional subpoenas, while also flooding the committee with what Raskin’s testimony called a “paper blizzard” of some 125,000 “mass emails, newsletters, flyers, and otherwise meaningless fluff documents,” appeared designed to distract investigators and forestall potential legal action against companies and their executives.

“There is certainly an adequate legal foundation for litigation against this industry,” Sharon Eubanks, the former head of the tobacco litigation team at the Department of Justice, and leader of the U.S. government’s racketeering case against Big Tobacco, told members of the committee.

“Both industries lied to the public and regulators about what they knew about the harms of their products, and when they knew it.”

Original article by Adam M. Lowenstein republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingCongressional Investigation Reveals New Evidence of Big Oil’s Decades-Long Campaign to Deny Climate Science

UK professor condemns own university over collaboration with oil giant

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Original article by Ben Webster republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Fawley oil refinery in Southampton

Southampton University slammed after openDemocracy uncovered its involvement in Exxon’s ‘greenwashing’ project

A senior professor has accused his own university of betraying its values by working with ExxonMobil on a project that has been condemned as greenwash.

Ian Williams, professor in applied environmental science at the University of Southampton, made the allegations after openDemocracy revealed that Exxon had made misleading claims about capturing carbon at the UK’s biggest oil refinery at Fawley in Hampshire.

We reported last month that Paul Greenwood, Exxon’s UK lead, had admitted that the oil giant would need a “magic wand” to deliver the project, which has no funding and no licence to store carbon.

Exxon refers prominently to its collaboration with the University of Southampton in publications about the scheme.

Williams suggested the university had been “fooled” into joining forces with the oil giant to launch the ‘Solent Cluster’, an industrial decarbonisation scheme focused on CCS.

Lindsay-Marie Armstrong, the academic cluster lead at the University of Southampton, has joined senior Exxon executives at several events to promote the scheme, including a reception at the House of Commons in February.

Williams hit out at the partnership during a lecture entitled “Working with the enemy: Why universities should not work with ‘Big Oil’” on 24 April, as part of the University of Southampton’s annual Green Week.

He said Exxon had a long history of undermining climate science and funding groups that promoted climate scepticism, asking: “Why does the University of Southampton work with companies that operate against our values and deny our research data?”

Williams pointed out the university’s collaboration with Exxon is at odds with two of its stated core values: its commitment to “embed environmental sustainability in everything we do” and its pledge to work with partners to “improve the environment”.

He added that his decision to speak out means he is “not very popular in some quarters of the university” and might be branded a “rogue academic”.

But Southampton University’s decision to partner with Exxon has also been criticised by many who study there. Heidi Wheatley, a second-year environmental science student, told openDemocracy that “the university’s relationship with the fossil fuel industry undermines my whole reasoning for studying this subject at this institution”.

Wheatley added: “Students are already calling for the university to re-evaluate its relationship with the industry through its research activities and are petitioning the university to withdraw its multimillion-pound investments in fossil fuel companies. I implore the university to listen to its students and live up to its own strategic commitments to sustainability.”

Williams quoted from openDemocracy’s investigation during his Green Week lecture, including our revelation that Exxon had so far refused to commit its own money to build the CCS plant and had instead focused investment on increasing diesel production at the refinery, spending £800m to produce an extra six million litres a day.

He also quoted Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, who told openDemocracy that Exxon’s CCS scheme “stands out as greenwashing”.

openDemocracy revealed in November that fossil companies had ploughed more than £147m into British universities in seven years.

Williams said: “Universities must be robust and healthy enough to resist commercial lobbying and greenwash. We must not be fooled again.”

Urging Southampton University to extend its ban on working with tobacco companies to fossil fuel firms, he added: “Universities should say no to collaboration with fossil fuel companies, no to funding from or with fossil fuel companies, no to green washing, no to climate washing.”

He also recommended the university commit to “not work[ing] on any form of greenwash project”, including “CCS” and “blue hydrogen” – a product made from natural gas, where most of the carbon dioxide from the gas is captured and stored. Blue hydrogen has come under fire from scientists, who have branded it a distraction from proven low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels based on renewable energy.

Williams also called on Southampton University to sign up to the People and Planet Fossil Free Campaign, which demands universities stop investing in and accepting funds from fossil fuel companies.

A University of Southampton spokesperson did not respond to any of Williams’ recommendations when contacted by openDemocracy.

Instead, they said: “Decarbonisation necessitates engagement with the sector that produces carbon and universities have a vital role to play in applying knowledge and expertise to address real areas of environmental concern.

“This is what the Solent Cluster was set up and receives government funding for, with our role here to work alongside 120 organisations and businesses, including nine local governments and three other universities.

“We uphold our value to embed environmental sustainability in everything that we do and require that all outputs from research undertaken with energy companies – and industry more widely – can be published, following our stated policies for responsible and open research.”

An Exxon spokesperson said the company would give further detail on the CCS project “in due course”.

Another recent openDemocracy investigation found that more than £281m of anonymous donations had poured into so-called Russell Group universities, including Southampton, since 2017. This prompted more than 120 academics, politicians and campaigners to sign an open letter calling for transparency over university funding in the UK.

The universities’ secrecy over donations means any potential conflicts of interest and commercial influences, including those related to fossil fuel production, remain hidden.

Some universities routinely invite fossil fuel companies to attend private meetings after donating millions of pounds.

Original article by Ben Webster republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingUK professor condemns own university over collaboration with oil giant