Carbon capture is a great idea, but it won’t solve our problems
The scarce tangible fruits in terms of agreements and commitments to emerge from COP26 and the opening in September of a plant at Orca, in Iceland are once again drawing attention to, carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS or CDR) technology, which some say offers a solution to the climate emergency, or at least as a way of showing that we’re doing something about it. But in practice it’s little more than an excuse for avoiding taking the decisions that really need to be taken.
Carbon capture is certainly an interesting technology in certain contexts, but in practice, given the concentrations of the gas in the atmosphere, which are measured in parts per million, it is a drop in the ocean. The US plans to remove gigatons of carbon dioxide through such plants in a way that makes economic sense seem, given the efficiency of the Icelandic plant, to be something of a distant and inefficient dream.
The Orca plant in Iceland, the largest of its kind, can capture 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually and, through a series of chemical processes, inject it into the porous and relatively young basalt on which most of the country rests, where it is trapped and transformed into rock in a process that fixes that carbon dioxide for a very long time. The difference with reforestation, the most common and natural approach to…
