Chevron's carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at its Gorgon LNG plant in Australia underperformed in 2021 with 2.26 million tons of carbon dioxide injected underground, well below its annual capacity of 4 million tons per year of CO2.
For comparison, annual CO2 emissions by Australia is 494.2 million tons per year
Chevron's CCS project has been working well below its annual capacity since it was launched in August 2019, three years after the Gorgon LNG project began operations, as the company grappled with new technology and technical problems.
Sand issues
One of the major issues has been the presence of sand that has clogged parts of the CCS project. This prompted Chevron to significantly reduce the amount of CO2 injected underground.
The "cure" that doesn't work for shit and waste even more taxpayer money, only so that they can greenwash their pamphlets and brochures so bourgie investors can feel not as bad about investing in fossil fuels to fuck everyone over further
I mean the very thin sliver of a silver lining is that this carbon capture technology works to a degree. In anything approaching a society that actually functioned, we'd see the same levels of funding, research and energy spent on this sort of thing that we spend nowdays on stuff like weapons development or extracting even more oil.
But if you read more carefully, this is exactly why carbon capture technology doesn't work and a giant waste of resource. Gorgon is LNG plant first and foremost. https://www.chevron.com/projects/gorgon
The CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) component at this plant is a tack-on project under near ideal carbon capture condition, trying to suck carbon out of nearby point-source emission rather than suck carbon out of diluted atmospheric background air. If they cannot do it nearby an LNG plant, they cannot do it out of thin atmosphere. The LNG plant is making 16 millions of tons LNG per year and struggle to barely capture 2 millions tons per year, after 2-3 years in a row since 2016-2018 of sequestering literally zero carbon. If they never drilled and develop the plant in the first place, keep the shit on the ground, you would have "captured" 16 millions tons per year since 2010, rather than emitting near 350 millions tons of CO2 to the atmosphere and sequestrating 2 millions tons over 22 years before your piece of shit capture tech got clogged by sand
Maybe somewhere someday carbon capture can work. But this one in particular is a scam and it is touted as the 4th best currently operational CCS facility in the world https://www.statista.com/statistics/1108355/largest-carbon-capture-and-storage-projects-worldwide-capacity/
Ah right, got ya. I was hoping that the as you said tacked on side project could be scaled up etc. I guess not.
Reason #209458 why CCS is a grift: didn't even care to think about the presence of sand in Australia
To be fair, It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
Beyond it being a scam on its face, I have a feeling in my gut that tells me that they could have gotten to 4 mil by paying 10 people $10 more/hr.
As a geologist, the only carbon capture that will ever work long term is sequestration in rock, back to where we have removed carbon from in the first place. All of these other methods are just to look nice or like we are trying but honestly offer very little. Read more about the real solution here
But how would you increase the reaction rates of silica weathering and sediment burial rates? About half of dissolved inorganic carbon from rivers is recycled by pythoplanktons in the surface ocean and only a small small fraction made it to the bottom of the ocean. Silicate weathering as means of carbon burial only works at million years timescale, and we need something can be industrialized at mass scale to pull CO2 from the atmosphere within 20 years
That’s the part we are working on figuring out, but it is by far the most promising method to operate at the enormous scale necessary for carbon sequestration
We already have perfectly functional carbon capture technology, they're called trees!
:a-guy:
