Many CCS projects will falter quietly without the promised benefits

In a recent special issue of EAGE’s journal First Break, dedicated to underground storage, one finds the usual articles that one would expect for such a publication. But there happened to be one little outlier. Or maybe a slightly larger outlier. A paper published by Ruud Weijermars and Simone Pilia, both affiliated with the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Saudi Arabia.

In the introduction, the authors already warn that their message will not resonate well with the cur­rent “research lobbies and bandwagon supporters” of both green hydrogen production (GHP) and ge­ological carbon sequestra­tion (GCS).

They argue that whilst these parties claim that the technologies to support these activities are mature, in fact they are not, despite the “ballooning” num­ber of literature claiming the contrary.

This dynamic of high levels of literature output has created a system in which political decision makers have gained a lev­el of confidence in these technologies that is, in fact, misplaced. And with pol­iticians ultimately being responsible for handing out subsidies, against a back­drop of well-researched climate change acceleration and a sense of urgency, it is no surprise that we see what we see: A large number of pilot projects depending on large amounts of sub­sidies without there being proof of the technology at scale.

A hype

To back this up, the authors identify what they describe as a typical example of the Gartner-style hype: an ini­tial trigger leading to a peak, followed by disillusionment and, subsequently, a “land­ing” in a phase of more modest, workable solutions.

Looking at the number of publications in the GHP and GCS spaces from Eu­ropean institutions, the authors observe a clear ac­celeration of publications during the last few years, which they now predict to decelerate or even start to fall in the next few years, as projects will pro­gress at a slower rate than expected, or even just out-right disappoint.

No doubt

So, are we now in a phase where we see an increasing number of project failures? The authors leave little doubt. Looking at Gorgon in Australia, which keeps on being the only carbon storage project at scale, they observe continued injection challenges. They also argue that it is no surprise to see the Dutch CCS project Porthos experiencing cost overruns and project delays; the project was assigned to a government entity with­out operational experience that also lacks the contrac­tor-handling leverage that large oil companies have.

Without denying that there is a climate problem that needs to be addressed, on the basis of their ass-essment, the authors cast doubt on whether CCS in the current form will ever be the way to achieve car­bon neutrality.

This is an interesting conclusion, even when it is disconcerting at the same time. With all that public funding that has been and continues to be directed towards technologies that are lagging and costly, what are the alternatives? But still, maybe it is more im­portant to have that very discussion more publicly than burying our heads in the sand.