After decades of sowing doubt about climate change and its causes, the fossil fuel industry is now shifting to a new strategy: presenting itself as the source of solutions. This repositioning includes rebranding itself as a “carbon management industry.”

This strategic pivot was on display at the Glasgow climate summit and at a Congressional hearing in October 2021, where CEOs of four major oil companies talked about a “lower-carbon future.” That future, in their view, would be powered by the fuels they supply and technologies they could deploy to remove the planet-warming carbon dioxide their products emit – provided they get sufficient government support.

That support may be coming. The Department of Energy recently added “carbon management” to the name of its Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management and is expanding its funding for carbon capture and storage.

But how effective are these solutions, and what are their consequences?

Coming from backgrounds in economics, ecology and public policy, we have spent several years focusing on carbon drawdown. We have watched mechanical carbon capture methods struggle to demonstrate success, despite U.S. government investments of over US$7 billion in direct spending and at least a billion more in tax credits. Meanwhile, proven biological solutions with multiple benefits have received far less attention.

CCS’s troubled track record

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, aims to capture carbon dioxide as it emerges from smokestacks either at power plants or from industrial sources. So far, CCS at U.S. power plants has been a failure.

Seven large-scale CCS projects have been attempted at U.S. power plants, each with hundreds of millions of dollars of government subsidies, but these projects were either canceled before they reached commercial operation or were shuttered after they started due to financial or mechanical troubles. There is only one commercial-scale CCS power plant operation in the world, in Canada, and its captured carbon dioxide is used to extract more oil from wells – a process called “enhanced oil recovery.”

Read full story The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/why-the-oil-industrys-pivot-to-carbon-capture-and-storage-while-it-keeps-on-drilling-isnt-a-climate-change-solution-171791

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