Skepticism on CCS continues to grow as leading company allegedly closed largest carbon capture plant
"An Oil Giant Quietly Ditched the World’s Biggest Carbon Capture Plant", 23 Octubre 2023
"The world wants to master the process of corralling carbon, and Occidental Petroleum Corp. is building a futuristic machine on the dusty plains of Texas designed to do just that.
The billion-dollar complex, called Stratos, will suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bury it deep underground. Amazon.com Inc., Shopify Inc., Airbus SE and the Houston Texans football team are among the businesses signed up to pay by the ton for captured carbon, long before the site is operational...
This is not the first time Occidental has bet big on technology to manage carbon. A mega-plant for carbon capture and storage — a facility named Century located about 100 miles from Stratos — was built by the oil giant in 2010. At the time it was set to become the biggest-ever example of carbon capture, representing more than 20% of global capacity...
A Bloomberg Green investigation has revealed that Century never operated at more than a third of its capacity in the 13 years it’s been running. The technology worked but the economics didn’t hold up because of limited gas supplied from a nearby field, leading to disuse and eventual divestment. Oxy quietly sold off the project last year for a fraction of the build cost. It was a far cry from the fanfare the company made in the plant’s early years — and the anticipation that’s been building for Stratos.
Occidental shares fell as much as 4.7% on Monday, making it the second-worst performer in the S&P 500 index...
Occidental said the Century plant “continues to operate as designed.” A spokesperson said in an email it would be a “mischaracterization” and “false narrative” to use the plant as an example of CCS project performance...
Shortcomings have marred virtually all of carbon capture’s previous generation used for climate purposes, an assortment of a few dozen facilities around the world grouped under the acronym CCS (for carbon capture and storage). Century’s struggles show the risk of underwriting the cost of carbon capture with fossil fuel revenues. Even if the technology works, projects frequently fail when commodity prices drop.
This legacy of underperformance is a warning about relying on the next wave of carbon-wrangling tech — both newer DAC projects like Stratos and an anticipated build-out of CCS facilities like Century on a vast scale — to play the role of climate savior..."