Carbon Capture and Storage

By Nicholas Vafeas

Published 14 November 2023

At a Glance

• The Core Problem: Despite aggressive global pushes for renewable energy, fossil fuels still account for roughly 84% of global energy consumption. With per-capita energy demand rising, mitigating emissions requires capturing and neutralizing the colossal carbon dioxide (CO2) output from existing industrial exhaust systems.

• The System Failure: Policy frameworks frequently mandate Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a primary climate tool, yet they ignore a massive, overlapping operational bottleneck. Integrating CCS increases power plant electricity production costs by 20% to 90%. More critically, the structural and technical challenges of long-term underground storage require highly specialized subsurface expertise. Ironically, the global pool of geophysicists from the oil and gas sector capable of solving these complex geological hurdles has dwindled dramatically just when they are needed most.

• The Solution: Governments and energy sectors must move past the ideological rejection of fossil-fuel adjacent disciplines and actively champion cross-disciplinary collaboration. Meeting net-zero goals requires scaling investment in unglamorous earth sciences and geophysics to safely deploy, transport, and structurally monitor CO2 infrastructure.

The Geophysicist Bottleneck: Deploying large-scale Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) infrastructure requires navigating profound subsurface engineering and atmospheric containment challenges, demanding specialized geological expertise that is increasingly scarce.

The transition to renewable energy sources is crucial in reducing our carbon footprint, but we can't escape the reality that a substantial portion of our current energy generation still relies on fossil fuels, which release enormous amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. With national and international Governments, industry and academia strongly focusing on renewable energy, the subject of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is often brought up. Whilst our current `strategies are described with CCS in mind, the whole CCS concept isn't exactly crystal clear to everyone – except, of course, for the humble geophysicist!

Firstly, I must acknowledge that the realm of geophysics goes far deeper (sorry) than CCS, involving many aspects of renewable energy, including off-shore windfarms, geothermal energy and hydrogen storage (some more practical than others). But for this post, I’ll focus on CCS.

Why the need for CCS? Make no mistake, the whole world needs to reduce its energy consumption and change where that energy comes from in order to truly slow down the effects of climate change, but we're not doing either of those things in the capacity that is needed, at least not worldwide.

At present, around 84% of the world's energy still comes from fossil fuels

and we keep using more energy per person, not less.

This age-old addiction to fossil fuels is a wake-up call, and it's telling us to deal with the colossal CO2 dump in our skies.

Today, one of the most common ways to trap CO2 is with a type of liquid called an amine-based solvent that reacts strongly with CO2, but doesn't react to much else in the exhaust. Once exhaust has been treated and then passed through the amine liquid, 85 to 90% of the CO2, in the original exhaust will have reacted with the amine solvent and become trapped within the liquid. When the liquid is heated up, the reaction reverses, thus releasing CO2 into a new container. Straightforward right?

So why haven't we jumped on the CCS bandwagon more enthusiastically, even though it has the potential to seriously cut down on emissions? Well, among others, there are two big roadblocks we've got to navigate, namely: 1) costs, and 2) technical challenges. Whilst discussing the financial aspects of CCS is honestly more of an engineers territory than a geologist, simply put, Electricity production from power plants with integrated carbon capture can cost 20 to 90% more than traditional methods.

The Technical and Financial Roadblocks

While the theoretical concepts of carbon capture are straightforward, deployment relies on navigating two massive system bottlenecks: prohibitive costs and complex subsurface engineering challenges.

From a financial perspective, electricity production from power plants with integrated carbon capture can cost 20% to 90% more than traditional methods. This additional expense is driven entirely by the massive energy penalties required to operate the carbon capture facilities and the capital required to build transport and storage infrastructure.

From a technical perspective, isolating a viable underground storage repository is an immense engineering challenge. Geophysicists must locate and qualify an underground formation that meets strict operational parameters:

• Containment Integrity: Securing an underground reservoir that prevents pressurized CO2 from leaking out over a mandatory 100-year monitoring window.

• Volumetric Capacity: Verifying the geological formation has enough physical space and the correct baseline pressure to absorb industrial-scale emissions.

• Subsurface Coexistence: Ensuring the storage site does not physically clash with concurrent underground activities, such as geothermal energy extraction or hydrogen storage.

• Environmental Security: Guaranteeing that the long-term chemical and physical stability of the injected carbon will not fracture the rock matrix or compromise vital local groundwater systems.

Furthermore, this doesn't even account for the specialized pipeline engineering and surface infrastructure required to compress, transport, and pump a highly pressurized supercritical liquid potentially hundreds of kilometers across shifting terrains without a single infrastructure failure.

It’s a tall order to say the least, and it calls for geoscientists, especially the ones who know their way around the world of oil and gas. But therein lies the point, the pool of geophysical expertise from the oil and gas sector, which could prove invaluable, has dwindled in recent decades. Now, more than ever, we need these skilled geoscientists in our corner to tackle the hurdles.

And that circles us back to our fundamental principle, which, let's be honest, is the recurring motif in the Green Transition – cross-disciplinary collaboration. Despite the formidable challenges it entails, our current policies include CCS as a necessary tool in combatting climate change. Thus, Implementing CCS technology holds the promise of significantly reducing our carbon emissions. Moreover, it underscores the need for expertise, calling on experts from various scientific fields, particularly those that aren’t necessarily “glamorous”, to work together and turn our renewable energy ambitions into concrete reality.