We all gasped when she said it. Everyone looked up.
Patricia Wright, vice president of external affairs for BP America and president of the BP Foundation, repeated herself to make sure we all understood: With carbon capture and storage we can reduce CO2 emissions by 90 percent and begin to solve one of our most serious energy problems.""
Could it be possible that we had found a solution to carbon dioxide emissions in the past few years but I'd been too busy to hear about it?
What Wright had in mind could mean major improvement for the environment.
Six billion tons of CO2 are released each year into the atmosphere from power stations, chemical plants and steel foundries, and these emissions cause our Earth to heat up at an alarming speed.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a process through which CO2 emissions from large point sources like these can be captured, transported and stored away in deep sea or geological formations, rather than released in the atmosphere. And Wright is right about the fact that it would reduce the CO2 emissions from these plants by 90 percent.
Sounds like a miracle solution.
But what Wright did not tell us is that CO2 capture, compression and transportation is actually very costly to the environment and to our wallets. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's air emission estimates of plants designed with CCS technology show that while CO2 emission drops, fuel use and emission of other air pollutants increases significantly, consistently outweighing the benefits.
Once CO2 is captured from point sources like power plants it has to be stored or used in some way.
Proposed ideas for storage include the ocean deep and geological formations below the Earth's surface. But storing CO2 in the ocean carries a large risk of ocean acidification with potentially disastrous effects on oceanic ecosystems. And according to an IPCC report, storing CO2 in deep geological formations is not a viable long-term plan. Maximum capacity for underground storage units has been estimated by the IPCC as 2000 Gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2, far from enough when humans are estimated to produce 30Gt of CO2 each year.
Plus, we can't keep storing everything we don't want to deal with (trash, nuclear waste, CO2) in the depths of the Earth and think it will disappear. There's always the risk of a leak.
CO2 is potentially lethal, and concentrations above 7 to 10 percent cause unconsciousness and death. Even a small leak of concentrated CO2 gas to the surface could kill millions of people.
The real hope for CCS technology isn't necessarily for citizens, plant owners or the environment at this point; it's for large oil companies like BP that have their best interest in mind. And though when Wright spoke about CCS's environmental benefits her concern seemed genuine, it was also the result of 25 years of experience in public relations for big oil companies like Amoco and BP.
With dwindling reserves, access to more oil is always the first priority for a big oil industry.
CCS technology has a lot of potential to help oil industries tap into unused resources through a process known as Enhanced Oil Recovery. In EOR, gases such as CO2 are injected beneath otherwise inaccessible oil reserves, creating a sort of aerosol that pushes out the petrol. Combined with storage, the technology could yield important benefits for energy industries.
This may be why one of BP's strategies is to acquire mature oil fields in proximity to BP-owned point sources. With CCS technology, CO2 could be captured and transported from polluting BP power plants to oil fields where it could be used in EOR projects to acquire more oil.
One way to get this done is to follow BP Strategy Recommendations and gain public support for CCS through awareness about global warming: ""As the profile and risks of the climate change issue increases, public opinion will demand a solution ... and government will have to foot the bill.""
Which seems to be exactly what Ms. Wright has in mind.
