Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing

by Anya Zoledziowski (Vice World News) A new Global Witness report found that it has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million gas-powered cars. -- A first-of-its-kind “green” Shell facility in Alberta is emitting more greenhouse gases than it’s capturing, throwing into question whether taxpayers should be funding it, a new report has found.

Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage facility captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the hydrogen produced at its Scotford complex between 2015 and 2019. Scotford refines oil from the Alberta tar sands.

But a new report from human rights organization Global Witness found the hydrogen plant emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in the same timeframe—including methane, which has 80 times the warming power of carbon during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and accounts for about a quarter of man-made warming today.

To put that in perspective, the “climate-forward” part of the Scotford plant alone has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million fuel-powered cars, Global Witness said.

“We do think Shell is misleading the public in that sense and only giving us one side of the story,” said Dominic Eagleton, who wrote the report. He said industry’s been pushing for governments to subsidize the production of fossil hydrogen (hydrogen produced from natural gas) that’s supplemented with carbon capture technology as a “climate-friendly” way forward, but the new report shows that’s not the case.

Meanwhile, Germany announced this week that even though it’s opting to subsidize clean hydrogen, it won’t foot the bill for “blue hydrogen,” which uses fossil fuels during production and then sequesters carbon emissions using carbon capture technology (the same type of hydrogen production at Shell’s Scotford plant).

Motherboard reported last week how Canada’s sole coal carbon capture plant keeps breaking. Several experts have already flagged carbon capture technology, particularly in oil and gas, as a poor public investment, citing its failures to drastically curb emissions.

In a letter sent Wednesday to Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and other ministers, hundreds of academics and scientists urged Justin Trudeau’s government to avoid rewarding companies who use carbon capture technology.

Excerpt from The Canadian Press/MSN: In Canada the biggest project is at the Boundary Dam coal-fired power plant in Saskatchewan, but there is also at least one project in the oilsands as well. Both include enhanced oil recovery.

Freeland has made clear enhanced oil recovery will not qualify for any tax credit but the academics want her to go further and limit its use only to industries that have no other options for reducing emissions, such as cement or steel. They want oil, gas, petrochemical and plastics producers to be excluded.

Emily Eaton, an associate professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina, said even if CCUS technology cuts emissions during fossil fuel production, that oil and gas is eventually going to be burned somewhere.

"So the federal government, I think, really has a choice to make," she said. "Either join countries around the world and plan for a sort of managed phaseout of oil and gas or it can prop up this industry with this unproven technology and sort of extend the life and also the emissions of the fossil fuel sector indefinitely."

Last summer Canada's biggest oil companies said getting the oilsands alone to net-zero emissions by 2050 would cost about $75 billion and about half the cuts will have to be made with CCUS. They also said the government would have to shoulder a lot of the cost.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said in August it wanted the CCUS tax credit to cover 75 per cent of the cost.

Matthew Paterson is a politics professor with a focus on climate, who until recently worked at the University of Ottawa. Now at the University of Manchester in England, Paterson said there is a political tension in Canada that exists for governments trying to maintain both climate action and the fossil fuel industry, which accounts for more than five per cent of the Canadian economy. READ MORE