There are 12 essential attributes that explain why commercial carbon capture and sequestration projects succeed or fail in the U.S., researchers say.
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has become increasingly important in addressing climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies greatly on the technology to reach zero carbon at low cost. Additionally, it is among the few low-carbon technologies in President Joseph R. Biden’s proposed $400 billion clean energy plan that earns bipartisan support.
In the last two decades, private industry and government have invested tens of billions of dollars to capture CO2 from dozens of industrial and power plant sources. Despite the extensive support, these projects have largely failed. In fact, 80 percent of projects that seek to commercialize carbon capture and sequestration technology have ended in failure.
«Instead of relying on case studies, we decided that we needed to develop new methods to systematically explain the variation in project outcome of why do so many projects fail,» said lead author Ahmed Y. Abdulla, research fellow with UC San Diego’s Deep Decarbonization Initiative and assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Carleton University. «Knowing which features of CCS projects have been most responsible for past successes and failures allows developers to not only avoid past mistakes, but also identify clusters of existing, near-term CCS projects that are more likely to succeed.»
He added, «By considering the largest sample of U.S. CCS projects ever studied, and with extensive support from people who managed these projects in the past, we essentially created a checklist of attributes that matter and gauged the extent to which each does.»
Credibility of incentives and revenues is key
The researchers found that the credibility of revenues and incentives — functions of policy and politics — are among the most important attributes, along with capital cost and technological readiness, which have been studied extensively in the past.
Story Source: Materials provided by University of California — San Diego. Original written by Christine Clark. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.