Carbon capture is vital to decarbonizing the global economy, but simply pumping the collected material underground won’t be enough, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said Thursday at an event hosted by Columbia University. Carbon utilization will be vital as well, he said: “Clearly, geological sequestration is there and can take quite a bit, but the reality is we’re not going to, I don’t think we’re going to put 20 gigatons of CO2 underground, so we’re going to need gigaton-scale solutions that can use that carbon in other ways.”
The Department of Energy is involved in several projects focused on carbon dioxide utilization. At the Petra Nova Project in Texas, a joint venture of NRG and JP Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration, captured CO2 is being used in enhanced oil recovery. Skyonic Corp. is using CO2 to make baking soda, also in Texas
Moniz also noted private sector support for carbon utilization research. NRG Energy and Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) have partnered with nonprofit organization XPRIZE to launch a $20 million carbon utilization innovation competition. The competition consists of two tracks, one that will test developmental technologies on emissions from a coal-fired power plant and one that will use emissions from a natural gas-fired power plant. “I think if we keep coming at it from different angles, we’ll get there,” Moniz said.
Hundreds of carbon utilization projects are underway, Moniz noted; fortunately, “We only need a few of them to scale at a reasonable cost.”
Regardless of where the carbon goes, CCS or CCUS is necessary for the world to address climate change, Moniz stressed. To meet the internationally agreed-upon goal of limiting global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius, only a certain amount of carbon can be emitted into the atmosphere. “We’ve used up quite a bit of the budget, so we’ve got to respect that requirement. In doing so, we can do it with continued use of at least a reasonable level of fossil fuels,” the energy chief said.
While CCS has long been considered a technology for coal, it will need to be used on other carbon emitting sources, such as natural gas-fueled energy production and industrial sources such as cement and steel manufacturing. “For the deep decarbonization, it’s also going to be for gas, that we will need some form of capture for example, and then utilization or sequestration,” he said.
For CCS to help with decarbonizing the economy, Moniz said, technology maturation must start now. “In this business, big capital decisions in industry are decades on timescales. They’re not like ‘oh, sequestration just showed up in 2029, let me build a plant in 2030.’ That’s not the way it works, so we need to get the policy signals straight, and we need to get the technology signals straight,” he said.