An advocacy group report challenges California’s first industrial carbon capture rules, citing capture rates as low as 10% across 16 global projects and a $4 billion pool of emissions allowances for decarbonisation investment.
California’s plans for its first industrial carbon capture and storage programme make no sense for the state, according to a report published by the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog on 10 August. The group argues the technology is a costly way to extend fossil fuel production rather than to cut emissions.
Air regulators are circulating proposed rules for the programme. The state has doubled a pool of CO2 emissions allowances to $4 billion for manufacturers making approved decarbonisation investments, and the state Fire Marshal recently finalised safety rules for carbon dioxide pipelines. Carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant at high concentration, which is why pipeline routing has become the contested part of most US capture projects.
The report centres on California Resources Corporation, the state’s largest oil producer and the operator furthest along the decarbonisation path. Consumer Watchdog described the company as “the poster child for both the California oil industry’s slow death as it runs out of oil, and dangerous reinvention as it pushes Carbon Capture and Storage technology that is a bad bet for the public and the environment.”
Capture rates fall short of industry claims
The report draws on third-party analysis of operating performance. A global review by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis of 16 carbon dioxide capture projects, spanning gas processing, hydrogen production and gasification, found capture rates as low as 10% and no higher than 80%. Industry commonly claims 95%.
Scale is the other constraint. The Congressional Budget Office puts the 15 operating CCS facilities in the United States at a combined capacity equal to four-tenths of one percent of annual US CO2 emissions.
The report also questions capture at gas-fired power plants, which CRC plans at its own facility. That has never been done at commercial scale, according to the same institute. The parasitic load of running capture equipment can reach 20% to 30% of a plant’s output, generating further emissions that industry estimates typically exclude.
Refinery capture fares no better in the report’s account. It argues the only target that makes economic sense is the steady stream from in-house hydrogen production, and that even this needs federal tax credits and premium contracts for low-carbon products to justify the spend.
Tax credits carry the economics
Without federal tax credits, the report says analysts doubt these projects would stay afloat even with private investment. California currently has around 40 announced projects, including direct air capture, on a list the California Air Resources Board last updated in autumn. None are fully approved, and no official statewide count exists. A pipeline of up to 45 miles has been proposed for the Bay Area.
Consumer Watchdog’s alternative rests on the International Energy Agency’s finding that “ramping up renewables, improving energy efficiency, cutting methane emissions and increasing electrification with technologies available today deliver more than 80% of the emissions reductions needed by 2030.”
The report is advocacy rather than regulatory analysis, and CRC has not responded to its claims in the material published. For industrial emitters watching California set precedent, the substantive question it raises is measurement: whether permitted projects will be required to report actual capture rates against design specification, and what happens to public support if they miss.
