CCS Europe has written an angry response to American NGO Oil Change International for condemning CCUS.

Oil Change International promotes the use of clean energy and an end to subsidies for fossil fuels, but its ‘Funding Failure’ briefing on carbon capture describes it as “a 50-year record of failure” and questions “Why are governments throwing billions of dollars at it?”.

For its part CCS Europe calls the paper “a Trump-like distortion of the truth” in that the briefing claims that the IPCC says that carbon capture is one of the most expensive and least effective emission mitigation options available, hiding the reality that the IPCC is strongly supportive of CCS. It claims that carbon capture projects consistently fail, but in Europe, Norway’s Sleipner and Snohvit projects continue to capture and store some 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually after nearly 30 years in use.

The NGO asserts that capture rates rarely achieve 80 per cent and never the 95 per cent frequently claimed, but with many companies now competing to supply capture plants, we can expect the market to address this issue. Industry emitters paying hundreds of millions of euros for capture equipment will insist that it meets the contracted requirements.

At heart is the old divide between those who want to use proven technologies and those who see technologies as developing and improving, and never the twain shall meet.

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