Scaling Carbon Capture
Interestingly the article didn&#x27;t really talk about scaling carbon capture. I&#x27;m still working on building my knowledge in this area, but I just cannot understand how you get significant cost reduction in carbon capture and storage.<p>Capture: amine absorption columns are mid-20th century technology and remain more or less state of the art. Economies of scale work up to a point; you can&#x27;t just make individual columns bigger and bigger, but you can make multiple trains so that you can share the &quot;balance of plant&quot; costs. If you made 20% CAPEX savings this way, you&#x27;d be happy.<p>Transport: pipelines. I just don&#x27;t see huge innovation here, but maybe improved materials such as internal coatings? The economy of scale here is in getting many plants together into a pipeline network. Maybe in the most generous assumption you could halve the pipeline and storage costs (but not the capture costs) this way?<p>Storage: this is the weak point currently in terms of risk. The Gorgon project in Western Australia has struggled with injectivity, and I think several other carbon storage projects have had subsurface struggles. I don&#x27;t know much about this - I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s due to CO2 storage itself or if it&#x27;s just the inherent risks of subsurface. Whatever it is, we clearly haven&#x27;t even achieved reliable storage yet, so talk of cost reduction via scaling might be premature - maybe we actually underinvested on the reservoir side in the past and it just needs more.<p>So about the only big opportunity for cost reduction is to make a hub of capture projects all feed into a pipeline network rather than individual pipeline&#x2F;reservoir. You&#x27;ll have to excuse me if I&#x27;m not excited.<p>And yet you constantly hear the mantra that carbon capture is &quot;not yet proven at scale&quot;. Well I&#x27;m afraid to say, scaling doesn&#x27;t look like it&#x27;ll be a game changer like it was for solar.<p>Thermodynamics does not obey Wright&#x27;s Law.<p>(I work in the oil and gas industry, I have worked on a CCS project in the past and I would personally benefit hugely if CCS were viable)