During the week of the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s first-ever Carbon Negative Shot summit on July 20, daily temperatures in Arizona rose to well over three digits consecutively, weather in northeastern states sizzled above previous record highs, the U.K. had its hottest day on record (104.5°F), and a wildfire, sparked in central California, scorched acres of land and spurred evacuations near Yosemite National Park.

虚拟峰会上的决策者，能源官员和顾问被描述为对二氧化碳去除碳的创新呼吁，并没有使当前抓住国家的气候变化现实加糖。他们警告说，达到零还不够。只有吮吸公司₂directly from the air to be safely stored underground can move carbon emissions in the right direction.

Calling attention to a growing number of extreme weather events making headlines, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told Carbon Negative Shot summit attendees that the urgency for carbon removal solutions is “only growing.” She added: “We just feel in our bones that carbon dioxide removal is finally having its moment,” noting that DOE’s goal over the next decade is to help reduce the price of decarbonizing industries.

The $1.2-trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) allocates more than $12 billion toward the development of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies—the “largest example of government support of carbon management technology that the world has ever seen,” the agency claims.

Because CCS mitigates carbon emissions at point of source during industrial and energy-producing processes such as oil recovery and coal-fired power generation, climate activists have criticized federal investment in the technology as simply a way to prolong the world’s reliance on fossil fuels—only benefitting the worst carbon-emitting culprits.

IIJA’s CCS subsidies are not “an excuse to slow down the transition to clean energy,” said Granholm, but a chance for climate policy and carbon removal pricing to meet in the middle, “because we can’t live without industries such as steel, cement, chemicals, aviation and agriculture.”

DOE estimates one gigaton of CO₂is equivalent to the annual driving emissions from some 250 million vehicles. The agency's goal is to drive down the cost of durable, scalable CO₂removal and storage to less than $100 per net metric ton equivalent by 2032.

In 2016, the $1-billion Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project in Thompson, Texas, became the first U.S. industrial-scale coal-fired power station with CCUS technology, capturing 5,000 metric tons of CO per day for enhanced oil recovery. The plant stopped the technology in 2020 due to low oil prices caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo courtesy of NRG ENERGY

Capturing at the Right Cost

证明了有限元分析sibility of CCS technology to work at commercial scale will require a big lift from AEC firms to engineer, procure and construct pilot and demonstration projects, says Jason Kraynek, president of production and fuels business line-energy solutions for Fluor Corp.

Current government incentives are “being challenged by market headwinds and hyper-escalation for equipment, material and labor—the key inputs for a CCUS project, especially the CO₂capture island,” says Kraynek, explaining that scaling up CCS adoption must include new recruitment and training programs to ensure an adequate pipeline of skilled labor.

Government support is a “critical component in advancing these CCS projects,” adds Kraynek. “We continue to engage all stakeholders—from the DOE and owners to other contractors and suppliers—to ensure these challenges are adequately understood and mitigated.”

CCS feasibility has two elements: technical feasibility and financial feasibility, explains Susan D. Hovorka, senior research scientist at the Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC) in the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

“The problems have all been on maintaining the economic model, not the technical model,” says Hovorka, who helped GCCC monitor the carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology at Petra Nova—the first commercial-scale coal-fired plant in the U.S. featuring the technology. A consortium of Kiewit subsidiary TIC - The Industrial Co., and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America engineered, procured and constructed the $1-billion project. According to Kiewit, the project totaled over 1.7 million working hours.

Switching on in 2016 at the W.A. Parish Generating Station in Thompson, Texas, a post-combustion system captured CO₂从240兆瓦的烟气中进行压缩并运输以增强石油回收率。根据Petra Nova所有者NRG Energy的说法，CCS重新培养的锅炉在运营的三年中捕获了92.4％的排放。在2020年，这项技术被关闭，就像19日的大流行成立并导致油价低下一样。

However, there is some debate about whether the project can be called a true CCS success, explains Hovorka. The project was delivered on time, on budget and captured the expected amount of CO₂为了取得技术成功，但是使用CCS的动机丢失了。

“They are waiting for a financial incentive that works for them,” she says. “They can supply lower cost electricity to the Houston markets by not capturing carbon and that’s the core of the issue.”

The multibillion-dollar Kemper power plant project in Kemper County, Miss., was considered another financial feasibility failure for CCS. After initial plans to operate on a coal gasification system, and capture more than half of the CO₂在此过程中生产的煤炭部分被取消了，因为经济学对运营公司不再有意义。

Globally, governments are finding that subsidizing CCS technology deployment is the missing link in building adoption rates to scale, explains Ruth Ivory-Moore, policy and advocacy manager for the Americas at the Global CCS Institute.

“CCS costs are decreasing as the breadth of deployment increases, and additional policy and financial incentives are made available,” says Ivory-Moore. The institute counts more than 140 CCS facilities in development globally, 30 in the U.S. Another 13 are in operation across the country, according to World Resources Institute. Costs are projected to further decrease as the tech scales up, Ivory-Moore says.

Last year, there were 19 direct air capture plants operating worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency, the largest being Climeworks’ Orca facility in Iceland.

Building Momentum

同样，降低CCS附加的价格标签正在不断发展的商业模式，例如将工业岛屿变成CCS枢纽分享CO₂transportation and geologic storage infrastructure.

In 2021, ExxonMobil announced plans fora $100-billion “innovation zone”for CCS along the Houston Ship Channel in Texas. Since then, a growing list of companies have also signed on to support the project, including Shell, Chevron, Marathon Petroleum, Phillips 66, Dow, INEOS, Linde, LyondellBasell, NRG Energy and Calpine.

“There is a lot of collaboration happening among the industry itself in trying to find the best solutions,” says Melissa Jones, Bechtel general manager for decarbonization, emission reduction and energy efficiency solutions.

借助CCS技术开发和初步部署的补贴，DOE旨在激发人们对各个重型工业和能源部门的广泛兴趣。但是，使用技术改造设施并不像翻转开关那样容易。琼斯解释说，取而代之的是，它需要一种协同的方法，该方法在很大程度上依靠AEC公司选择最适合所有者资产的能力。

“We always think about that every industrial asset is different,” says Jones. “They all need their own bespoke solutions.”

A map that shows the presence and capacity of saline aquifers where captured CO can be stored safely underground.
Map courtesy of Gulf Coast Carbon Center
*Click the image for greater detail

A contracting behemoth, Bechtel is known for leading massive projects in infrastructure and energy, as well as manufacturing and technology sectors. When it comes to CCS, Jones says “there has certainly been a real push to look at the innovations, study the technology and understand what’s available.”

There are some enablers getting these projects to full scale, she explains. “One is having the new technology, but also you need partnership and collaboration—not only within the industry but also within the community, with regulators and with those who are developing the legislation.”

On July 13, DOE announced plans to fund six carbon capture and sequestration demonstration projects through its $2.6-billion Capture Demonstration Projects Program, with $100 million allocated for its Carbon Dioxide Transport/Front-End Engineering Design Program. Together, the two complementary programs will help map out technical costs related to developing CCS at commercial scale and plot a path for the infrastructure systems needed to move captured CO₂to safe storage.

Residents and landowners gather outside the Iowa state capitol building in Des Moines to protest three proposed CO₂pipeline projects.
Image courtesy of Food & Water Watch

Twelve commercial-scale CCS projects in the front-end engineering and design, permitting and environmental review phase will receive $160 million from DOE. Then, $2.1 billion will be allocated to six CCS projects for advanced procurement, construction and operation.

According to the IIJA law, those six projects must include two “new or existing” CCS projects each in natural gas electric, coal-fired electric-generating and non-electric-generating industrial facilities. Projects must demonstrate a minimum of at least 95% carbon-capture efficiency with verification of secure geologic carbon storage.

“For some projects it might be straightforward to add on a carbon capture unit. For others, it's a longer and a larger project,” says Jones about how AEC firms will play a role in helping owners crunch the costs. “The impacts of a particular technology on the initial cost to construction of a project versus the operating cost is something that you really want to understand before you go to full scale.”

As outlined in DOE’s National Getting to Neutral Report, storing carbon in saline aquifers miles underground is the most well-established and tested method of safe CO₂storage.

Aquifers are made of porous sedimentary rock. Located above these rocks is an impenetrable cap rock that prevents CO₂from escaping. Additional storage techniques are also being tested to store CO₂in basalt and coal seams.

Without direct air capture of CO₂, a recent report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a grim picture. According to the report, “annual average GHG emissions from 2010 to 2019 were higher than in any previous decade.”

在碳负面射击峰会上，参议员谢尔顿·怀特豪斯（Sheldon Whitehouse）（D-r.i。）分享说，他想在一项新法案中对被捕获的碳的价格投入，这将使美国政府成为其最大的买家之一。

“Which is another way to send a price signal into this market that will encourage development and innovation,” he said. “At the end of the day, if you don’t have a carbon price, and it is free to pollute, you handicap yourself in terms of a proper market signal that will give the revenue necessary for innovation to really flourish.”

Climeworks’ Orca is the world’s largest direct air capture and carbon storage plant. Located in Iceland, the facility can capture 4,000 metric tons of CO₂for storage.
Photo courtesy of Climeworks

Community Impact

Recent protests against three newly proposed CO₂pipelines in Iowa demonstrate that DOE will also need to convince the public that CCS is a viable solution that can’t wait. With a density of saline aquifers located in specific regions and virtually nonexistent in others, shown in map above, some regions will see an uptick in proposed pipelines.

In a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 office in San Francisco, the Center for Biological Diversity urged it to reject carbon capture projects in central California, citing “threats to the environment and public health.” The letter was signed by more than 80 environmental justice and conservation groups.

“CCS projects pose dangers to communities wherever they’re located, plus they consistently fail to live up to climate promises,” says Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, staff attorney for the organization. “Right now we don’t see any level of CCS that is acceptable.”

However, the National Wildlife Federation has said that it supports CCS as an “important and necessary part of the climate solution, especially for industry.”

In 2020, one of the most damaging incidents affecting public acceptance of CCS took place in Satartia, Miss. A CO₂报道，天然气公司Denbury Inc.用于增强石油回收的管道破裂，并使49人因吸入集中排放而住院。

这一事件引发了一场持续lawsu的数量its against the company. “That is the heart and soul of the struggle right now. That is what all these companies are going to have to look forward to when they start trying to build pipelines,” says Zegart.

Contracting firms with experience in the space can play a role in making sure that clients and communities are fully informed of the risks and rewards tied to CCS projects in order to keep communities safe, explains Richard Spires, technology development director of Wood PLC’s energy assets and technology division.

“It is an unusually complex task, with hundreds and hundreds of variables, and we are looking for the optimum of as many of them as we can,” he says.