Large-scale carbon capture is still unproven

Carbon capture won’t work, says International Energy Agency, Nov. 23

Bravo to Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency (IEA) for calling out the folly of carbon capture and underground storage (CCUS) as proposed by oil and gas producers from around the world.

Big Oil (The Pathway Alliance in Canada) is trying to convince the governments and people of the world that CCUS will be our saviour from self-destruction.

The message from the IEA dispels the myth propagated by the oil and gas industry. Large scale carbon capture is unproven, prohibitively expensive, estimated in Canada to cost $16.5 billion to capture just 10 per cent of the extraction emissions (to say nothing of the emissions produced by combusting their product) and predicts that if enough CCUS capacity was built by 2050, it’d require more electricity to operate than the entire world used in 2022.

The estimated $3.5 trillion required every year between now and 2050 would be better spent on building renewable infrastructure to replace oil and gas. Let’s hope our leaders are not coerced into funding an underdeveloped, unproven and overhyped white elephant. Philip Warne, Pickering