The challenges of carbon dioxide capture & storage persist here (click to expand)

From an Article by Audrey Carleton, VICE Communications, February 8, 2022

The fossil fuel industry has a new plan for Appalachia: Blue hydrogen.

An alliance between some of the largest corporations in the energy business — Shell, General Electric Gas Power, EQT Corporation, Equinor, Mitsubishi, US Steel and Marathon Petroleum — announced in a press release late last week their plan to create a “hydrogen industrial hub” in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Their plan is to work with local stakeholders in the process, creating “a national model for sustainable energy and production systems.”

The companies are putting their faith in an element that’s gained traction as an energy form in recent months, as the bipartisan infrastructure bill includes billions of dollars to build out clean hydrogen energy development. Hydrogen is also the most abundant element in the universe, existing in water, alcohols, and the like.

Producing hydrogen as an energy source requires separating H atoms from other elements in the molecules where it naturally occurs (so, removing the H from H2O, for example). This is most commonly done commercially using steam to separate hydrogen from methane in natural gas; the finished product is referred to as ‘blue hydrogen,’ because it is emissions-free when burned, but is made with polluting sources of energy. (Its green counterpart, ‘green hydrogen’ is made by separating hydrogen atoms from water using renewable sources of energy, like wind and solar.)

Matt Kelso, manager of data and technology at the non-profit environmental watchdog FracTracker Alliance sees the investment in hydrogen as “an extension of the existing polluting industries, by the exact same companies that are polluting our air, land, and water today.”

“It is an excuse to keep drilling, obfuscated under a new identity, in an environment where there is increasing awareness of the damages that oil and gas extraction has caused to the region,” said Kelso, who lives in Pittsburgh, near southwest Pennsylvania’s oil and gas hub.

The plan will capitalize on the region’s natural gas stores, largely trapped in the Marcellus Shale geologic formation, untapped during the fracking boom of the early 2010s. The technique, which involves thrusting drilling fluid deep into rock formations, first vertically, then horizontally, to reach gaps in which natural gas is stored and release it. At the time, fracking promised to resuscitate the oil and gas industry, bringing an economic renaissance to the region.

In reality, these plans didn’t pan out: Actual job numbers paled in comparison to those promised. A 2021 economic analysis by the non-profit think tank Ohio River Valley Institute found that jobs in Appalachian fracking counties climbed by merely 1.6 percent in the 2010s, compared to the 450,000 jobs that industry estimates from the early 2010s laid out. It also led to an oversupply of natural gas that the industry is now trying to offload (most notably by pushing plastics).

The companies are positioning the move as an environmentally-sound one, or a way to achieve “aggressive net zero carbon goals,” Bill Newsom, president and CEO of Mitsubishi Power said in a press release. In fact, the fossil fuel industry more broadly has rallied around using carbon capture and sequestration as a technique to eliminate emissions from steam-methane reforming in the hydrogen production process.

These emissions are substantial. An August, 2021 report out of Cornell and Stanford Universities found that the carbon footprint that comes with creating blue hydrogen is 20 percent larger than that of burning natural gas and coal for heat and 60 percent greater than burning diesel oil for the same purpose.

Thus, carbon capture and storage — in which carbon dioxide is collected at the source of emissions and shot underground into stores — is essential to the fossil fuel companies’ plan if it is to be ‘net zero.’ But CCS comes with its own set of risks; pipelines carrying captured carbon have, in the past, exploded, and in the Marcellus Shale, where oil and gas wells, many abandoned, dot the landscape, shooting it underground could prove geologically risky — pressure from two wells interacting could lead to explosions.

Though the nuances of the ‘blue hydrogen hub’ plan remain opaque, and it is not clear how close any of these corporations are to receiving the permits required to see it through, they have a topline goal to generate “thousands of new jobs” and “protect current jobs,” per the release on the hub.

Matt Kelso remains dubious of this claim. “Based on the past actions of the industry, I would be highly skeptical with whatever figure they put forth,” he said, citing a Shell ethane cracker plant in Pennsylvania that was touted as generating 17,000 jobs but actually created 600. “The economic promises were knowingly inflated by several orders of magnitude, which undoubtedly helped secure better state investment offers,” he said of the project.

Even so, much of the landscape of Appalachia has yet to be reclaimed from already-dying industries; abandoned coal mines continue to leach into waterways and abandoned oil wells sit uncapped, leaking planet-warming methane all the while. The quick shift to a new energy form begs the question of whether a region is ready for a new wild west era, as the remnants of old ones have yet to be cleaned up.

Should DOE’s Vision of an Ohio Valley CO2 Hub be DOA?

From the Blog of Sean O’Leary, Ohio River Valley Institute, 1/27/22

The Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI) responds to a DOE request for information about carbon capture deployment.

Last year, a report titled, “Building to Net-Zero: A U.S. Policy Blueprint for Gigaton-Scale CO² Transport and Storage Infrastructure,” captured the imagination of the Biden administration and the US Department of Energy (DOE). The report envisions an energy system and manufacturing sector that can continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels because power plants and factories would be retrofitted with new technologies to capture their carbon emissions, which would then be transported through thousands of miles of pipelines to massive underground storage caverns.

The report is the product of a collaboration between the Energy Futures Initiative and the AFL-CIO, and it recommends the creation of three “CO2 Infrastructure Hubs” in Wyoming, along the Gulf Coast, and in the Ohio River Valley. The figure (image) above from “Building to Net-Zero: A U.S. Policy Blueprint for Gigaton-Scale CO² Transport and Storage Infrastructure”, Labor Energy Partnership, 2021.

The question is whether these hubs are effective and necessary solutions for the climate crisis or, as in the movie, a detour into financial and political opportunism that fails to solve the problem while inflicting immense financial and environmental costs. The Ohio Valley CO2 hub at least appears to be the latter. The Ohio River Valley Institute explained why that is the case in its response to a recent DOE request for information about the demonstration and deployment of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC) technologies.

In its response, ORVI made three points, which it supported with research findings, to explain why the Ohio River Valley CO2 Hub is a fatally flawed vision.

1. Expanding or perpetuating Appalachian coal and natural gas activity, even if successful, will contribute little or nothing to job growth and prosperity in the region and may even be counterproductive.

2. Because fossil fuel resources do not contribute to increased prosperity and improved quality of life in host communities, any carbon management project DOE considers for funding must be justified purely on the basis of its market competitiveness and greenhouse gas reduction, which, given the technologies’ cost, precludes broad-based adoption in the electricity generating sector and narrows the viability window to niche applications and industries.

3. Because carbon management technology is viable in only niche applications and industries, massive infrastructure projects, such as region-wide pipeline networks and storage hubs for captured carbon and natural gas liquids, are not economically viable and cannot be cost-justified.

In support of these points ORVI cited the failure of recent fossil fuel expansion in Appalachia to deliver job growth despite investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars. We also pointed out that the incremental cost to retrofit coal and gas-fired power plants with CCS capabilities would be greater than the market value of the electricity they generate. That would make them either completely uncompetitive with clean, renewable resources or the wholesale price of electricity would more than double and potentially increase Americans’ utility bills by more than $100 billion per year.

Finally, pointing to the “Building to Net Zero” report’s observation that coal-fired power plants are responsible for over 90% of the region’s carbon emissions, ORVI’s response explained that, if implementing CCS isn’t financially viable in the electric generating sector, then any economic rationale for a massive pipeline and storage network that would cost tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to construct collapses.

These findings make the viability window for proposed carbon capture and sequestration and related carbon management projects quite narrow. For that reason, ORVI encouraged the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) to include in the range of carbon management technologies and projects it considers ones that are devoted to remediating the impacts of past and ongoing fossil fuel activities, which have long saddled the region. These burdens include hundreds of thousands of orphaned and abandoned mines, wells, and toxic waste sites the remediation of which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide large numbers of jobs in areas that struggle most, encourage economic development, and enhance quality of life, making the region more attractive to both businesses and families.

Whether DOE will apply the kind of stern criteria for economic competitiveness and viability that ORVI recommends when considering proposed carbon management projects is at least doubtful. In December the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO), released a report that is highly critical of DOE’s past conduct in selecting and administering funding for carbon capture projects.

The GAO report found that, of eight coal carbon capture projects for which DOE provided $684 million in funding between 2010 and 2017, “Three projects were withdrawn—two prior to receiving funding—and one was built and entered operations, but halted operations in 2020 due to changing economic conditions.” Also, “DOE terminated funding agreements with the other four projects prior to construction.” In short, none of the power system carbon capture projects that DOE supported is alive today.

That’s in part because of a persistent failure to adequately take into account issues of market competitiveness and viability. But it’s also because of political pressure within the agency to waive standard project selection practices and bypass cost controls. The report makes multiple references to DOE “at the direction of senior leadership” failing to adhere to and enforce cost guidelines.

DOE will take a few months to process responses to its RFI and probably later this year will issue a request for proposals for projects that will be considered for funding.

View the full letter of Sean O’Leary here. >>>

https://ohiorivervalleyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/DOE-RFI-Response.pdf

>>> Sean O’Leary, senior researcher, energy and petrochemicals, is a native of Wheeling, WV. He has written about coal, natural gas, and their role in the economies of Appalachia in a book, a newspaper column, and blog titled, “The State of My State”.

Carbon dioxide is difficult to remove AND near impossible to store

Newsprint Article by Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette Mail, 10/28/21

Julio Friedmann, senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, mentioned the impacts of the climate crisis before looking ahead to the future of carbon dioxide removal during a webinar hosted by the WV Center on Climate Change Tuesday night. He went biblical to describe the extreme wildfires, flooding and freezing devastating the country more and more as the climate crisis intensifies.

“We’re having our family stroll through the Book of Revelation this year,” Friedmann said. They are keenly aware that failing to decarbonize at an unprecedented scale in the years to come will result in even more apocalyptic climate impacts.

“If you don’t think this is hard, you’re not paying attention,” Friedmann said. The future of carbon removal, though, is wide open and could see West Virginia play a key, job-creating role in decarbonization efforts. “We’re going to need to make a bunch of stuff here,” Friedmann said.

Carbon management and removal are poised to become the largest markets in history, Friedmann said. He noted that some 100 countries have net-zero emissions goals and alluded to a March report from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a London-based energy and climate analysis nonprofit, that more than a fifth of the world’s largest 2,000 publicly traded companies have made a net-zero commitment.

Friedmann presented a PowerPoint slide that called carbon capture, use and storage technology “mature, cost effective technology for CO2 reduction & removal.” But carbon capture, use and storage technology, which gathers and compresses carbon from emission sources for reuse or underground storage so it will not reenter the atmosphere, has been too uneconomical to be widely deployed. It has also faced criticism from some clean energy advocates fearing that it could be used to justify lingering fossil fuel dependence.

The Global CCS Institute, a think tank that aims to accelerate carbon capture and storage deployment, reported earlier this year that there were 26 operating CCS facilities worldwide, with 34 in early or advanced development.

Friedmann, though, cited U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports from recent years including carbon capture and storage technologies as a critical component of decarbonization models.

Politicians representing constituencies like West Virginia — Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., most prominent among them as Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman — have embraced developing carbon capture, use and storage technologies as a way to keep coal in the energy mix.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate in August would authorize more than $12 billion for carbon capture technologies, a provision taken from Manchin’s Energy Infrastructure Act that served as legislative text for key portions of the bill.

West Virginia Public Service Commission Chairwoman Charlotte Lane also is interested in carbon capture technology and recently asked Manchin to support federal funding for installing carbon capture technology at the Mountaineer coal-fired generating plant in Mason County.

But a briefing document that PSC General Counsel Jessica Lane indicated was discussed at a meeting between Lane and Manchin last month, says that a carbon capture project to treat the slipstream of just 20% of the plant capacity likely would cost $850 million to $1 billion to construct.

The document acknowledges that federal funding of close to 100% of project capital costs would be needed, since the unsubsidized cost for customers would be unsustainable. The document was first obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog group that supports a transition to clean energy.

American Electric Power deemed carbon capture technology uneconomical in its request for $448.3 million in cost recovery to make environmental upgrades at three in-state coal-fired plants federally required to keep them operating past 2028. The PSC granted that request earlier this month, after Kentucky and Virginia utility regulators deemed the proposed upgrades uneconomical.

Friedmann noted that Microsoft, Amazon and Shopify are among the companies to buy direct air capture carbon removal. Direct air capture is a technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air. The carbon removal market, Friedmann observed, needs much greater structure and definition.

“We need to be able to quantify CO2 removals and validate them in the marketplace,” Friedmann said. “Today in the market, there’s no supply, there’s no demand, there’s no transparency, there’s no regulation and there’s no actual exchange. Other than that, the market’s perfect.” Friedmann predicted that the cost of direct air capture technology would come down “pretty fast” as more is deployed.

Fellow panelist and Wayne County native Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a Washington, D.C.-based climate-focused nonprofit, emphasized the difference between carbon capture, which is the process of capturing carbon from a smokestack or flue before it enters the atmosphere, and carbon removal, which takes carbon from the atmosphere and doesn’t have to involve fossil fuel production or extraction.

“For a long time, people have talked about opportunities around employment in places like West Virginia around point-source carbon capture,” Burns said. “But I think that that promise has never appeared in any meaningful way.” She argued that carbon removal could be more impactful in West Virginia from forest preservation and expansion to steelmaking and direct air capture facility work as that technology is scaled up. “Carbon removal is not a silver bullet for West Virginia’s future,” Burns said, “but I think it could be an interesting part of it.”

The webinar took place just hours after the U.S. Department of Energy announced $14.5 million in available funding to leverage existing low-carbon energy to scale up direct air capture technology combined with reliable carbon storage. The agency called advancing direct air capture deployment critical to slowing climate change and achieving net zero emissions by 2050. The department intends for the funding to facilitate engineering studies of advanced direct air capture systems capable of removing 5,000 tons of carbon per year from the air — the equivalent of electricity used by more than 900 homes in the United States for one year.

“[T]here are a lot of people working very, very hard to try to not do it poorly,” panelist Emily Grubert, deputy assistant secretary for carbon management at the Department of Energy, said of carbon removal. “There are pathways where this is done really well and really provides an important net benefit to the world. We can get there, but it’s going to be a hard road, and we need help.”