Shell CCS Plant Emits More Greenhouse Gases Than It’s Captured

Oil corporations love to inform the world concerning the tremendous cool applied sciences which have that may enable us to maintain burning fossil fuels with out cooking the local weather. But these applied sciences are largely bullshit.

A brand new report from Global Witness paperwork how a much-hyped blue hydrogen plant with carbon seize and storage (CCS) owned by Shell is just capturing a fraction of the greenhouse fuel emissions that the corporate claims. In reality, it’s created extra emissions in its 5 years of operation than it’s captured.

The Quest plant, which is positioned close to Edmonton, Alberta, is a facility designed to create blue hydrogen—a much-hyped new sort of gas—from pure fuel, with an accompanying CCS mechanism to retailer carbon emissions from the method underground. Shell has mentioned that the Quest plant, which began working in late 2015, has stopped greater than 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide—”extra CO2 than anticipated,” Shell’s website claims—from coming into the environment.

The firm is required to report how properly its CCS facility is performing to the Canadian authorities. And the figures inform a barely much less rose-colored story than the one which Shell is telling the general public. The figures present that about 80% of emissions from the method it makes use of to create the blue hydrogen are being captured. However, these emissions solely account for 60% of the plant’s precise emissions. Other carbon emissions from the plant, Global Witness discovered, come from a waste stream that’s a byproduct of this course of—and which Shell shouldn’t be required to report. That signifies that the CCS portion of the ability solely captures 80% of 60% of the plant’s emissions—math that works out to simply underneath 50% of Quest’s total emissions.

“We do think Shell is misleading the public in that sense and only giving us one side of the story,” report writer Dominic Eagleton told Vice.

There are additionally parts of the CCS equation behind the Quest plant that Shell does not publicize, the Global Witness report claims, which makes its footprint even dirtier. CCS techniques are notoriously energy-intensive, and the power the Quest system expends within the strategy of capturing and storing the emissions isn’t included within the figures Shell stories to the federal government. The methane emissions from the provision chain of pure fuel—the first ingredient in blue hydrogen—are additionally an enormous downside, and are equally not included in Shell’s 80% determine.

With these two further inputs calculated, Global Witness estimated that from its opening by means of 2019, the Quest plant has emitted greater than 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the environment, some 2.5 million tonnes greater than Shell says it has captured. In different phrases, solely 39% of the general yearly emissions related to the Quest plant’s total life cycle are literally captured. (A Shell spokesperson instructed Vice that the Quest plant “has met or exceeded our expectations” on the subject of carbon seize, however didn’t remark immediately on Global Witness’s 7.5 million tonnes determine.)

The Quest plant, which was constructed and opened with quite a lot of fanfare, was meant to be a take a look at case for each blue hydrogen and CCS applied sciences; the plant price $1 billion to construct, with greater than $650 million of that cash coming from Canadian authorities subsidies. Shell, for its half, has been spinning the plant as successful.

“Widespread adoption of carbon capture and storage is one of the key solutions the world needs right now to help solve the climate challenge,” Michael Crothers, the president of Shell Canada, mentioned in a statement after the plant reached the 5 million tonnes mark in 2020. “In its fifth year operating, Quest continues to be a thriving example of how carbon capture and storage is working; showing it can make a significant contribution to lowering CO2 emissions and at a lower cost than anticipated.”

But the maths on this report is the newest damning instance of the truth of precise emissions when in comparison with overhyped, early-stage expertise. A examine launched final summer season discovered that blue hydrogen really has a bigger greenhouse fuel footprint than pure fuel, thanks largely to the methane emissions created within the manufacturing and transport of the fuel to make the hydrogen. CCS, which has change into a key lynchpin of many oil and fuel corporations’ local weather insurance policies and guarantees, has additionally constantly confirmed to be an unreliable expertise. In November, Chevron agreed to pay up round $140 million in carbon offsets after its CCS plant in Australia failed to satisfy its targets for capturing not less than 80% of its emissions.

“Shell has described the carbon capture facility at its Alberta plant as showing that carbon capture technology is an effective way of reducing carbon emissions, whereas our investigation shows that’s clearly not the case,” Eagleton instructed Vice. “This should be a wake-up call for governments, not just in Canada, but across the world.”