Shell sold millions of carbon credits for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that never happened, allowing the company to turn a profit on its fledgling carbon capture and storage project, according to a new report by Greenpeace Canada.
Under an agreement with the Alberta government, Shell was awarded two tonnes’ worth of emissions reduction credits for each tonne of carbon it actually captured and stored underground at its Quest plant, near Edmonton.
This took place between 2015 and 2021 through a subsidy program for carbon, capture, utilisation and storage projects (CCUS), which are championed by the oil and gas sector as a way to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.
At the time, Quest was the only operational CCUS facility in Alberta. The subsidy program ended in 2022.
Rant in a totally different direction. Carbon Capture Is Not Sustainable!
Unless you can capture 1 ton of carbon using less energy than is extracted by burning 1 ton of carbon, you can not capture carbon. Carbon capture will ONLY work if the energy you use to capture the carbon does not add more carbon to the atmosphere (nuclear, wind, solar) but having to run a supplementary power generation tech just to negate the effects of your primary tech is just stupid, fossil fuels no longer a viable option.
Even in this case carbon capture is stupid. Why not use that “green” energy to replace carbon-emitting power plants?
Because Alberta thinks wind turbines and solar panels are ugly.
Carbon capture is basically a form of energy storage. If it’s energy that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to capture, or if it’s more energy than we need for consumption at a given moment in time, then it makes sense to store it instead. I don’t know enough to say if these would apply in practice, but it’s plausible that it’s better to capture than to use the energy.
Carbon capture, carbon footprint, carbon offsetting - its all bullshit made up by the oil and gas industry to greenwash their public image while they continue to destroy our planet.
Pedantic, but you can do this by planting a forest (in a currently not forested area).
Most of those schemes are scams in one way or another as well tho.
Agreed. Forestation can be a large contributor to reducing climate change, but any scheme that is offered by polluting companies should be viewed with extreme scepticism.
Yeah, not saying it wouldn’t help, but a lot of these schemes don’t have enough oversight to guarantee that the tree you paid for is effectively planted and cared for enough that it will survive.
Realistically we’ll need to do everything to tackle climate change: change away from fossil fuels, doing everything we can to sequester carbon (in a way that doesn’t generate more emissions), and probably also reduce consumption in general (degrowth).
A bunch of young trees don’t equate to old growth forests in any sense and it’s even worse if the species hasn’t evolved in in balance with that environment’s other species and conditions.
So it’s not even just that the tree needs to survive. On top of that we need to put time and resources into the right mix of regionally native trees which will thrive and integrate into their surroundings to properly reform ecosystems over numerous decades that we don’t even have.
No, you can’t. There are trillions of trees on earth and the impact they have on carbon emissions is relatively minimal, planting a forest or even many forests isn’t going to cut it.
Not to mention that for trees to be an at all viable long term carbon capture method, you can’t ever cut those trees down. If we can’t leave the fucking Amazon alone, what makes you think we won’t chop up that artificial forest in 50 years?
This is the same issue with kelp. Kelp has a ton of uses, and is an even better carbon sink than trees are, but to be a carbon sink you have to forgo all of those other uses because you have to literally sink the kelp to the bottom of the ocean and leave it there, because actually using it for anything just rereleases the carbon.
You can cut down the trees and they’ll still hold on to their carbon. Just don’t burn them.
Not all cut timber is used for burning. Paper is still manufactured, along with strand board, particle board and plywood.
Not practically. You’d have to be replacing the trees faster than you chop them down just to account for the energy(and thus carbon) used to chop them and process them. Then there’s the fact that decomposition will also release the carbon, so you HAVE to use the lumber for stuff that is intended to last at least as long the tree grew, or else that tree is still a net negative.
Not by half. Look up the rate at which we emit carbon and the sequestering abilities of a forest. You would have to cover every square inch of land with bamboo to break even.
And even then it will on average still create emissions because it takes capacity from the grid.
Molten Salt Reactors run at the perfect temp for CO2 sequestration. Should be building these things. Can do this while producing electricity
Molten salt reactors have this little problem that they’re digesting themselves. The salt is so aggressive that it eats through the reactor before the building costs amortise. Unless you are a time traveller capable of giving us the material science of 200 years into the future fusion is going to be here first.
ssr design is pretty based for this reason.
Who needs liquid fuel when you can just put the liquid fuel into a fuel rod anyway!
Bullshit
And? Yep, non-radioactive fluoride salt can be somewhat managed with ludicrously expensive materials. The equation is rather different when you add thorium to the equation. Also note that nine years are nowhere near long enough.
There’s a reason we don’t see those kinds of reactors in the wild: They can’t realistically be built as production-scale power plants. If they did greedy bastards would long-since have invested in the tech and tried to monopolise electricity production with patents and undercutting the competition.
You do know that the blankeded reactor only have a 7 year run cycle? Have you seen the costs of a traditional reactor? Ya know with a 9" thick vessel only made in Japan.
The ONLY reason we don’t have LFTR reactors is because at the time the US was in the middle of a nuclear arms race and you can’t build a bomb that can be hidden (gamma rays) using the decay chain from thorium.
And it would also risk the capitalistic model y’all love so much.
If they were able to get a MSR to run for 9 years in the 1960’s we could easily do it now. Stop being a Debbie Downer
Because no other country would be interested in the tech, or capable of building it. “Muh US nukes killed thorium” is a completely America-brained take.
Germany researched Thorium (pebble bed, in particular), never bothered with molten salt because it was seen as not feasible. Japan dabbled with molten salt, projects failed due to lack of funding. Neither countries have any interest in building nukes. The Chinese currently are trying, which is because the Chinese are currently trying everything. The government throwing money at the issue doesn’t in any way imply commercial viability, push come to shove they’d do it for the published papers alone.
I’m sorry for using reality to accost your religious beliefs but they happen to be dumb.
Is this not already the case that these processes are net negative in carbon released? How much does it currently cost, in energy, to capture carbon at these smokestacks?
TL;DR it’s not possible.
We burn carbon based fuels because the reaction between carbon and oxygen releases energy that can be used to generate electricity. It would take EXACTLY as much energy to turn the released CO2 back into oil/coal/carbon except that this is not a perfect world, there are losses at every step. The only way to lower CO2 levels is to globally stop burning fossil fuels for heating and electrical loads (hydrocarbons are needed for a bunch of very specific chemical processes).
Um, nobody is talking about chemically converting the released carbon dioxide back into chemical compounds with stored chemical energy, like hydrocarbons and graphite. They’re talking about physically sequestering CO2, or binding the carbon into materials that aren’t combustible (like calcium carbonate).
Put another way: if I burned some hydrocarbons in a fireplace and put a balloon over the flue, I’d capture some carbon dioxide (and probably some water) in that balloon, and the carbon in that balloon would’ve cost me less energy to capture than was released in burning the hydrocarbons to begin with. So long as I could keep the balloon from leaking or deflating.