Norwegian CCS Boss: CCS is not BS

Sitting on a panel during the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit in New York City on April 24, Michael Bloomberg proclaimed that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is “total bullshit.” That statement was not received well by Trude Sundset, CEO of Gassnova, Norway’s state enterprise for the development of CCS.

“There’s a whole new world opening up, so I think we have to accept that there will be a lot of disruptive changes in the world,” Sundset told POWER. “You cannot just talk about one technology and say it’s ‘bullshit.’ That’s not acceptable.”

CCS has long been in an awkward position in the U.S., not entirely accepted on either side of the increasingly divisive issue of climate change. Environmentalists, like billionaire activist Bloomberg, shy away from the technology because it could serve as a lifeline to fossil fuel, which they would prefer stay in the ground.

Those who reject mainstream climate science often see no reason to support CCS, questioning why they should support a technology to reduce carbon emissions whey they don’t believe that carbon is a problem.

“We have the same debate in Norway as you have here in the U.S. where they want to get rid of all the fossil fuels immediately, just stop producing it and just go for renewables,” Sundset said. “If you do the numbers and you look at the targets from the Paris Agreement, it’s not enough just to do renewables. You have to do CCS, and there’s no way you can just phase out all the fossil fuels, it’s not possible.”

Not only do most climate models show that CCS is essential to keeping the average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, but reports have also suggested that addressing climate change will be much more expensive without CCS. “Without CCS, the transformation of the power sector will be at least USD 3.5 trillion more expensive. In a ‘no CCS in power’ scenario variant of the [2-degree scenario (2DS)], deployment of renewable technologies would need to be expanded by an additional 1900 GW by 2050 over and above the 2DS requirements. This is equivalent to around four times the total wind and solar PV capacity additions achieved in the last decade,” according to an International Energy Agency report released in November 2016.

“I would challenge back the people saying that you shouldn’t use CCS: How are you going to solve the climate problem? Can you show me your roadmap to degrees or even 1.5 degrees? It’s not possible. I’ve seen a lot of roadmaps, they all include CCS and then we have to get going,” Sundset said.

The right, and members of industry, have been signaling support for CCS recently, particularly since the election of President Donald Trump, who was vocal about his support for “clean coal” during his campaign. After meeting with a few Republicans in the Senate, Sundset concluded that “they are going to promote CCS, they think that CCS is a good technology, and so what I take home with me now is, which I didn’t know before I came here, is that in the U.S. the Republicans are really promoting CCS as a solution,” she said.

However, where that support will land the nation remains to be seen. Signals from the White House are mixed. While the Trump administration has applauded the recently completed Petra Nova CCS project in Texas, Trump also proposed a budget contained deep cuts to the Department of Energy office involved with the project.

The president’s “skinny budget,” which differs significantly from the omnibus budget currently being mulled over by the Senate, would focus funding for the Office of Fossil Energy “on limited, early-stage applied energy research and development activities where the Federal role is stronger.”

This is somewhat problematic as CCS’s most significant obstacle at this point is a lack of large-scale projects, several of which were presented funding under the Obama administration though only a few have been completed. “I think it’s very important to get more full-scale projects up and running because when you build things full-scale is when you learn enough and feed that back to research and demonstration,” Sundset said.

Norway is working on its own demonstration projects, though unlike those in the U.S., the Norwegian projects are mostly industrial, as opposed to energy-based, with the exception of a waste-to-energy plant in Oslo.

The government is currently considering two other projects as well as the Oslo project, all three of which are in the concept and detailed engineering phase. “We don’t know how much funding we’ll get from the government, so we’re not sure if we’ll build one, two, or three at the same time. It could be that you build one first, and then you build the second one after because we are dependent on public funding,” Sundset explained. “By 2019 the plan is to make the investment decision.”

The Oslo plant, which is located near the city center, is particularly interesting as one of the goals of the project is to use CCS without cutting energy production. “You have a lot of waste around the world, and so I think what’s good about the project is that it’s transferable. You can copy what we’re doing,” Sundset said of the project.

—Abby L. Harvey is a POWER reporter.