This is the third article in a series delving into the contentious topic of carbon capture and storage at point-source emitters like power plants and industrial facilities. My first article discussed the three technologies used in CCS, and my second examined their strengths and weaknesses.
This article is about a dirty little secret habitually glossed over by CCS supporters: there simply aren’t many places to store captured carbon dioxide.
A small coal-fired power plant with a 100 MW capacity running at 80% utilization would generate nearly 700,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year. Triple that figure for a medium-sized coal-fired plant and multiply by ten for a large plant.
You might be considering 700,000 metric tons in a theoretical sense, so I’ll state it in visceral terms. That weight in steel stacked in a city block would stand fifteen stories high. That weight in corn would completely fill a professional sports stadium.
Finding sufficient space in which to store that much of anything is not easy and requires non-trivial engineering.
Capturing carbon is only one-third of the CCS battle
Geologists would suggest that there are plenty of geological formations that could store an enormous amount of carbon dioxide. Indeed, carbon storage capacity is a good news-bad news story.
The good news is that the U.S. is the world leader in carbon dioxide storage capacity. The bad news comes in two parts.
First, there is hardly any operational storage capacity outside the U.S., as indicated by the dark green sections in the graph below. Storage facilities are in early stages of planning and construction, but at nowhere near the required scale.
The second bit of bad news is that even in the U.S., where storage capacity is often related to enhanced oil recovery—extracting oil from tight reservoirs by injecting pressurized CO2—facilities emitting carbon dioxide aren’t situated near suitable underground storage sites.
Since many emission sources are far from viable storage sites, transporting captured carbon dioxide represents a daunting engineering and political obstacle.
Post-CCS transportation of CO2 represents a huge political and engineering challenge
Interstate pipelines must be approved by several federal regulatory agencies and are subject to further regulation if traversing or bordering on environmentally protected areas.
State regulators must also approve such plans, and the pipeline company must jump through various municipal hoops pertaining to taxes, zoning, and land use. The pipeline company must finally secure contiguous property for the entire pipeline route through easements or the arduous legal process of eminent domain.
Once the property has been purchased, the pipeline constructed, and the regulatory hurdles cleared, operating a carbon dioxide pipeline can be fraught with peril, as the residents of Sartartia, Mississippi—a town situated near a CO2 pipeline that burst in 2020—know too well.
Considering the difficulties in planning, permitting, and operating a CO2 pipeline, it would be reasonable to ask how long it would take to build out the infrastructure necessary to transport carbon dioxide, and how much of it already exists.
There are only just over 5,000 miles of pipelines permitted to transport carbon dioxide, only 1.25% of the 400,000 miles of natural gas pipelines in the U.S. The natural gas pipeline system has taken ~100 years to build, suggesting a long road lies ahead for the buildout of CO2 pipelines.
(Make sure to check out my recent article about two U.S. start-ups that are generating electricity from natural gas pipelines without burning any gas!)
You might expect that natural gas pipelines could be repurposed to transport carbon dioxide, but these pipelines must undergo significant renovations—including replacement with pipes constructed of thicker, specialized steel—to be certified to carry CO2.
Building out new pipelines is expensive. The 2,000-mile Midwest Carbon Express pipeline was estimated to cost $3.5 billion, or $1.75 million per mile.
Spending this much money might make sense for a coal-fired power plant generating 700,000 metric tons of CO2 which can be sold to an oil major that needs the pressurized gas for EOR.
However, will the owner of a small manufacturing facility generating a fraction as much CO2 pony up $1.75 million per mile to transport their emissions?
CCS infrastructure is being built out
The situation is not as bleak as I have painted it. Several large oil and gas companies are building billions of tons of CO2 capacity in the Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast industrial corridor region, an area responsible for about half the refining capacity in the U.S. and a major center for chemical production as well.
For example, the Occidental Petroleum subsidiary 1PointFive is developing the Bluebonnet Hub; Chevron, Total, and Equinor are building the nearby Bayou Bend CCS facility, and ExxonMobil is building a facility to store CO2 from Linde’s blue hydrogen production center. These storage facilities will store many billions of tons of CO2 underground.
This incremental progress is great, but facilities less accessible to storage hubs will find it difficult to transport carbon dioxide if they invest in equipment to capture it. Smaller emitters are out of luck due to the expense of pipeline construction unless they are situated very close to accessible pipelines.
I have been speaking with a few interesting companies with viable solutions to the CCS quandary described in this series.
One start-up, Neustark, a young Swiss firm has developed a great solution for storing captured carbon dioxide without burying it underground. Neustark’s solution works especially well for smaller emitters that have no way to use lower-emission technologies in their processes.
Follow my work here to learn more about Neustark’s solution to the biggest deal killer for CCS.
Intelligent investors take note.
