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Media Brief: CCS and Blue Hydrogen at COP27
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Media Brief: CCUS and Blue Hydrogen at COP27

As countries and companies gear up for COP27, carbon capture promises and hydrogen hype are being used to greenwash new investments in fossil fuels, particularly fossil gas, and to perpetuate the myth that the world can remain reliant on dirty energy for decades. But we cannot win the fight against climate change without getting off fossil fuels. And carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) and hydrogen — 99% of which is made from fossil fuel — only delay that necessary transition by extending the operation of polluting facilities, propping up demand for fossil fuels, and locking in dependence on gas and coal. What’s more, ample evidence demonstrates that CCUS is unnecessary, unproven at scale, and unjust for frontline and fenceline communities, while producing “blue hydrogen”—made from fossil gas with CCUS — is worse than just burning fossil gas directly.

 

If COP27 is to deliver meaningful progress toward averting climate catastrophe, Parties must close loopholes that allow for continued expansion of oil, gas, and coal supply and business-as-usual production, such as exceptions for “abated” fossil fuels, and ensure they do not proliferate in new decision text or political commitments. Delegates should not be fooled by the fossil fuel industry’s latest ploy, claiming that oil and gas can be made “low-carbon” or “net zero” through CCUS and/or conversion to hydrogen. Instead, world leaders must commit to an unqualified phaseout and rapid, equitable, managed decline of fossil fuel production and use. CCUS and blue hydrogen are false solutions that should not get public money or approval.

Connections Between CCUS, Blue Hydrogen, and Climate Action

  1. CCUS is unnecessary for rapid emissions cuts. According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, CCUS is one of the highest cost measures with the lowest potential to reduce emissions by 2030 — the most important period for curbing greenhouse gasses (GHGs) to prevent catastrophic warming. It will almost always be more efficient and effective to replace fossil fuels with renewables, which provide the cheapest source of energy in the majority of the world today, than tacking carbon capture onto already-expensive, polluting fossil fuel facilities. The IPCC confirms that the surest and most effective way to avoid an overshoot of 1.5°C and the further irreversible harm it would unleash is for governments and companies to deploy proven mitigation measures now. These measures should include the rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, investment in renewables, and reduction of energy demand–rather than relying on speculative future fixes.

  1. CCUS looks good in models (if you don’t look closely), but it fails in reality. Projections of CCUS’s ability to contribute to climate action, including those on which the IPCC relies, assume very high levels of CO2 capture, often above 90-95%. In practice, despite more than fifty years of industry experience with the technology, CCUS projects have repeatedly failed to deliver the emissions reductions promised by their promoters and included in models.

  1. CCUS threatens to entrench and exacerbate the harmful impacts of the fossil economy. No amount of investment in CCUS can accelerate the needed transition to a fossil-free future. By design, CCUS prolongs reliance on fossil fuels, literally and figuratively locking in place the polluting facilities onto which it is applied. Because the carbon capture process is energy intensive, it can increase local air pollution. The massive buildout of CO2 pipelines and storage sites envisioned by CCUS poses a range of additional environmental, health, and safety risks. Finally, CCUS may drive further fossil fuel production. The vast majority (80-90%) of captured carbon to date has been used to pump more oil out of depleted wells through enhanced oil recovery (EOR). EOR tied to CCUS represents a major potential source of oil production growth.

  1. Industrial emissions do not justify large-scale CCUS deployment.

High-emitting industrial activities, particularly petrochemical, steel, and cement manufacturing, are increasingly used to justify the reliance on–and public subsidies for–CCUS. Yet even advocates of the technology acknowledge that CCUS is infeasible, uneconomic, or unnecessary for most industrial sector emissions. In reality, the bulk of industrial emissions can be eliminated through demand reduction, reuse of materials, and electrification with renewable energy. To the degree that residual emissions exist, CCUS has only a limited ability to reduce those emissions given its expense, energy consumption, and limited capture rate. Such residual emissions are insufficient to justify the massive infrastructure buildout (and public subsidies) required to address industries. In the United States, for example, CCUS proponents routinely cite cement process emissions as a justification for massive CCUS deployments (and subsidies) even though such emissions account for just six-tenths of one percent (0.6%) of total US emissions.[1] Cement emissions are among the most expensive CO2 point sources to capture through CCUS and are scattered across roughly 100 facilities in 34 US states and Puerto Rico. Applying CCUS to such facilities would require constructing a massive pipeline network at great expense and risk with little if any, climate benefit.

  1. Blue hydrogen is a Trojan Horse for fossil gas. Over 99.9% of all hydrogen produced today is made from fossil fuels, mostly from steam-reforming methane — fossil gas —to make so-called gray hydrogen. Blue hydrogen is the same fossil gas hydrogen with carbon capture and storage tacked on. But research has shown that making blue hydrogen is so energy intensive and has such high methane emissions that, even with assumed high carbon capture rates, it produces more GHGs than just burning the underlying fossil gas directly. In other words, blue hydrogen is not a climate solution; it is just a more expensive and riskier form of dependence on fossil gas. Calls for “hydrogen-ready” infrastructure are just doublespeak for doubling down on investment in new gas production and facilities — risking lock-in and stranded assets.

  1. The push for hydrogen production generates new demand for fossil-gas-derived products. While green hydrogen may have a modest but valuable role to play in a small subset of industrial and heavy transport applications, those applications are limited and often overstated. The narrow role for green hydrogen is being used to justify and greenwash a broad push for all hydrogen, including fossil hydrogen, on the premise that massive new markets for hydrogen will soon emerge. Central to the hydrogen hype is the myth that blue hydrogen is a “bridge fuel” to a new green hydrogen economy, rather than a tether to the old fossil-fueled one. Not only does blue hydrogen fail as a climate solution, the drawbacks of using any kind of hydrogen, and the significant limitations, challenges, and risks of green hydrogen are largely ignored. Green hydrogen production requires very large energy and water inputs that limit its feasibility and use cases. Hydrogen of any kind is both extremely flammable and an indirect greenhouse gas (it does not trap heat itself but it extends the atmospheric life of other GHGs). And because hydrogen has the smallest particle size of any gas, it is exceptionally prone to leaks.

  1. Public funds for CCUS and hydrogen are fossil fuel subsidies in another form.

Fossil fuel companies are lobbying governments to subsidize CCUS and blue hydrogen. Legislative efforts include the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in the United States, and Canada’s financing R&D. Despite the massive amount of financing that has gone into CCUS projects to date, they have not made a dent in global CO2 emissions. Taken together, existing CCUS facilities and planned CCUS projects have the combined capacity to capture less than one percent of global CO2 emissions–and that is only if they all worked as designed, at full capacity, as projects have almost never done. Using public funds to advance these technologies amounts to a significant new fossil fuel subsidy. Such plans directly contradict governments’ promises to end fossil fuel subsidies and meet international obligations under the Paris Agreement.

What to Watch for at COP27

Governments must take action sufficient to close the enormous ambition gap and avoid further irreversible catastrophic climate impacts. Key to that is accelerating the global transition away from coal, oil, and gas. False solutions like carbon capture and blue hydrogen only detract from those essential aims. No amount of investment in CCUS, which literally and figuratively locks in place the polluting facilities to which it is attached, or blue hydrogen, which is reliant on fossil gas, can accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. During COP27, both within negotiating rooms and in the halls around them,  governments and decision-makers must:

Relevant Events at COP27

Further Reading

Press Contacts

Following COP27 remotely:

[1] The most recent US Greenhouse Gas inventory (Table 2-3) reports that CO2 emissions from cement production in the United States totaled 40.7 Mmt CO2eq in 2020, representing 00.6% of gross U.S.emissions (5.981 Gt) that year. For comparison, fossil Energy production and use accounted for 4.85 Gt of emissions, more than 81% of total U.S. emissions in 2020.