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

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Which should surprise nobody. Carbon capture is energy-intensive and expensive, and invariably fails to live up to the unrealistic expectations of climate obsessives. In terms of its supposed purpose it just isn’t worth it.
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A new report provides some damning new math on one of the oil giant’s much-hyped CCS projects, says Gizmodo.

Oil companies love to tell the world about the super cool technologies that have that will allow us to keep burning fossil fuels without cooking the climate. But those technologies are largely bullshit.

A new report from Global Witness documents how a much-hyped blue hydrogen plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) owned by Shell is only capturing a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions that the company claims.

In fact, it’s created more emissions in its five years of operation than it’s captured.

The Quest plant, which is located near Edmonton, Alberta, is a facility designed to create blue hydrogen—a much-hyped new kind of fuel—from natural gas, with an accompanying CCS mechanism to store carbon emissions from the process underground.

Shell has said that the Quest plant, which started operating in late 2015, has stopped more than 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — “more CO2 than expected,” Shell’s website claims — from entering the atmosphere.

The company is required to report how well its CCS facility is performing to the Canadian government. And the figures tell a slightly less rose-colored story than the one that Shell is telling the public. The figures show that about 80% of emissions from the process it uses to create the blue hydrogen are being captured.

However, these emissions only account for 60% of the plant’s actual emissions. Other carbon emissions from the plant, Global Witness found, come from a waste stream that’s a byproduct of this process—and which Shell is not required to report.

That means that the CCS portion of the facility only captures 80% of 60% of the plant’s emissions—math that works out to just under 50% of Quest’s overall emissions.

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

There are also portions 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 systems are notoriously energy-intensive, and the energy the Quest system expends in the process of capturing and storing the emissions isn’t included in the figures Shell reports to the government.

The methane emissions from the supply chain of natural gas—the primary ingredient in blue hydrogen—are also a big problem, and are similarly not included in Shell’s 80% figure.

With these two additional inputs calculated, Global Witness estimated that from its opening through 2019, the Quest plant has emitted more than 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, some 2.5 million tonnes more than Shell says it has captured.

In other words, only 39% of the overall yearly emissions associated with the Quest plant’s entire life cycle are actually captured.

Full article here.