By David Fickling
Updated: 6 hours ago Published: 6 hours ago
For those who have followed the energy transition over the past few decades, there’s one technology that is treated as much as a punchline as a serious industry: Carbon capture and storage.
A decade or so ago, many still thought it the best hope for decarbonizing the world’s power systems. CCS was “the Google and Intel of the energy world,” the Atlantic magazine declared in a 2010 cover story that predicted solar and wind would never get above 10% of power supply.
In the following decade, it was renewables that boomed while CCS went bust. Wind and solar accounted for 39% of generation in Germany in the first quarter of 2023 and will hit 50% over the full year in Spain. Meanwhile, only a handful of demonstration CCS plants went into operation — and one of the biggest was switched off in 2021 as oil prices plummeted, since it had only been able to make money from the decidedly dirty business of driving carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to force out fresh crude.
There are signs that CCS may be about to get the last laugh, though. In the U.K., the government has promised as much as $25 billion in spending to kick-start the sector. A tender to scope out sites that could store as much as 10% of the country’s emissions in old North Sea oil fields closed comfortably oversubscribed last month. In the Gulf of Mexico, Exxon Mobil has spent about $25 million in two recent rounds bidding for nearly 170 blocks of depleted offshore acreage that might be able to store carbon from a planned hub in Houston.