Welcome back to none of the above.
Federal agencies now have new guidelines when it comes to carbon capture.
The new guidelines handed down this week encouraged the widespread
use of climate attack that traps and stores carbon emissions.
The goal here is the process would help keep carbon out of the atmosphere
without requiring a whole lot of change by big companies and manufacturing plants.
Several scientists say that this method would be crucial, they say,
to helping us decrease the use of carbon emissions
by the year 2050.
But critics warn,
these type of carbon capture projects will let polluters keep
operating and could actually impact nearby communities as well.
Joining us now to discuss more about this is
professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford,
Mark Jacobson.
Mark Jacobson, Welcome to the show. Nice to have you.
So supporters here called carbon capture,
a practical way to achieve deep decarbonization.
What does this process look like?
Can you tell to pretend I'm a five year
old child trying to understand what this means.
What does this mean?
Well, there's two types of carbon capture,
there's what's called carbon capture from power plants or from manufacturing
facilities where there's there's lots of pollution coming out of a
smokestack and included in that pollution is carbon dioxide and there's
this machinery and apparatus that's added to the to the power plant
to try to capture the ceo to the carbon dioxide that comes out of the plant.
And the other type of carbon captures direct air capture where
they try to extract carbon dioxide directly from the air.
Now, both of these processes, they require a lot of energy just to run the equipment,
they require a lot of money to make the equipment and to install it
and they're not very efficient that actually capturing carbon.
And because they need more energy, they actually produce,
they use fossil fuels mostly for that additional energy.
And they actually produce more air pollution than
the plant would without the carbon capture.
Okay, so this is with regards to the way that we burn and use fossil fuels for energy.
These are for nuclear power plants, all of the above. None of the above.
As we like to say here on the show, help me better break this down.
Yeah, it's for fossil fuel power plants as well as biomass power power plants.
So not nuclear power plants which don't emit
carbon dioxide at when they are running,
they do emit carbon dioxide to manufacture the uranium to refine it.
But it's mostly for fossil fuel power plants and biomass power plants.
And sometimes ethanol factories when they're producing ethanol,
anything where you're burning fuel that produces smoke.
So we're burning fuel,
we're burning away our natural resources and in what sounds
like a bit of an effort to try and make it
not as bad on the environment as it is. Otherwise enter carbon capture.
That's a fair read.
It's actually yeah.
So well a Fareed is that it actually makes air pollution worse because
you need 25% more energy to run the carbon capture equipment than,
let's say if you put it on a coal fire power plant,
25% of that energy from the coal plant.
It would be used to run the carbon capture equipment in the United States.
There was only one coal plant actually that ever had carbon capture
and they actually built a natural gas power plant just
to run the carbon capture equipment for the coal plant.
So you can immediately see what a boondoggle this is.
Yeah.
So you don't you don't sound exactly as sold
as at least some in our federal government.
What do those supporters in our government say?
And largely are they are we sort of out of options otherwise?
I mean, I understand it's not a great solution, but is there much better that we have?
Yeah, I'll say that it's not a solution at all.
It will barely reduce any carbon dioxide
because first of all, you have to, it's not very efficient
And you know,
they claim it will be 90% efficient at removing carbon
dioxide from the power plant or from the exhaust stream.
However, in reality,
actual carbon capture places that they've been between 20
and 70% efficient on average for certain processes.
They've been up to 80% efficient.
And but that's just looking at the best.
Before you account for the additional energy.
You need to run the carbon capture equipment.
As I said,
like they built a natural gas plant just to run the carbon capture equipment for
a coal plant and they didn't capture any carbon from the natural gas plant.
So that just went right into the air. Then they had to mind more gas.
I had to dig more gas wells and there's emissions associated with
the digging of new gas wells and then transporting the gas etcetera.
So it really hardly reduces any carbon.
And also when you capture that carbon, what do you do with it?
Well,
most of the carbon dioxide that's captured in the world today is used to is piped to
a nearby oil field where it's used to try to push out more oil from the ground.
That process emits 40 all the of all the carbon that has been captured,
40% of that goes back to the air right away from that process and then
you get more oil and you burn more oil and so now we have more.
So two more air pollution from that process.
This whole thing is like a smokescreen to keep the fossil fuel industry in business
and it just increases air pollution increases,
mining increases pipes increases co two pipes,
it's just it's really just no benefit whatsoever.
I'm giving you my snaps from the audience because you are you are hitting it,
my friend.
Well said, okay,
Elon musk back in january tweeted SpaceX is starting a
program to take SEO two out of the atmosphere,
turn it into rocket fuel.
Please join me. If interested
is the might
of Elon musk
in the corner of the side of so called carbon capture.
Is that a step in the right direction? And you're still equally skeptical?
No. Yeah.
So we've analyzed, he's talking about what you called direct air capture,
where you take carbon dioxide out of the air
and in this case he wants to convert it into methane. Uh
and which is if he can use for fuel,
but it's the same thing. You always you require energy.
And if that energy is fossil fuel energy, then you're just polluting more.
So you created more air pollution.
You don't actually reduce much carbon
if it were renewable energy.
Some people say, let's use renewable energy to power the carbon capture equipment.
Well then you're preventing that new renewable energy from
replacing a coal plant or a natural gas plant.
And if you use renewables to replace the color gas plant,
you eliminate not only the carbon dioxide,
but you eliminate the air pollution and the mining.
So the social costs,
which is the energy costs plus the health costs plus the carbon dioxide,
climate costs
of of doing carbon capture with renewable energy,
it's five times more than just using the renewable
energy to replace the coal or gas plants.
So there's just no benefit whatsoever to take carbon out of the air because you just,
that's all you're doing.
You're taking carbon out of the air.
you're not taking any air pollutants out of the air.
You're in fact therefore increasing air pollution.
You're increasing mining because there's just a
limited amount of renewable energy available.
Okay, so so Mark, let me,
let me let me pop in some run out of time if I
may to this point about I understand that we don't have renewable energy,
but that's often times where the supporters of nuclear power plants come in to say,
okay, well, because of uranium rods and and and the the nuclear particles here,
we can sort of generate
that early energy ourselves, as long as we don't irresponsibly
do anything with it.
What are your thoughts that should we increase
our reliance on nuclear energy across the country?
Well, now, what we do have enough renewables,
it's just in the time that we need to ramp it up,
we need 80% transition within eight years.
We have to go fast to transition so we don't
have enough time to just use renewables for other things.
Now nuclear,
it takes its costs five times more per unit
energy right now as new onshore wind or new solar
photovoltaics and it takes on the order of 10 to 15 years longer to install.
So the in fact today,
The only nuclear plant being built in the United States,
which is in Georgia was delayed another six months
and it's going to cost another $900 million.
So it's going to be up to almost $33 billion.
And it's taking almost 18 years between planning and operation.
You can't imagine if we plan one new nuclear plant today.
It won't be ready until 2040. It's way too late to help for anything.
Yeah,
that's a great perspective and a really important conversation because our energy
comes from somewhere folks and we have to have these conversations.
Mark Jacobson is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.
He was good enough to be on the show tonight to all
make us a little bit smarter about the issue at hand.
Mark. Thank you.