Lithium is only needed for Li-ion batteries, which are only needed when energy-density matters, e.g., cars. If you are electrifying a house you can use iron phosphate or, if you have room on your property, bury a bunch of lead-acid batteries. Sodium-ion batteries are also going to be a thing soon. There are also non-chemical batteries that store energy as heat or potential energy (e.g., pumping water up hill).
Matt's broader point about diversity is spot-on and is the point of contention that I find the most irritating. Just like you need different battery chemistries for different applications, you need different energy generation for different contexts. And that will include carbon capture. But instead we end up with a stupid dichotomy of left-wing 'the climate crisis demands solar and wind or nothing' versus right-wing 'I hate solar and wind because liberals like them and I have to like the opposite, so fossil fuels all the way'.
I disagree with the statement that direct air capture is the more exciting pathway for carbon capture and sequestration. From well known thermodynamics principles, there is a minimum work (energy) requirement for any separation. That minimum must be exceeded by any practical process not requiring infinitely large equipment or infinite time for execution. For CCS we want to end up with almost pure CO2 for sequestration. The intuitive guess that it’s easier to go from 10% CO2 to 99% than to go all the way from 0.04% to 99% is correct. In fact the minimum work is about 3x greater for stack gas carbon capture case than for DAC case. I suspect that practical DAC processes will also need a higher multiple of their minimum work than will CCS. So my guess is that a practical DAC process might need 2x the capital intensity ($/ton/day CO2 capture capacity) and 4-5x the energy intensity (MWhr/ton CO2 capture). So the practical approach is to sequester as much CO2 as possible from existing CO2 rich stack gases, for the next ten years or so. Meanwhile optimize DAC but do not deploy at scale until after 2035. The more we do cheaper stack gas capture now, the less need we’ll have for expensive DAC on another day. I agree with the main point that we need more Class VI wells now.
"This now tends to come dressed up in the rhetoric of environmental justice which holds that it’s specifically bad for Black and Latin people to allow fossil fuel burning to continue."
The political analysis looks about right. On the tech front, I am pretty bearish on CCS (although not on a little CCU for synthetic avgas). Gas peakers are fine in the short term, but I think the scale they will be needed is exaggerated and they should pay for the negative externalities of the methane/CO2 leakage. Bullish on V2G and H2 as balancers for daily and seasonal storage, respectively. Source: climate VC.
The big problem with carbon capture is really twofold.
In terms of economic costs, since it's strictly additive, fuel burning with carbon capture is guaranteed to always cost more than fuel burning without carbon capture - regardless of future technology advances, regardless of fuel prices. If anything, carbon capture actually increases the economy's dependency on fuel price spikes because the energy to power the carbon capture most likely has to come from burning more fossil fuel (which is also why the fossil fuel companies like carbon capture, even while opposing all other climate policies).
The second problem is that carbon capture does nothing to address all of the other problems with fuel burning besides climate change. You still have to breathe all the particulates and nitrous oxide, and the fuel burning machines as as noisy and smelly as ever. In fact, if carbon capture requires burning additional fuel to power the carbon capture process, all of these other non-CO2 emissions only get worse, compared to a policy of simply doing nothing.
And none of these even gets into the issue of whether one can really trust the sequestered carbon to remain sequestered long enough to do any good. If it leaks out into the atmosphere, all of that money spent on it and all of the extra NO2 and particulate emissions from all that extra fuel burning to power it, ends up being for naught.
On the contrary, climate change is the most morally compelling issue of the day, just as slavery was in the antebellum period. Abolitionist tactics eventually persuaded enough northerners to support the Republican party. I actually agree with Matt that "progressive" tactics are often counterproductive.
I feel like the attack on gas stoves should have come more in the "Big Gas pays people to shill for gas stoves, are gas stoves even that great?!"
I feel like unexposed to any influence, I would find gas stoves a little annoying. Luckily I've never owned one, but it just seems like they mostly heat up the air over your food...
I was looking forward to Matt’s take on the Class VI well program but was disappointed in the dearth of actual information and inaccuracies in the post. I think it is great to throw some light on this issue but let’s use some good information! Eg EPA regulates these wells under the Safe Drinking Water Act, it has long regulated injection wells, that’s why this is the sixth class. EPA genuinely seems to be slow on approving state programs. I can’t tell how slow they are on permits without more digging but as of their October 2022 report to Congress they had issued six permits, not zero, though only two were actually constructed. They had permit applications for nine projects pending, some of which involve more than one permit. That report also describes EPA’s efforts to streamline their processes from those used to process the first applications.
Are they on the right track? Should they be doing more? Is the White House not paying enough attention? I don’t know, but hoped for a more informed take here.
Great post Matt. But you ignored what may be the most promising way to sequester carbon, letting woody plants capture the carbon, harvesting that biomass, and then turning some of it to charcoal via pyrolysis. Charcoal can be added to soils with beneficial results and is likely to retain its carbon for centuries. Unlike other carbon sequestration approaches, this method actually produces some energy. A question is whether this approach could scale to the size needed. Some analyses suggest it could. See Lenton, T., 2010, The potential for land-based biological CO2 removal to lower future atmospheric CO2 concentration, Carbon Management 1, 145–160 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4155/cmt.10.12 and Lehmann, Johannes, 2007, A Handful of Carbon, Nature, 447, 143-144. https://www.nature.com/articles/447143a
I really want this to work. I think that forestry is one of the only places in the economy with big enough scale and low enough cost to make a dent at a planetary scale.
I’ve always imagined somehow speeding up photosynthesis under artificial conditions to sequester carbon, I wonder if thats feasible  outside of science fiction 
Precisely because we're going need to keep burning fuels for a long time in some use cases, I don't think dumping captured carbon in the ground is likely to be the main way we get rid of it. I think by the time those use cases are the main part of what's left of emissions, we'll be phasing out fossil fuels in favor of e-fuels made with CO2 and (green/turquoise/yellow/pink/etc.) hydrogen. The EU has already set e-fuels blending mandates for aerospace that steadily increase through 2050, for example, and Maersk has ordered a bunch of methanol powered ships and signed supply agreements with CO2-to-methanol companies in Sweden and Texas to secure supply.
If anything this makes the regulatory problem for scaling up renewables even more severe. But it does also enable fuels (and chemicals) production to act as a form of storage, somewhat reducing the amount of long-term battery or hydrogen storage we're likely to need. Storing kerosene and methanol can be a heck of a lot cheaper than storing hydrogen or building lithium-ion batteries, even though making it is less efficient.
If we agree that there is some level of atmospheric CO2 concentration that is lower and preferable to what we have currently, then the only way to reach that concentration on human time scales is carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Silicate weathering takes hundreds of thousands of years at minimum. CCUS will takes decades, but it is better than the alternative.
The perfect place for a carbon storage well would be the same places we drilled for carbon in the first place. And once you realize that it become obvious how much cheaper it is to not drill then it is to sequester captured carbon. (Better still, develop clean energy that prices-out drilling).
Matt's fully on board with the energy-abundance to displace fossil fuel, but he's ridiculed restrictions on drilling as too much deadweight loss. Well its a lot more deadweight loss to put it back in the ground!
The timescales are different here, which is why he opens with the idea that we'll need this as a solution 30 years in the future. If clean energy ready does become hyperabundant and we are still looking for ways to cut carbon, in theory this would be the option. But much much more likely the cost of sequesting carbon remains very high, because of the fundamental mechanics of it. The US would rather say "we owe climate reparations, but we are no going to do it because that would be too expensive - what we'll do instead is decarbonize slightly faster than would be convenient for us".
I continue to believe that carbon capture is an absurd thing to suggest when decarbonization is still in progress. There is a dozen other better things we can do - replace wood-fired cooking stoves in third-world countries with more efficient ones, do a better job capturing landfill gases, build out rail networks, crack down on crypto scams.
Has CA actually built any gas fired power plants since Gov. Newsom suggested this in 2021? I've lived there for some time, and do not recall any. Wikipedia does not list any that my old eyes can see.
It is not a bad idea. But good ideas are not usually the ones that the State follows up on. For example: Democrats generally identified climate change as a serious problem (long) before the other parties. Democrats have controlled California's government for years. How much money did they spend to beef up our management of forest fires? How much money did they give to Elon Musk by subsidizing the expensive virtue signals he sells to the wealthy?
Lithium is only needed for Li-ion batteries, which are only needed when energy-density matters, e.g., cars. If you are electrifying a house you can use iron phosphate or, if you have room on your property, bury a bunch of lead-acid batteries. Sodium-ion batteries are also going to be a thing soon. There are also non-chemical batteries that store energy as heat or potential energy (e.g., pumping water up hill).
Matt's broader point about diversity is spot-on and is the point of contention that I find the most irritating. Just like you need different battery chemistries for different applications, you need different energy generation for different contexts. And that will include carbon capture. But instead we end up with a stupid dichotomy of left-wing 'the climate crisis demands solar and wind or nothing' versus right-wing 'I hate solar and wind because liberals like them and I have to like the opposite, so fossil fuels all the way'.
I disagree with the statement that direct air capture is the more exciting pathway for carbon capture and sequestration. From well known thermodynamics principles, there is a minimum work (energy) requirement for any separation. That minimum must be exceeded by any practical process not requiring infinitely large equipment or infinite time for execution. For CCS we want to end up with almost pure CO2 for sequestration. The intuitive guess that it’s easier to go from 10% CO2 to 99% than to go all the way from 0.04% to 99% is correct. In fact the minimum work is about 3x greater for stack gas carbon capture case than for DAC case. I suspect that practical DAC processes will also need a higher multiple of their minimum work than will CCS. So my guess is that a practical DAC process might need 2x the capital intensity ($/ton/day CO2 capture capacity) and 4-5x the energy intensity (MWhr/ton CO2 capture). So the practical approach is to sequester as much CO2 as possible from existing CO2 rich stack gases, for the next ten years or so. Meanwhile optimize DAC but do not deploy at scale until after 2035. The more we do cheaper stack gas capture now, the less need we’ll have for expensive DAC on another day. I agree with the main point that we need more Class VI wells now.
"This now tends to come dressed up in the rhetoric of environmental justice which holds that it’s specifically bad for Black and Latin people to allow fossil fuel burning to continue."
“World Ends: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit”
https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/world_ends_joke
The political analysis looks about right. On the tech front, I am pretty bearish on CCS (although not on a little CCU for synthetic avgas). Gas peakers are fine in the short term, but I think the scale they will be needed is exaggerated and they should pay for the negative externalities of the methane/CO2 leakage. Bullish on V2G and H2 as balancers for daily and seasonal storage, respectively. Source: climate VC.
The big problem with carbon capture is really twofold.
In terms of economic costs, since it's strictly additive, fuel burning with carbon capture is guaranteed to always cost more than fuel burning without carbon capture - regardless of future technology advances, regardless of fuel prices. If anything, carbon capture actually increases the economy's dependency on fuel price spikes because the energy to power the carbon capture most likely has to come from burning more fossil fuel (which is also why the fossil fuel companies like carbon capture, even while opposing all other climate policies).
The second problem is that carbon capture does nothing to address all of the other problems with fuel burning besides climate change. You still have to breathe all the particulates and nitrous oxide, and the fuel burning machines as as noisy and smelly as ever. In fact, if carbon capture requires burning additional fuel to power the carbon capture process, all of these other non-CO2 emissions only get worse, compared to a policy of simply doing nothing.
And none of these even gets into the issue of whether one can really trust the sequestered carbon to remain sequestered long enough to do any good. If it leaks out into the atmosphere, all of that money spent on it and all of the extra NO2 and particulate emissions from all that extra fuel burning to power it, ends up being for naught.
On the contrary, climate change is the most morally compelling issue of the day, just as slavery was in the antebellum period. Abolitionist tactics eventually persuaded enough northerners to support the Republican party. I actually agree with Matt that "progressive" tactics are often counterproductive.
On the contrary, climate change is the most morally compelling issue oof the day, just as slavery was in the antebellum period. Abolishing tactics
Drill, baby, drill (class VI wells)!
I feel like the attack on gas stoves should have come more in the "Big Gas pays people to shill for gas stoves, are gas stoves even that great?!"
I feel like unexposed to any influence, I would find gas stoves a little annoying. Luckily I've never owned one, but it just seems like they mostly heat up the air over your food...
Good post. I hope it is just the first on this topic. There is much that can be done on class IV wells.
I was looking forward to Matt’s take on the Class VI well program but was disappointed in the dearth of actual information and inaccuracies in the post. I think it is great to throw some light on this issue but let’s use some good information! Eg EPA regulates these wells under the Safe Drinking Water Act, it has long regulated injection wells, that’s why this is the sixth class. EPA genuinely seems to be slow on approving state programs. I can’t tell how slow they are on permits without more digging but as of their October 2022 report to Congress they had issued six permits, not zero, though only two were actually constructed. They had permit applications for nine projects pending, some of which involve more than one permit. That report also describes EPA’s efforts to streamline their processes from those used to process the first applications.
Are they on the right track? Should they be doing more? Is the White House not paying enough attention? I don’t know, but hoped for a more informed take here.
Great post Matt. But you ignored what may be the most promising way to sequester carbon, letting woody plants capture the carbon, harvesting that biomass, and then turning some of it to charcoal via pyrolysis. Charcoal can be added to soils with beneficial results and is likely to retain its carbon for centuries. Unlike other carbon sequestration approaches, this method actually produces some energy. A question is whether this approach could scale to the size needed. Some analyses suggest it could. See Lenton, T., 2010, The potential for land-based biological CO2 removal to lower future atmospheric CO2 concentration, Carbon Management 1, 145–160 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4155/cmt.10.12 and Lehmann, Johannes, 2007, A Handful of Carbon, Nature, 447, 143-144. https://www.nature.com/articles/447143a
I really want this to work. I think that forestry is one of the only places in the economy with big enough scale and low enough cost to make a dent at a planetary scale.
I’ve always imagined somehow speeding up photosynthesis under artificial conditions to sequester carbon, I wonder if thats feasible  outside of science fiction 
Fascinating!
Precisely because we're going need to keep burning fuels for a long time in some use cases, I don't think dumping captured carbon in the ground is likely to be the main way we get rid of it. I think by the time those use cases are the main part of what's left of emissions, we'll be phasing out fossil fuels in favor of e-fuels made with CO2 and (green/turquoise/yellow/pink/etc.) hydrogen. The EU has already set e-fuels blending mandates for aerospace that steadily increase through 2050, for example, and Maersk has ordered a bunch of methanol powered ships and signed supply agreements with CO2-to-methanol companies in Sweden and Texas to secure supply.
If anything this makes the regulatory problem for scaling up renewables even more severe. But it does also enable fuels (and chemicals) production to act as a form of storage, somewhat reducing the amount of long-term battery or hydrogen storage we're likely to need. Storing kerosene and methanol can be a heck of a lot cheaper than storing hydrogen or building lithium-ion batteries, even though making it is less efficient.
If we agree that there is some level of atmospheric CO2 concentration that is lower and preferable to what we have currently, then the only way to reach that concentration on human time scales is carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Silicate weathering takes hundreds of thousands of years at minimum. CCUS will takes decades, but it is better than the alternative.
The perfect place for a carbon storage well would be the same places we drilled for carbon in the first place. And once you realize that it become obvious how much cheaper it is to not drill then it is to sequester captured carbon. (Better still, develop clean energy that prices-out drilling).
Matt's fully on board with the energy-abundance to displace fossil fuel, but he's ridiculed restrictions on drilling as too much deadweight loss. Well its a lot more deadweight loss to put it back in the ground!
The timescales are different here, which is why he opens with the idea that we'll need this as a solution 30 years in the future. If clean energy ready does become hyperabundant and we are still looking for ways to cut carbon, in theory this would be the option. But much much more likely the cost of sequesting carbon remains very high, because of the fundamental mechanics of it. The US would rather say "we owe climate reparations, but we are no going to do it because that would be too expensive - what we'll do instead is decarbonize slightly faster than would be convenient for us".
I continue to believe that carbon capture is an absurd thing to suggest when decarbonization is still in progress. There is a dozen other better things we can do - replace wood-fired cooking stoves in third-world countries with more efficient ones, do a better job capturing landfill gases, build out rail networks, crack down on crypto scams.
Has CA actually built any gas fired power plants since Gov. Newsom suggested this in 2021? I've lived there for some time, and do not recall any. Wikipedia does not list any that my old eyes can see.
It is not a bad idea. But good ideas are not usually the ones that the State follows up on. For example: Democrats generally identified climate change as a serious problem (long) before the other parties. Democrats have controlled California's government for years. How much money did they spend to beef up our management of forest fires? How much money did they give to Elon Musk by subsidizing the expensive virtue signals he sells to the wealthy?