Shell’s carbon capture plant is emitting more than it’s capturing | Hacker News Reader

Shell’s carbon capture plant is emitting more than it’s capturing

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269 pointsbjourne94 comments

It sounds like this was intended.

It looks like the project may've been based on winning a grant [from this call [PDF]](https://www.alberta.ca/release.cfm?xID=2638932A61D80-09C7-C9... ) from 2009, which wanted:

> The first round of commercial scale projects is expected to achieve annual carbon dioxide reductions by 2015 equivalent to taking approximately one-million vehicles, or about a third of all registered vehicles in the province, off of the road.

Sounds like the Canadian-government was looking for projects that'd remove a lot of CO2 for the money, rather than necessarily a high portion of CO2 from the source.

Then from the executive-summary of [this report from 2011](https://open.alberta.ca/publications/quest-carbon-capture-an... ):

> Over one million tonnes of CO2 per year will be captured, representing greater than 35% capture of the CO2 produced from the Upgrader.

Plus [this project-database](https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/quest.html ) also listed it as being intended to capture ~35%.

It's kinda weird to capture just ~35%, but apparently they didn't need to go higher to meet the project-specification.

Here's (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8) a satirical 'honest government ad' on carbon capture from an Australian viewpoint.

We're attempting to apply dodgy accounting tricks to reality. It doesn't work.

(I know there's greater transparency without it, but I too would really like []() markup for links on HN.)

Another way of looking at it is that they captured 6 million tonnes of CO2, which is not a bad demonstration for the technology. Shell never claimed that they can achieve zero or negative emission. It's a hydrogen plant, it creates hydrogen and CO2. They managed to capture almost half of the CO2.

Still not climate-friendly, but it's something.

It's not like Shell would make a carbon capture plant for nefarious purposes. They wouldn't set up a carbon capture plant just to accelerate global warming.

They don’t think along this axis at all, I’m afraid. They try to maximize profits while having more compliance checkboxes checked than their competition does.

Good/bad for planet is more of a marketing sort of issue.

Even if Shell is a completely amoral company (they're really not) setting up a carbon capture plant that emits carbon is still not even rational.

As the first comment in this tree pointed out, it's not, in fact a "a carbon capture plant". It's an oil refinery with added facilities to capture the CO2 that the refinery emits. And now it turns out that it captures less than half of the overall emissions. Which is better than nothing, but not nearly good enough.

If they're not amoral, they are morally evil, since they have repeatedly tried to cover up global warming, oil spills, and have many many other sins to their name.

I don’t think it comes from being evil as such. Not a hollywood villain evil, at any rate.

Antropomorphic personifications of Shell or BP would sure come out as very ruthless businessmen with enormous egos, deeply afraid of criticism and dealing with it dirty at times. But people who make up those corporations and direct them and so on are often driven by desires to do their jobs as efficiently as they can, make their dime, and deeply wishing that could please some unintended consequences of their jobs please be someone else’s problem. Please? “Will no one rid me of this turbulent environmental activist?”

In other words, a pretty normal situation in a big company.

Sure, but that would mean that the company as an entity is amoral, which the previous comment claimed "they are really not".

but you're conflating amoral with immoral; they are not the same

I am not. You can claim that Shell and other oil companies are either amoral (they are not moral entities, their decisions are not subject to moral considerations), which is what you were saying; or, you can claim that they are immoral (they are moral entities, and have been making the wrong moral choices).

But I don't think there is any way to see them as moral (as in morally good).

It's all relative though. The EV and solar industry certainly lies about the carbon footprint of their tech, exploitation of workers in developing countries, mining pollution, etc.

I mean I agree that carbon capture should not be used as an excuse to prolong the fossil fuel industry, but we sort of need to produce hydrogen to produce ammonia.

It's hard to get out of this trap, because ammonia is critical for the agriculture, and this is not a sustainable practice, but it's a Sophie's choice. Starve now or kick the can down the road and likely face bigger problems.

The fossil fuel industry gets the angry letters, but in this case agriculture is the one that needs to be reinvented first.

Green hydrogen is a thing. It is not economically viable now, but the costs of electrolyzers are falling.

The world in 2020 had 300 MW of electrolyzer capacity, but multiple companies (Cummins, thyssenkrupp, etc) are building factories with the capacity to build 1 GW of electrolyzers per year.

The IEA anticipates 17 GW of installed electrolyzer capacity in 2026.

https://www.iea.org/articles/could-the-green-hydrogen-boom-l...

Green hydrogen could be cost-competitive in a few years.

They set it up for the purpose of staying in business and staying in business for them means continuing to extract petrol. So yeah they are doing this to continue to accelerate global warming.

Staying in business is all the ultimately care about. If they can use their expertise to make green energy in an economical way that is on par with their current money flow they would have no issues with that. It's all about money in the end with investors.

Okay, but why is the government subsidizing this? That just encourages increasing the volume of production that increases emissions over time. Instead we need to progressively ramp up taxes on fossil fuels to drive down demand over time.

Government should do both: tax carbon and use it to pay for pilot projects and moonshots that could be valuable in the fight against AGW.

It was definitely a light-bulb moment, recognizing that in some cases, taxation is not a necessary evil, but a positive good (in this case, pricing externalities) [0].

At this point, I care less about what carbon taxes pay for, than making sure they exist at all, enough to shift incentives on both production and consumption. (That said: the dividend strategy certainly does seem to have advantages for political viability, and avoiding "yellow-vest" backlash to regressive taxation.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

Canada carbon tax is interesting because it’s meant to be almost a zero-sum game. They take the money and you get it back in your tax refund. So it is more about pricing externality and ensure we slowly switch to better alternatives without disproportionately taxing us.

My understanding is that it’s designed to be zero-sum for someone who emits the average amount of carbon for a Canadian. If you emit less personally (say by taking public transit and living in an energy efficient apartment) you’ll actually get more back than you pay. If you are a big emitter it is a net tax in your activity.

I like that design, since wealth is highly correlated with carbon emissions. I do want to see more programs to make rental units more energy efficient, since renters tend to be less wealthy and are in less control of how much they emit. If their landlord refuses to insulate more, switch from gas heat (or worse they are stuck with baseboard electric) there is very little someone can do to reduce their emissions and any incentives from the carbon pricing just become the punitive tax critics say carbon pricing is.

Fwiw this is what "zero-sum" usually means. Not that it has net zero impact for any individual, but that the total impact is some fixed amount: every (marginal) dollar gained by you is a dollar paid by someone else.

That taxes and tax breaks can be used in to create incentives is one of the fundamental aspects of modern liberalism. Most people don’t have the libertarian idea of taxes where they are evil/theft.

If you only fund things that fully work, you'll never get anything new because research takes steps. It doesn't happen in a day.

My question is why the government is funding Shell of all companies. The ones who have contributed to so much climate change and climate denial in the first place — shouldn’t this come out of their own pocketbook?

Pragmatism and realpolitik.

It doesn't really matter who is doing it so long as it's being done. The incentives align, and they're well positioned to do this.

Indeed. In the choice between punishing a corporation and solving the problem, we should pick solving the problem.

Thank you for that strawman. In a world with two choices, I take the third. Lets open up dialouge, not close all doors but two.

False dichotomy is the fallacy you're reaching for.

FTA:

> Joanna Sivasankaran, the press secretary for the Minister of Natural Resources, said, “Carbon capture utilization and storage is not a silver bullet to the climate crisis but it is an important tool on the pathway to reaching Canada’s ambitious climate goals and reducing emissions in many industries, including oil and gas.”

Oh I’m not suggesting to avoid gov funding research. I’d just rather see that money go to academics, gov labs, and startups rather than a multinational who has raped the Earth for decades, and helped (helps?) fund climate denial. For those companies, I’d suggest forcing them to subsidize the research rather than the public subsidize them.

No to privatizing profits while socializing loses.

It's a pretty pragmatic call: Shell has decades of experience with large scale chemistry operations, and the oil majors have been hiring all the smartest engineers in the field for decades, similar to how FAANG hovers up much of the software engineering talent by offering humongous salaries. If there is any company that has a decent chance at success for scaling up carbon capture technology, it is probably Shell or one of their main competitors.

This type of hardware-based market is much less amenable to the type of startup-driven innovation that we see in the software world, because building a large scale chemical plant is so incredibly expensive.

>I’d suggest forcing them to subsidize the research rather than the public subsidize them.

I'm afraid the sanction approach would merely force Shell to limit research/commercialization efforts and take jobs and tax revenues out of Canada.

You're not designing a greenfield system. But if you want to go hardline, there would be severe consequences for Canada.

From one perspective Shell has the most to gain from this technology. They are being forced to go green. So that can happen in one of two ways.

1) They convert their entire operation to green energy sources and scrap all their current investments. Meaning a major shift in operations.

2) They capture their emissions in place and turn their emitting sources into neutral (or negative) sources. To be honest, the second is probably easier and cheaper. Remember, the problem isn't so much that we are producing carbon, it is that we are producing carbon and we're ending up with too much in the atmosphere. If we produce carbon and it doesn't end up in the atmosphere then we don't really have the same problem.

This is not a research effort. It's a scam.

Because carbon is the negative part of using fossil fuels? If this improves enough there could end up being no problem whatsoever with fossil fuels.

We should fund efforts like this with carbon taxes however because carbon hurts now

For the same reason governments the world over subisidize research (which, on its own, obviously emits more co2 than it directly saves, as it directly saves zero), or why e.g. germany has subsidized solar so hard there were plenty of obvious net-negative cases to be found:

To pull the technology through the hole where it is financially inefficient - without having to wait for some investor to take that gamble (and expect the 10x return that goes with it).

_IF_ the subsidies continue forever and _IF_ this technology now takes over all other attempts, you're totally right: Utter madness.

But those 2 ifs are extraordinary claims.

> Okay, but why is the government subsidizing this?

Because the goal is to reduce carbon emissions. This plant produces Hydrogen out of hydrocarbons, and manages to sequester 40% of the CO2 output. The Hydrogen produced maybe be used to generate electricity, for example. The obtained MWh of electricity will have less CO2 emissions than if you simply burn the hydrocarbon to begin with. Moreover, you can store the Hydrogen for load balancing. It's not 100% carbon neutral, but it's an improvement over what's available now; the perfect is the enemy of the good.

We need hydrogen for a number of chemical processes, and this will be increasingly true moving forward as we start using it for things like direct reduction of iron to reduce carbon emissions in making steel. Green hydrogen is coming, and will likely be cheaper than grey by the end of the decade, but governments had no way of knowing this when this project was commissioned.

Besides which, there are still many, many plants producing grey hydrogen that are going to keep running until they reach EOL. If we can find ways of reducing their carbon output, that seems like a net gain to me. This project is a demonstrator for such technology, and is a net gain over just another grey hydrogen plant.

> Instead we need to progressively ramp up taxes on fossil fuels to drive down demand over time.

this is incredibly simplistic.

our whole way of living produces huge amounts of CO2. chemical engineering, mining, aviation, shipping, food production and a lot more. you can start taxing CO2 and realise that some industries cannot function without producing it. thus another solution is needed. CCS is that solution. with enough money we could have the best of both worlds: keeping our way of life and capturing all the CO2 we produce.

Because the Alberta tar sands focussed the various political playbooks of the oil companies for a decade or so and now they have their fingers in the Canadian government.

These are companies that topple nations if they want to, and basically own US Congress.

Their power is waning only because their stocks are collapsing.

This is like selling 10 dollar bills for 9 dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction

Then why is Shell Canada's operating profit margin hitting 29%?

[0] https://reports.shell.com/tax-contribution-report/2018/our-t...

Because they are selling the tax payers dollar bills.

You need to clarify.

1. Who is "they"?

2. What is $10?

3. What is $9?

I linked an article showing Shell paid $8B to Canada in taxes in 2018 alone.

With this CC project, GHG emissions are being stored for the foreseeable future. Without the CC project, the core refinery would be emitting a net increase of GHG.

The value destruction analogy doesn't work.

You should try to read beyond the headline, I’m sure you can do it :)

This is like selling 10 dollar bills for 9 dollars and 1 euro.

Petroleum companies have captured our governments and are subsidizing bs technology to stay relevant on our dime, it has never been about zero emissions for them.

As someone else said: "We lose money on every sale, but we're hoping to make it up in volume!"

No it is nothing. It has concocted a way to launder fossil fuel demand through another product stream.

It takes as much or more energy to capture the co2 as it took to create it in the first place. It’s just the laws of the universe.

The way the capture guys argue is that if you have a plant that captures 50% of carbon emissions, then you run it on >50% renewable fuel, and it ends up carbon neutral or negative.

Of course it’s fun to laugh at the “capture guys” for not understanding basic math, but do you have an actual source for this accusation?

The "basic math" here is straightforward:

100 tonnes of carbon in fuel. 50 are captured, 50 go to the atmosphere. If more than 50 tonnes originally came from the atmosphere recently, then the net flow to the atmosphere is negative.

There may be other issues with carbon capture (its expensive, doesn't necessarily prevent other pollutants, can be part of a greenwashing scheme). But snark about math isn't useful, especially when you are wrong.

It would had captured more carbon (or at least, less carbon in the atmosphere) if you didn't turn it on.

It would be great a carbon capture technology, on which companies should invest billions in a technology that turns carbon into (natural) gas, liquid (oil) or solid (coal) form and bury them deep underground. In the same way with that plant, not extracting them in the first place would be a more efficient solution.

But instead we have this kind of placebo technology that not only does nothing, but worsen the problem, and with some creative accounting gives them an excuse to extract even more fossil fuels and delays even more the urgent actions needed to mitigate the devastating consequences that warming at the current rate will bring.

Sounds like a great plan... if you don't need electricity

Could those billions be used to change all electrical generation facilities to not use fossil fuels? And then turn all public transport in the world to electric ones? And then private cars, heating, and so on?

Yes, that could be expensive, but you don't want to know how expensive will be to do nothing.

In fact, billions were already used in denialism campaigns by Shell and other companies, if they can use billions for that then well we may charge them trillions to mitigate what they put all of us into.

But no, the chosen way will be to blame others, try to reach a mythical net-zero and increase extraction of fossil fuels and pumping it into the environment while they last.

> Could those billions be used to change all electrical generation facilities to not use fossil fuels?

Probably only if you're willing to invest in Nuclear.

Solar, Batteries and Wind and such are just not there yet. And may not ever be.

> Solar, Batteries and Wind and such are just not there yet. And may not ever be.

What is your definition of "there"? Because green energy is already cheaper than nuclear. There is zero need for nuclear. Wind, solar, hydro and geothermal with sufficient storage can meet all our needs. Stop pushing pro nuclear FUD.

>Wind, solar, hydro and geothermal with *sufficient storage* can meet all our needs.

The sufficient storage part is the key.

You can massively overbuild wind, solar and hydro capacity and still have parts of each day or stretches of several days a year where these sources will provide very little of their nameplate capacity.

Geothermal is pretty reliable, but not something I'm keeping an eye on as I'm not aware of any large energy systems where this type of power generation will play a significant role.

"with sufficient storage"

Sure, it's easy to say. There's currently no tech available that could be deployed for grid scale storage. Batteries are needed elsewhere, pumped up hydro requires specific geography, hydrogen is too inefficient. And all of those would cost a lot to be able to deal with a multi-day energy generation slump ( e.g. a big storm).

Um, LCOE for utility solar and wind is under installed coal and Almost under installed nat gas.

That means a power company is losing money by not building solar wind for coal and keeping an old coal plant running.

Nat gas is probably going to hit this level this year. Certainly with reasonably accurate carbon taxes and if we removed shadow subsidies for fossil fuels.

Soon nat gas will only be useful for load balancing.

What many seem to use as argument for wind, solar, hydro and geothermal is its price. But to compare the price with nuclear is flawed. The price of wind, solar, hydro or geothermal doesn't include the price of planability. Wind and solar would need some sort of energy storage to produce continuous energy. Hydro and geothermal only works at places where it can be installed. A good example for need of planability can be submarines or spacecrafts. Many of these crafts use either fossil fuels or nuclear as main energy source. Stop compare apples and oranges, they have different use for different cases.

What is the point then? Don't we have alternative means do reduce Co2 while producing electricity?

Just like nuclear fusion they're trying to get to break even.

yeah, this is actually pretty great. but i think we’ll need a lot more investment in CCS before we can deploy this everywhere. also the costs i assume would be high, even in the long run.

They run this same scam in Australia, see this honest government ad https://youtu.be/MSZgoFyuHC8

Exactly it's just a scam (until now).

Correct me if I'm wrong here but it sounds like "emitting more than captured" here just means reduced emissions by less than 50% but still a lot. Seems misleading.

It's a massive government subsidy for fossil fuel demand. That's not helping anything.

Correcting you because you're wrong. They're talking specifically about emissions caused by the capture plant being greater than emissions it captures. The carbon footprint would be lower if the plant didn't exist.

The plant was not penalised for emissions it failed to capture.

The original study is considering the emissions of the entire hydrogen plant, not just the carbon capture portion.

Its a hydrogen plant with a carbon capture piece on top. Not a “carbon capture plant.”

Correct but irrelevant. Operation of the plant resulted in more emissions than were captured. The fact that hydrogen was also produced is a net neutral in that equation.

If you want to describe this in terms of a hydrogen produced with a particular net emissions footprint, that's fine. It's dirty hydrogen that's been made less less dirty.

And that's a good thing, not a bad thing. As usual, environmentalists are the environment's worst enemies "dirty hydrogen"? Seriously? We need hydrogen, that's not something optional. They made it better, yet you are calling them names.

You're twisting my words. My point is that we should judge this facility on the net emissions required to produce hydrogen, not how those emissions were caused/captured/offset. And once you've accounted for this, talking about the fact they're using carbon capture is marketing fluff; what matters is the overall footprint.

This is akin to how "hybrid" cars are perceived. Being a hybrid doesn't make it any greener than a non-hybrid with the same fuel economy numbers.

“Australian Science Writing 2021” has a fascinating short story called “Hail Hydrogen: Powering the debate on future fuel” that touches on this exact project, and provides much more nuance and background detail that I found an enjoyable and informing read.

Highly recommend the above if you want what felt like a more neutral take. (In fact the entire book so far has been great)

It's capturing money.

This machine does the work of ten men. Unfortunately, it takes twenty men to operate it.

You can always remove a huge amount of co2 from the air, if you’re willing to burn an even greater amount to do it.

Carbon capture is not going to save us, folks. Once again we must review the laws of conservation of mass and energy.

All forms of negative emissions are a scam. You’re better off just using the solar power than you are burning oil and then using solar power to un-burn the oil, or worse, using other fossil fuels to capture the first fossil fuels.

Flagging as a clickbait title.

The title seems to suggest that shell has a carbon capture plant that is emitting more than producing, where in reality it's a hydrogen generation plan that captures some, but not all co2.

This article is way less better: https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/fossil-gas/shell-...

Looks like you're right.

[This fact-sheet](https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/quest.html ) lists the plant has intending a 35% capture-rate. And while that's a weirdly low target-(capture-rate), it doesn't seem hidden.

Looks like [a Canadian-government-hosted report from 2011](https://open.alberta.ca/publications/quest-carbon-capture-an... ) also includes this in the executive-summary:

> The purpose of the Quest Project is to deploy technology to capture CO2 produced at the Scotford Upgrader and to transport, compress and inject the CO2 for permanent storage in a saline formation near Thorhild, Alberta. Over one million tonnes of CO2 per year will be captured, representing greater than 35% capture of the CO2 produced from the Upgrader. Quest is a part of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project (AOSP), an oil sands joint venture operated by Shell and owned by Shell Canada, Chevron Canada and Marathon Oil.

So if they're capturing ~38.4% when they proposed "greater than 35% capture" to the government, then... that sounds kinda like they're doing what they said they'd do.

The issue still stands why are governments subsidizing this dead end research?

5.6 trillion dollars of taxpayer money went to Fossil Fuel subsidies. That's almost 7% of the world's gdp, or about 11 million dollars per minute just in 2020 [0]

Oil companies continue to capture trillions in subsidies while deflecting blame and misleading the public along the way.

[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...

The main argument for technology like this is that it's relatively quick to develop-and-deploy in existing infrastructure. It's basically an emergency-bandage, meant to provide first-aid, to help reduce emissions in the short-term.

Traditionally, the expert-consensus has been that solving climate-change'll require a multi-pronged strategy. Stuff like this would be intended to reduce some of the emissions now, reducing the build-up before greener technologies come online.

This is PR talk, there is no band aid.

The price drop of EV batteries has killed the use case for hydrogen, which was mostly city buses.

Now that charging networks have been deployed and widespread, the argument of Hydrogen at gas stations is dead. It was a good idea but let's stop spending money on this.

unfortunately we need lots and lots of band aids.

the problem is that EVs are a tiny solution to a small problem. the rest of the problems don’t go away by using EVs.

food production, mining, chemical engineering, shipping, aviation and many other high CO2 industries still have no solutions. so we’ll need band aids. some industries might never be possible to have zero CO2. for those we’ll need permanent band aids.

and the best band aid is CCS. we could get rid of all CO2 right now if we use CCS everywhere. but no one wants to spend trillions on this. so we’re left arguing…

I would like to see the absolute amount of energy produce vs emitted carbon compared with oil/gas/{fossil_fuel} rather than an article by a pissed off reporter/magazine. Is it an improvement over existing technology/efficiency? Is it just the first step and can be improved or has it been a failure? These are the types of articles people should write. NetZero carbon won't happen over night.

What's clickbait about it? When the public is sold on carbon capture by the fossil fuel industry, they're given to believe it's a net negative technology. You can argue that it is self-deception, but there is still a deception involved. Governments are only kicking the can by subsidizing things like this. Canada put $654 million into it? That would have been 654 MW worth of utility-scale solar panels.

> they're given to believe it's a net negative technology

Would you be able to cite some sources that support this claim?

Would you be able to waste your own time googling the obvious instead?

If it’s so obvious, could you point me towards an useful query to put into google?

Surely you can come up with at least something to support your claim about what the public is being led to believe?

Can you point me toward some references on the sky being blue and water wet? I just need a starting point for my research. Genuinely interested.

Don’t be a child.

And? My country produces electricity mostly from coal, ICE uses way less energy, but everyone will argue tooth and nail electric vehicles are CO2 neutral and green!

Why this creative statistics should not be used in this plant? For example carbon capture could be in one country, while energy production and negative externalities in second! Boom, we captured N millions tons of CO2!

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