Shell sold millions of carbon credits for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that never happened, allowing the company to turn a profit on its fledgling carbon capture and storage project, according to a new report by Greenpeace Canada.
Under an agreement with the Alberta government, Shell was awarded two tonnes’ worth of emissions reduction credits for each tonne of carbon it actually captured and stored underground at its Quest plant, near Edmonton.
This took place between 2015 and 2021 through a subsidy program for carbon, capture, utilisation and storage projects (CCUS), which are championed by the oil and gas sector as a way to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.
At the time, Quest was the only operational CCUS facility in Alberta. The subsidy program ended in 2022.
TL;DR it’s not possible.
We burn carbon based fuels because the reaction between carbon and oxygen releases energy that can be used to generate electricity. It would take EXACTLY as much energy to turn the released CO2 back into oil/coal/carbon except that this is not a perfect world, there are losses at every step. The only way to lower CO2 levels is to globally stop burning fossil fuels for heating and electrical loads (hydrocarbons are needed for a bunch of very specific chemical processes).
Um, nobody is talking about chemically converting the released carbon dioxide back into chemical compounds with stored chemical energy, like hydrocarbons and graphite. They’re talking about physically sequestering CO2, or binding the carbon into materials that aren’t combustible (like calcium carbonate).
Put another way: if I burned some hydrocarbons in a fireplace and put a balloon over the flue, I’d capture some carbon dioxide (and probably some water) in that balloon, and the carbon in that balloon would’ve cost me less energy to capture than was released in burning the hydrocarbons to begin with. So long as I could keep the balloon from leaking or deflating.