Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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for twenty-nine out of the forty-one existing CCS plants, the captured carbon is used in a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a technique developed by the oil industry in the 1970s that uses pressurized CO2 injected into oil and gas reservoirs to increase the quantity of hydrocarbons that can be extracted.
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More than 80 percent of all CO2 captured in operational CCS projects is earmarked for EOR
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indeed this is why oil companies developed EOR in the first place — is that CCS technology will enable oil to be extracted from declining fields and unconventional shale oil and gas reservoirs that would have otherwise been unrecoverable.
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When oil companies report their carbon emissions, they refer only to the carbon involved in the actual production of a barrel of oil — not the carbon released when that oil is consumed. In reality, however, at least 85 percent of the carbon emissions associated with the industry come from oil’s final consumption — not its drilling, extraction, and refining.
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As such, oil companies can bank CCS against the emissions associated with their operations, claiming they are supporting the transition to net zero (and earning large tax benefits to boot), all the while ignoring the fact their product is the main driver of global warming. To return to the tobacco analogy, this is a bit like Philip Morris disavowing responsibility for cigarette deaths because lung cancer rates were very low among workers on the company’s assembly line.
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NZE works by appearing as something it is not: net zero is not zero carbon, and the focus on net emissions deflects attention away from the oil companies’ absolute levels of hydrocarbon production.
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In practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now. We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar