Carbon-capture technology has its flaws

Manitoba has announced plans to build one of the largest carbon-capture facilities in the world, partnering with the company Deep Sky in this endeavour.

Carbon capture has long been touted as a pivotal tool in our battle against climate change, proponents of the tech contending that we can reclaim our carbon emissions in a bid to seemingly turn back the clock on pollution. There are some who boast of technology that can pull carbon out of the very air, which is the technique which will be utilized at the planned Manitoba facility.

Too bad carbon capture is largely a greenwashing scheme for big oil companies and polluting corporations, a tool they can employ to frame themselves as combatting the problem they themselves are causing.

It’s not hard to see why industries love the idea.

Big polluters, and in truth, most everyday people, have been eager for some great technological leap which will solve the climate change problem while allowing us to go on without changing our lifestyles or economic practices.

But as carbon capture sounds too good to be true as a concept, when we offer it the barest of scrutiny, we quickly find that it is. First, it is wildly inefficient. Some proponents might suggest that this is still a new and developing technology, but in truth it has been around for over 50 years.

Yet even if we took the companies behind these technologies at their word for how much carbon they pull from the atmosphere, it would still only account for the tiniest fraction of a fraction of what we emit.

Of course, we also can’t take these companies at their word about the impact they have.

Take the Quest carbon capture plant in Alberta, owned by the Shell company. In 2020 it celebrated how it had managed to prevent five million tonnes of carbon going into the atmosphere, but neglected to publicize how their operations had been responsible for 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in that time. This is because while the company claimed it would capture 90 per cent of all emissions from the nearby oilsands operations, in reality it captured about 48 per cent.

A shortfall gargantuan enough to fail in even making up for the energy spent in the carbon capture operations themselves.

And lest we believe that perhaps all this tech needs is a solid injection of investment capital, keep in mind that billions of dollars have already been pumped in the carbon-capture industry. Not so much from private capital. No, most of it comes from the public purse.

The Canadian government offered $2.4 billion in subsidies to the industry in 2024 alone, much of it going directly to the oil industry that run these useless projects. It ultimately amounts to our tax dollars being funnelled to the oil industry and paying for their greenwashing campaign. As exuberant as the oil industry claims to be about carbon capture, they have been much more conservative with investments of their private capital.

So we have a mostly useless field of technology being propped up by massive subsidies of public money and utilized to deflect responsibility from polluting corporations. But beyond that, even if this technology were as effective as proponents claim and it were being paid for by the industry itself in a genuine bid to correct the environmental damage they have enriched themselves on, carbon capture would still be a foolish endeavour.

The new Manitoba facility claims that it will fund itself by selling carbon credits to polluting corporations. Setting aside that this is not a sound funding model, other operations have resorted to such shady methods as awarding double or “phantom” credits of two tonnes of carbon for the price of one just to stay afloat, it is also fundamentally a terrible way to fight climate change. Even in its most idealized iteration, it does not incentivize a decrease in emissions, which we so sorely need. It just serves as an excuse for companies to go on increasing their emissions, which they are existentially compelled to do as long as we cling to this endless growth model of corporate capitalism.

The fact of the matter is, we know what needs to be done to combat climate change. And it is going to require a drastic restructuring of our economy, starting with a lot of things the oil industry isn’t going to like. We need to invest in clean, renewable forms of energy. We need to abandon this culture of consumerist capitalism and crack down on destructive practices like planned obsolescence. We need to stop wasting vital resources on distractions and fake miracle cures.

And we need to have started yesterday.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg writer.