Debunking the canard that CCS is needed for cement and steel decarb
Carbon capture and storage proponents are using a new report to argue we must dramatically scale this technology to remove climate-warming pollution and decarbonize the steel and cement industries. Let’s focus on the canard of the hard-to-decarbonize industry argument, which has captured many well-meaning climate advocates in the CCS trap.
The argument that CCS is “necessary” rests on the fallacy that carbon capture will eliminate emissions from steel and cement. Science and economics tell another story.
At the outset, it is worth asking: if carbon capture is so effective in the cement and steel industries, then why, despite billions in public subsidies, haven’t proponents attached CCS projects to cement or steel production? The only exception in the world is the Al Reyadah project in Abu Dhabi, which is designed to capture only a fraction of the plant’s emissions, and even then its efficacy is dubious. The project has been operational for seven years, yet no other carbon capture developer has followed in its footsteps.
No doubt the reason is that we already have better, cheaper, and more effective solutions for preventing carbon pollution in steel and cement production.
Steel production currently produces 7-8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a meaningful contribution to the climate challenge. The industry is hard to decarbonize because it is energy intensive, requiring high heat for smelting and other processes, and it produces carbon dioxide directly by using coke, a form of coal, to reduce iron oxides. We already have better approaches to decarbonizing the industry, such as green hydrogen, which would reduce emissions by 90%. In fact, none of the recent Department of Energy funding for demonstration projects to decarbonize steel and iron went to carbon capture projects; instead the money for demonstration went to green hydrogen. And even better solutions, with fewer risks and impacts on communities and environmental justice, are on the horizon. Firms like Boston Metal are busy working on next generation technology that would eliminate the need even for green hydrogen and could produce high quality metals from many different metal oxide feedstocks.
CCS in the cement industry makes even less sense than CCS in the steel industry. Cement plants are necessarily distributed across the world, making it impossible to achieve economies of scale with mitigation solutions, and the carbon pollution produced at those cement plants is also dilute. Rather than invest in technology that has consistently failed to produce climate results over nearly 50 years of trying, we would be better off pursuing novel ways to make cement without CO2. The Department of Energy recently funded two promising methods for demonstration, Brimstone and Sublime, which already hold more promise than the prospect of an expensive, distributed network of CCS facilities in every city and town in the world. These new approaches hold the most promise because they eliminate the production of carbon dioxide from limestone, which accounts for more than half the emissions from conventional cement production.
What’s more, spending hundreds of dollars per ton of CO2 captured from any industry, including steel and cement, represents a huge opportunity cost: we have the clean energy technology today to reduce emissions for a significantly lower cost.
Finally — and perhaps most disingenuously — the fossil fuel industry advocates for generous CCS subsidies for cement and steel despite having no intention of investing in those projects because they will never be profitable. CCS proponents frequently roll out the steel and cement industries argument and, with a rhetorical sleight of hand, then justify subsidies (such as 45Q tax credits for carbon capture) that overwhelmingly go not to carbon capture for steel and cement facilities, but instead to directly fund natural gas processing, which taps carbon dioxide that is safely geologically stored to enhance extraction of oil. Instead, the oil and gas industry intends to use these subsidies for natural gas processing and enhanced oil recovery, which are the only way to consistently make money capturing carbon. The simple economics are that carbon dioxide captured from steel and cement fabrication is expensive but geologic carbon dioxide pumped up from underground for natural gas processing is cheap.
It is also telling that the industry has successfully advocated for subsidies that are paid per ton of CO2 captured, not emissions to the atmosphere reduced. By structuring subsidies in this way, the industry has prevented competition from better ideas that don’t produce any CO2 in the first place, locking in approaches that burn fossil fuels to produce CO2. But, of course, oil companies will still go first with the cheap source of carbon dioxide, natural gas processing, in order to harvest these subsidies.
It is true that we will need to innovate to decarbonize the steel and cement industries. That innovation simply won’t come from the carbon capture industry or from giving more subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.