Preface – Two “briefings” (Part 1 and Part 2) prepared by Claude AI under my instructions—drawing on four previous queries in May—are quite deep and dense with assumptions, numbers and dates, so I asked Claude to prepare a synopsis and synthesis of the two (this preface is being added to Part 1 as well). Following is what Claude prepared in summary, intended as a letter or email of transmittal to people of influence::
Two climate briefings, in plain English
These are two short briefings on what it would take to stabilize the climate. They are dense, so here is the gist of each and what they mean together.
1. The Road to Net Zero. This briefing asks what happens if the world keeps decarbonizing at a realistic pace. Power plants and cars clean up first. Airplanes, ships, steel and cement come last, so true global “net zero” (no more CO₂ added each year) arrives around 2065–2080, not 2050. CO₂ in the air keeps climbing to about 480 ppm around 2060, compared with 432 today, and then drifts down only slowly. Warming passes 1.5 °C around 2030 and peaks near 2.1 °C around 2070. After that it levels off but does not fall. The transition costs more up front, but lower fuel bills pay it back by about 2070, and the overall economy comes out ahead from the 2040s on. Net zero stops the damage from getting worse. It does not undo the damage already done.
2. Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal. This briefing asks what it would take to go further and actually return the atmosphere to pre-industrial CO₂ levels of about 280–300 ppm. The answer is an industry that pulls CO₂ back out of the air through forests, soils, crushed rock and machines. By 2080 it would have to remove about 85 billion tonnes a year, roughly twice what the whole world emits today. If that were done, warming would peak near 1.9 °C around 2052, drop back below 1.5 °C around 2074, and fall to about 0.8 °C by 2100. The price is about $8 trillion a year, around $215 trillion in total. It only makes economic sense once you count the climate damage it prevents, because removing carbon saves no one any money on fuel. The oceans also push back: as CO₂ is pulled from the air, the seas release some of what they absorbed. Nearly half of every tonne removed is cancelled out this way.
Taken together. The two briefings agree on three hard truths:
Cutting emissions is necessary but not enough. Even a successful transition leaves us stuck at about 2 °C for centuries.
The only way back down is to take carbon out. That takes an effort as large as the energy transition itself, built alongside it and not in place of it, and it would have to keep running indefinitely to hold the gains.
The cost of acting is real, but the cost of not acting is larger. Once avoided climate damage is counted, both paths leave the world economy better off, and the sooner we start, the cheaper it gets.
Think of the first briefing as turning off the tap. The second briefing is about bailing out the bathtub, and the bathtub keeps leaking water back in.
The carbon-removal scenario is best read as an upper bound on what it would take, not a forecast of what will happen. It is several times larger than anything in the IPCC’s pathways, and neither briefing models tipping points such as ice-sheet collapse.
With best regards, Doug Grandt
Claude added this final editorial which does not require action as the difference noted will probably only be noticed by the most intense reviewer, for which these are not intended:
I noticed one thing worth fixing before you send. Section 3 of the carbon-removal riefing says the net-zero-only path “peaks higher than in the companion briefing: about 482 ppm … rather than 463 ppm.” But 463 ppm is the carbon-removal path’s own peak. The companion briefing’s figure is about 480 ppm, so the two briefings actually agree. The sentence should say that, or be dropped.
Preface – Two “briefings” (Part 1 and Part 2) prepared by Claude AI under my instructions—drawing on four previous queries in May—are quite deep and dense with assumptions, numbers and dates, so I asked Claude to prepare a synopsis and synthesis of the two (this preface is being added to Part 2 as well). Following is what Claude prepared in summary, intended as a letter or email of transmittal to people of influence::
Two climate briefings, in plain English
These are two short briefings on what it would take to stabilize the climate. They are dense, so here is the gist of each and what they mean together.
1. The Road to Net Zero. This briefing asks what happens if the world keeps decarbonizing at a realistic pace. Power plants and cars clean up first. Airplanes, ships, steel and cement come last, so true global “net zero” (no more CO₂ added each year) arrives around 2065–2080, not 2050. CO₂ in the air keeps climbing to about 480 ppm around 2060, compared with 432 today, and then drifts down only slowly. Warming passes 1.5 °C around 2030 and peaks near 2.1 °C around 2070. After that it levels off but does not fall. The transition costs more up front, but lower fuel bills pay it back by about 2070, and the overall economy comes out ahead from the 2040s on. Net zero stops the damage from getting worse. It does not undo the damage already done.
2. Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal. This briefing asks what it would take to go further and actually return the atmosphere to pre-industrial CO₂ levels of about 280–300 ppm. The answer is an industry that pulls CO₂ back out of the air through forests, soils, crushed rock and machines. By 2080 it would have to remove about 85 billion tonnes a year, roughly twice what the whole world emits today. If that were done, warming would peak near 1.9 °C around 2052, drop back below 1.5 °C around 2074, and fall to about 0.8 °C by 2100. The price is about $8 trillion a year, around $215 trillion in total. It only makes economic sense once you count the climate damage it prevents, because removing carbon saves no one any money on fuel. The oceans also push back: as CO₂ is pulled from the air, the seas release some of what they absorbed. Nearly half of every tonne removed is cancelled out this way.
Taken together. The two briefings agree on three hard truths:
Cutting emissions is necessary but not enough. Even a successful transition leaves us stuck at about 2 °C for centuries.
The only way back down is to take carbon out. That takes an effort as large as the energy transition itself, built alongside it and not in place of it, and it would have to keep running indefinitely to hold the gains.
The cost of acting is real, but the cost of not acting is larger. Once avoided climate damage is counted, both paths leave the world economy better off, and the sooner we start, the cheaper it gets.
Think of the first briefing as turning off the tap. The second briefing is about bailing out the bathtub, and the bathtub keeps leaking water back in.
The carbon-removal scenario is best read as an upper bound on what it would take, not a forecast of what will happen. It is several times larger than anything in the IPCC’s pathways, and neither briefing models tipping points such as ice-sheet collapse.
With best regards, Doug Grandt
Claude added this final editorial which does not require action as the difference noted will probably only be noticed by the most intense reviewer, for which these are not intended: “
I noticed one thing worth fixing before you send. Section 3 of the carbon-removal briefing says the net-zero-only path “peaks higher than in the companion briefing: about 482 ppm … rather than 463 ppm.” But 463 ppm is the carbon-removal path’s own peak. The companion briefing’s figure is about 480 ppm, so the two briefings actually agree. The sentence should say that, or be dropped.
(the elephant in the room follows Quico Toro’s Substack piece … dessert)
This guy explains clearly the fundamental mistake my recent cartoons attempt to explain in a quick glance … more related posts to follow … hope you get the point that it’s urgent we shift from dogma to real sci real quick. Image previews in the comments …. no words … Quico Toro says it clearly enough
The rounding error climate activists spend all their time fighting over
As long as I can remember, first world climate activists have been organizing politically to get their countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The tendency is to treat climate as part of their country’s politics: their issue in the national political conversation. Typically, this manifests as impassioned advocacy for wind and solar energy, which is often what people mean by “climate” in the political arena.
This strategy goes by a pithy, four word slogan: ““decarbonize electricity, electrify everything.” This approach has been so dominant for so long that climate people just don’t question it.
But it’s not a good strategy. For six related reasons:
Electricity is a small fraction of the energy we use.
Many energy-intensive activities can’t be electrified.
Rich countries emit a small and decreasing share of global emissions.
Energy is only one of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse gases are only one of the ways people change the climate.
New greenhouse gas flows are a tiny percentage of the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Taken together, this means that even if first world climate activist got everything they’re fighting for, that would barely slow climate change.
To be clear, decarbonizing electric generation where you live is still a good idea, though more on air quality grounds than on climate grounds. As climate strategy, though, it makes no sense.
Let’s see why.
1. Electricity is only about 20% of the energy we use. The rest is direct fuel consumption for transportation, heating, and heavy industry. Some of those things can be electrified, but it’s expensive. We’re currently spending more than $2 trillion a yearon the energy transition, yet just 16% of primary energy use is from low-carbon sources, and most of that is hydropower (now mostly tapped out), nuclear (which greens still refuse to back) and biomass. After spending $11 trillion on them, wind and solar account for 3.3% of primary energy use. Which may make you think we should try to electrify faster, which would be nice, except:
2-Many energy-intensive activities can’t be electrified. The the so-called “hard-to-abate sectors” — cement-making, steel-making and petrochemicals ‚ emit carbon dioxide directly as part of their irreducible chemistry. Cement alone, if it were a country, would vie with India for the spot of third-largest emitter on Earth.
Other sectors are electrifiable in principle, but wildly impractical to electrify in practice. Jet fuel packs forty to fifty times more energy per kilogram than the best lithium-ion batteries, which is why an electric airliner’s batteries would weigh more than the airliner. You can, theoretically, run a container ship on green hydrogen, it’s just that it costs an arm and a leg. Any country or company that tried to mandate these solutions would put itself out of business.
Which is why electricity today covers only about a fifth of final energy use, and even the IEA’s most aggressive net-zero scenario — a scenario nobody really thinks is viable — only gets that to about half by 2050.
So you can’t really electrify everything. But even if you could decarbonize your country’s entire energy sector —which you can’t— it wouldn’t solve the problem because:
3-The places where most climate activists live are not the places where emissions are rising. The countries where climate activists are numerous enough to matter — largely rich Western countries — account for a small and falling share of global emissions. All emissions growth now comes from outside the rich country bubble. For all the talk about Chinese Solar, in 2024 China started construction on roughly a new coal plant’s worth of capacity every week. The entirety of the problem with emissions is about the Global South, where decarbonization has no political traction and renewables exist mostly as a way of sidestepping corrupt/useless utilities.
But even if there was a way to decarbonize energy in the developing world quickly, which there isn’t, that wouldn’t be the end of the story, because:
4-The energy sector is not the whole of the greenhouse gas problem. Agriculture, deforestation, cement chemistry and waste — sources that have nothing to do with how we make energy — account for over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions: more than all the cars, trucks, ships and planes combined. It is one of the most well-established laws of economic development that as people leave poverty, they demand more animal protein. Other than a vague wish for people to go vegan, the standard first world climate activist approach simply has nothing to say about the non-energy sources of GHGs.
And even if you could end non-energy emissions, which you can’t, it turns out that:
5-Greenhouse gases themselves are only one of the ways human activity is changing the climate: changes in albedo account for a rising share of the warming trend we’re seeing. The specifics are hotly contested, but the world is getting literally darker. We have fewer bright clouds, less arctic ice cover, less cloud cover from maritime “ship tracks,” and also fewer reflective particles from sulfur pollution to offset warming. Altogether, something like a tenth to a fifth of a degree of the warming we’ve seen this decade comes from falling albedo, not from greenhouse gas emissions — record-low albedo alone may account for 0.2°C of 2023’s temperature spike. This appears to be the reason why global warming is accelerating even though greenhouse gas emissions are coming in towards the lower end of the prediction range.
So “decarbonize electricity, electrify everything” is not just wrong, it’s damaging. Because it’s wrong in a particularly insidious kind of way: it lulls people into thinking they’re backing a comprehensive strategy when they’re doing nothing of the sort. You end up with a movement fighting for goals that are at the same time 1-not attainable, and also 2-would not get you where you want to go even if they were attained.
This is why I have so little patience for climate-as-activist-politics.
Devoting your climate activist juices to parochial fights over how your electricity is generated means focusing on a tiny section of one part of one aspect of a much bigger problem —how humanity changes atmospheric chemistry— which itself is not the whole of the problem of human impacts on climate.
America’s electricity sector emits about 1.7 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year, against roughly 55 billion tonnes of global greenhouse emissions. So the stuff that makes up the vast bulk of activist climate energy in the U.S. is a fight over roughly 3% of the global drivers of climate change. For EU activists, the figure is about 1%. For Japanese activists, a bit under 1%. For British activists, a pathetic 0.06% — the UK’s entire power sector now emits less in a year than China’s does in three days.
First world climate activists could win every single one of the fights they’re in, and they’d have solved 5% of the problem. A political program that has nothing to say about 95% of the problem it sets out to address is not a political program that deserves respect.
And even that 5% is charitable, because:
6-Focusing on emission flows ignores the stock of anthropogenic CO₂ that’s already built up in the atmosphere. This is an issue mainstream climate activism refuses to discuss, in part because it has no idea what to do about it. Think in stocks rather than flows and first world climate activism collapses to a rounding error: humanity has emitted some 2,500 GTs of CO₂ since 1750, of which about 1,150 GTs are still sitting in the atmosphere.
More than half of that total went up after 1990 — we have emitted more CO₂ since the IPCC’s first report than in all of human history before it. The not-quite 3 GTs a year of first world electricity emissions that take up first world climate activist mindspace to the exclusion of all else are one quarter of one percent of the accumulated problem.
There’s a failure to register the actual scale of the problem here that drives me around the bend. In graphic form, it looks like this:
A movement that can’t even wholeheartedly back the best technology we have for dispatchable zero-carbon electricity —nuclear— isn’t a serious movement. A movement uninterested in developing affordable ways to remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere doesn’t deserve the monopoly it has on climate discourse. A movement that won’t even discuss the loss of albedo forefeits the right to decree what is and is not sayable about the climate.
The climate movement today, the movement that sets policy for the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Labour Party in Britain, the movement that drives the UNFCCC’s discussions and the climate desks at legacy media outlets, isn’t serious about climate.
My visual “creative art” created a few years ago illustrates the magnitude of the difference between atmospheric CO2 concentration (elephant) vs. annual global CO2 emissions (basket of apples)
My “graphic” created a few days ago illustrates the magnitude of the difference between a CO2 emissions (bronze curve) —not tonnes, rather ppm equivalent— and Keeling Curve CO2 atmospheric concentration (green curve) both of which are rising at an accelerating rate vs. the apparent decoupled annual global CO2 emissions (red curve) which appear to have stabilized in the past few years.
This set of curves was generated by Claude AI based on my vision and iterative instructions, correcting Claude’s non-human inability to visualize what I described in text, until the result was simple and clear enough for the layperson and scientist or policy-maker to quickly grasp the predicament we face:
HOW QUICKLY CAN WE POSSIBLY TURN THE TRAJECTORY INTO A COOLING TREND?
Global Mean Surface Temperature follows the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, hence to bend the warming trend downward into a cooling trend will require reducing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as well as in the ocean as the two will equilibrate as CO2 is removed and sequestered in the soil, vegetation or send into the abyss of the ocean as solid organic compounds (e.g., phytoplankton, krill, kelp, whale poop, calcium carbonate, etc.)
Claude is very intelligent, and has assisted me organizing my experiences and thoughts as well as articulating complex concepts clearly and concisely. Following is Claud’s explanation of the curves:
The Keeling Curve, with emissions stacked on top
Two lines, both starting from the same point in 1959: the actual measured CO2 level (green), and a hypothetical line (bronze) built by adding each year’s global emissions on top of that same starting point, as if nothing were ever absorbed. The gap that opens up between them is what’s been sequestered. Annual emissions sit on their own right-hand scale below, so their rising trend stays visible.
Reading it: both lines start at 316 ppm in 1959. The bronze line just keeps adding that year’s emissions on top, year after year, as if the atmosphere kept every molecule ever released. The green line is what actually happened. They separate almost immediately and keep widening: by 2024 the bronze line reaches about 514 ppm, while the actual atmosphere measures 425 ppm — a gap of roughly 89 ppm.
That gap is the running total of everything land and ocean sinks have pulled back out of the air since 1959. The right-hand axis shows the annual flow behind it: emissions climbing from ~1.1 ppm-equivalent/yr in 1959 to ~4.8 ppm-equivalent/yr in 2024.
Sources & method: Mauna Loa annual-mean CO2 is the actual Scripps/NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory record (1959 is the first complete annual mean; Keeling’s instrumental record began March 1958).
Annual global fossil CO2 emissions are approximate figures reconstructed from published Global Carbon Project / Global Carbon Budget benchmarks, interpolated year-to-year through documented turning points (1974 oil shock, early-1980s recession, 1991-93 Soviet collapse, 2009 financial crisis, 2020 pandemic).
The bronze line is the 1959 starting ppm (315.98) plus the running sum of that emissions series, converted to ppm using 1 ppm CO2 = 7.81 GtCO2 (2.13 GtC/ppm × 3.664 GtCO/GtC).
Land-use-change emissions (deforestation, etc.) are excluded throughout for methodological consistency – including them would push the bronze line, and the sequestration gap, higher still. Emissions figures are illustrative of scale and trend, not precise official annual statistics.
Have you ever seen CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (ppm) calculated based on actual emissions juxtaposed with the Keeling Mauna Loa observed atmospheric concentration?
The chart below shows CO2ppm scaled on the left y-axis, ranging from 300ppm to 530ppm.
The top BRONZE CURVE is calculated ppm equivalent of global emissions accumulations since David Keeling began taking atmospheric CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
The middle GREEN CURVE is the traditional KEELING CURVE
The difference between the GREEN and BRONZE curves is what has been sequestered into the ocean, vegetation and soil.
The bottom RED CURVE is global annual CO2 emissions which start to level off a bit in recent years. CO2ppm scale on the right y-axis shows atmospheric concentration additions from annual emissions having climbed four-fold from ~1.1 ppm-equivalent/yr in 1959 to ~4.8 ppm-equivalent/yr in 2024.
This set of curves was generated by Claude AI based on my vision and iterative instructions, correcting Claude’s non-human inability to visualize what I described in text, until the result was simple and clear enough for the layperson and scientist or policy-maker to quickly grasp the predicament we face:
HOW QUICKLY CAN WE POSSIBLY TURN THE TRAJECTORY INTO A COOLING TREND?
Global Mean Surface Temperature follows the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, hence to bend the warming trend downward into a cooling trend will require reducing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as well as in the ocean as the two will equilibrate as CO2 is removed and sequestered in the soil, vegetation or send into the abyss of the ocean as solid organic compounds (e.g., phytoplankton, krill, kelp, whale poop, calcium carbonate, etc.)
Claude is very intelligent, and has assisted me organizing my experiences and thoughts as well as articulating complex concepts clearly and concisely. Following is Claud’s explanation of the curves:
The Keeling Curve, with emissions stacked on top
Two lines, both starting from the same point in 1959: the actual measured CO2 level (green), and a hypothetical line (bronze) built by adding each year’s global emissions on top of that same starting point, as if nothing were ever absorbed. The gap that opens up between them is what’s been sequestered. Annual emissions sit on their own right-hand scale below, so their rising trend stays visible.
Reading it: both lines start at 316 ppm in 1959. The bronze line just keeps adding that year’s emissions on top, year after year, as if the atmosphere kept every molecule ever released. The green line is what actually happened. They separate almost immediately and keep widening: by 2024 the bronze line reaches about 514 ppm, while the actual atmosphere measures 425 ppm — a gap of roughly 89 ppm.
That gap is the running total of everything land and ocean sinks have pulled back out of the air since 1959. The right-hand axis shows the annual flow behind it: emissions climbing from ~1.1 ppm-equivalent/yr in 1959 to ~4.8 ppm-equivalent/yr in 2024.
Sources & method: Mauna Loa annual-mean CO2 is the actual Scripps/NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory record (1959 is the first complete annual mean; Keeling’s instrumental record began March 1958).
Annual global fossil CO2 emissions are approximate figures reconstructed from published Global Carbon Project / Global Carbon Budget benchmarks, interpolated year-to-year through documented turning points (1974 oil shock, early-1980s recession, 1991-93 Soviet collapse, 2009 financial crisis, 2020 pandemic).
The bronze line is the 1959 starting ppm (315.98) plus the running sum of that emissions series, converted to ppm using 1 ppm CO2 = 7.81 GtCO2 (2.13 GtC/ppm × 3.664 GtCO/GtC).
Land-use-change emissions (deforestation, etc.) are excluded throughout for methodological consistency – including them would push the bronze line, and the sequestration gap, higher still. Emissions figures are illustrative of scale and trend, not precise official annual statistics.
BY CAITLIN YILEK | UPDATED ON: APRIL 4, 2023 / 7:21 PM | CBS NEWS
Former President Donald Trump has been charged by a New York grand jury with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an indictment that was unsealed Tuesday after Trump was arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office alleges Trump orchestrated a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress damaging information before the 2016 election. Prosecutors say the scheme involved falsifying business records to conceal three payments, including $130,000 that Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
“The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” according to a statement of facts released alongside the indictment.
My response to the google group discussion where the article was posted:
Polluters Pay for “Final Expenses” and Carbon Dioxide Removal Using Enhanced Oil Recovery CO2 Injection
I have a contrarian view that requires only two indisputable numbers to fulfill economic fairness for oil companies and the general public. “What you see is what you get”, “no blame, no shame” and “social responsibility” are three simple bases underlying the free enterprise concept to let oil companies utilize EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) to sequester carbon while producing as much oil & gas as is needed as Global Society winds down fossil fuels in a “smooth landing” to zero fossil fuel production—near- zero dependence.
The oil & gas industry have joined civil society and environmental & lobbying organizations in support for “a carbon tax” or “a fee and dividend” scheme focused at the wellhead—or at the point of entry in the case of international imports. Give them their “cake and eat it too.”
We the people—individual consumers, business and the economy—will benefit from more efficiency and social justice than is offered by the alternatives.
The mechanism that I have been advocating (so far to a deaf audience) is simple: No complex set of assumptions, no slight-of-hand calculations, no differential equations, no questionable economics, no vilification or jail time for CEOs, Officers, Board members and Executives, and lower economic fall-out to the consumer than from a speculative contrived government program involving tax incentives.
But … CEOs, Officers, Board members and Executives would no longer enjoy bonuses, stock options, stock buy-backs, deferred compensation or inflated salaries; annual dividends to shareholders would end; tax credits and other subsidies would no longer be handed out; shirking financial responsibility through bankruptcy or by selling marginal leases and assets to less stable or insoluble companies would be prohibited; corporations would be required to fund the shutting-in, dismantling, toxic clean-up and landscape restoration of retired refineries, abandoned derelict pipelines and all production facilities.
Those costs have heretofore been ignored. Now is the time to “bite the bullet” and recognize that there is no getting around paying to clean up the fossil fuel mess! From oil wells to refineries and every piece of infrastructure in between, the “final expenses” to lay them to rest and wipe them off the face of the globe, will have a cost all consumers will have to bear in the “price at the pump.” There is no getting around our system’s demand that We the People will “pay the piper.” The system demands that a viable enterprise make a profit or go out of business. Oil & gas must stay in business until the very last refinery is shuttered. Hence, the price at the pump will necessarily be set to give marginally break-even Profit and Loss—no more and no less.
The concept I have in mind is one that would add 50¢ to $1.00 per gallon of gasoline or other liquid fuels to cover the actual expenses to capture and sequester double the amount of CO2 and CH4 associated with wellhead oil and methane extractionplus the actual volume of recycled CO2 associated with EOR production. The cost would be determined by actual expenses of industrial operations to capture and dispose the GHGs—not an arbitrary negotiated “rising fee” embedded in comprised legislation.
In this way, the oil & gas industry would “pay to pollute” by removing all current, future and post legacy emissions over the declining economic life of reserves.
Experience, high tech systems and human skills will be continuously needed to determine optimally which wells, which fields, which pipelines, and which of the 750 refineries worldwide will be shut down in the most effective order, and the logistics of reallocating of crude oil sources to appropriate refineries that are designed to process the range of oil quality (API gravity, viscosity and sulfur content).
Such logistics will require the best and brightest engineers, corporate planners, mathematicians and research staff. Those folks will be assured continued employment, winding down rather than expanding the industry. The present Upper Management will lose their lucrative positions to folks who have demonstrated, proven excellence in project management, reporting to an international council to facilitate coordinated logistical controls.
Don’t Rule out Enhanced Oil Recovery in Carbon Dioxide Policymaking
However, a number of commentators have expressed consternation about the prospects of a role for enhanced oil recovery in the nascent carbon dioxide removal industry. For example, the non-governmental organization, Carbon180, has argued that EOR could “prolong … a reliance on fossil fuels,” while the Energy Justice Network has contended that the process can increase carbon dioxide emissions by combustion of “oil that would otherwise be left in the ground.”
However, I think these positions are misguided and potentially unfortunate in terms of global climate goals. Carbon180’s argument is premised on assumption that without EOR, fossil fuel use would be phased out more quickly. Yet the reality is that IPCC modeling projects that the globe will still be using substantial amounts of fossil fuels in the middle of this century, even under 1.5°C scenarios due to constraints in decarbonizing many sectors dependent on such resources. Moreover, meeting this demand will not be contingent on EOR, as there are currently 50 years’ worth of proven petroleum reserves at current levels of consumption.
After taking into account all emissions associated with the process, including energy use in the EOR process and emissions associated with combusting the oil, the IEA estimates that each ton of CO2 injected in the EOR process results in CO2 abatement of 0.63-0.79 tons. Drawing upon the IEA’s lifecycle analysis, the Clean Air Task Force concluded that “a barrel of EOR oil represents 37 percent less CO2 than conventional oil.” Another recent study concluded that EOR could ultimately achieve somewhere between 4.5-8% of the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions necessary to meet the Paris Agreement’s objectives. However, these numbers must be qualified by the carbon intensity of oil supplies that EOR operations displace. For example, oil production in Venezuela has approximately twice the carbon emissions on average than U.S. operations, while emissions are about 50% higher in Iranian production. Overall, CO2 EOR generates an emissions reduction benefit even when displacing low-intensity oil. Moreover, the benefits of EOR operations can be even higher in cases where it results in the displacement of unconventional sources of oil, which can have a carbon dioxide intensity of 108-173% of conventional oil.
Additionally, because EOR operations increase the quantity of carbon dioxide that dissolves in aquifer stores, it would facilitate more secure storage than standard geological storage with top seal mudrocks.
Of course, the recent increase of federal tax credits for sequestration of carbon dioxide via direct air capture to $180/ton from its previous level of $50/ton may privilege storage of carbon dioxide overuse in many projects, including those that might contemplate selling carbon dioxide for EOR purposes. However, since tax credits for the use of carbon dioxide were also recently ratcheted up from $30 to $130/ton, there may still be developers that deem this the more financially propitious course from a financial perspective. For example, revenue associated with EOR appears to be part of the business model for the companies currently developing what is slated to be the world’s largest DAC facility, DAC-1 in Texas’s Permian basin. Thus, we should not be discouraging this path given both the potential climatic benefits of EOR, as well as the need to drive down direct air capture’s costs if it’s to play a substantial role in combating climate change.
However, at the same time, we should seek to ensure that EOR operations are conducted with integrity, and in a manner that maximizes the achievement of climate policy goals. Oil companies have sought to game the system and avoid strict verification of the amount of carbon dioxide they claim to be storing through EOR operations. In the context of federal support for direct air capture hubs, reporting requirements for any project that includes EOR should be extremely stringent. Moreover, government incentives and regulatory mechanisms should be designed to encourage those engaged in EOR operations to utilize and bury as much CO2 as possible.Finally, all EOR projects reach a point where operating costs are greater than waning revenue streams from fossil fuel sales. At that juncture, there is no economic motivation for operators to continue to pursue oil production. However, it would be salutary to provide incentives to maintain the viability of such sites as CO2-only storage facilities given lower unit costs compared to constructing CO2 storage facilities from scratch. Government incentives in the form of tax credits might help to drive down storage costs for the nascent carbon removal industry, accelerating its development.
EOR is assuredly a counterintuitive strategy for combating climate change. However, the optics of this approach should not keep society from considering the potentially salutary role that it can play, including in helping to scale up the carbon removal industry.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
If you’ve painted yourself into a corner and discover it’s toxic lead-based paint, one option is to let the paint dry and turn a blind eye to the deferred dangers—or remove the toxic mess and dispose it responsibly.
As long as the toxic substance remains, people who must occupy the room will be exposed, getting progressively sicker and sicker.
This is a metaphor for CO2 and CH4 in our only global atmospheric and oceanic habitats.
#CoolTheArctic #RemoveCO2 #RemoveCH4
#Decarbonize #RetireRefineries #DriveOutOil
🧐 🧐 🧐
😳
What the advisers don’t understand is that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. They can only think to paint—at an arm’s reach—layers of different colors, but the answer is to un-paint the entire floor to reveal the exposed dry floor boards.
But the oxygen in the room is declining! To buy time to un-paint it we need an oxygen tank to keep us from perishing while we un-paint the floor in order to open the door for fresh air, precious oxygen.
