Dr. Charles Harvey is a professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Kurt House is the chief executive officer of KoBold Metals, a metals exploration company. On August 16th, they challenged the prevailing wisdom that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is key to fighting climate change in a New York Times guest essay titled, Every Dollar Spent on This Climate Technology Is a Waste.
Doctors Harvey and House opinion is driven by their own direct experience starting the first privately funded company to make use of CCS in 2008. Back then, solar and wind energy were vastly more expensive than generating electricity by burning fossil fuel, even if you added the high cost of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the exhaust. Now, with clean renewable energy cheaper than burning coal, “it’s clear that we were wrong, and that every dollar invested in renewable energy — instead of C.C.S. power — will eliminate far more carbon emissions.” New York times, August 16, 2022
Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!
Dr. Charles Harvey is a professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Kurt House is the chief executive officer of KoBold Metals, a metals exploration company. On August 16th, they challenged the prevailing wisdom that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is key to fighting climate change in a New York Times guest essay titled, Every Dollar Spent on This Climate Technology Is a Waste.
Doctors Harvey and House opinion is driven by their own direct experience starting the first privately funded company to make use of CCS in 2008. Back then, solar and wind energy were vastly more expensive than generating electricity by burning fossil fuel, even if you added the high cost of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the exhaust. Now, with clean renewable energy cheaper than burning coal, “it’s clear that we were wrong, and that every dollar invested in renewable energy — instead of C.C.S. power — will eliminate far more carbon emissions.” New York times, August 16, 2022
Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!
Thanks, everyone for joining us for another episode of climate money watchdog where we try to investigate and help people understand the many billions of dollars that are now being spent by the federal government on mitigating the effects of climate change and environmental remediation. Tonight, we're joined by doctors Kurhaus. And Charles Harvey, to discuss a recent opinion piece they wrote for The New York Times about a very highly funded by controversial climate change remediation measure, which is called carbon capture and storage. Dr. Harvey is a Professor of Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Dr. House used to also be a research fellow with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is now the Chief Executive Officer of cobalt metals, metals exploration company using artificial intelligence to find better materials with which to make batteries. Do DITA of course, is somebody that I've known for 30 years and gave me my first job at the project on government oversight. And we recently formed the climate money watchdog, as I said, to investigate federal spending on climate response. A doctor's house in Harvey, is there anything else you'd like to say by way of introduction before we get started?
Dr. Kurt House:No, thank you for the introduction.
Greg Williams:All right. Well, do you know I think you'd have a list of questions that you've prepared. But I have a
Dina Rasor:Yes. I have a list of questions. And I but I first want to thank them for coming. And we are starting to seriously look at CCS. And it especially because it's just had so many private and public failures. I mean, we'll talk we'll ask them, but I have yet to find one that's actually been successful. Or it's so minut really takes out carbon, it's not worth the money and the energy. So we're looking at the money now going in. And then there's, you know, there's, there's $12 billion or more going into this, and so we better get it right. And right now, it doesn't seem to be that way. Okay, well, first of all, I, when I read your article, I was just fascinated, you just this doesn't happen very often, you get these two very highly educated guys who decide they're going to do a startup company, or they're going to make the career and the CCS and you know, and go gung ho into it. And then they discovered they were one of the first people of a startup company, and they found out that it, it doesn't work. And so they've gone on to better pastures. So that's the first question is, how did you both get involved in the ground floor of this? Because it's to me, this is a really fascinating story. And I also would like to know how, how far in the past you were doing this stuff versus now?
Dr. Kurt House:Yeah, sure. I start, Charlie and
Dr. Charles Harvey:yeah, yeah, Kurt, Kurt really is the founder of the company. I'm like the academic mascot. So I think he should start that answer.
Dr. Kurt House:Yeah, so I've been more or less than in climate Tech. My whole career, whole adult life, I've been in the field, broadly defined since 2002, roughly speaking, which kind of makes me an elder statesman in this in this area. The I got my doctorate at Harvard, and I and Charlie was one of my doctoral advisors. And it was we're working on the physics and chemistry of carbon capture and sequestration, I was working on that as my doctoral thesis and and Charlie got involved because he was he was advising me on on the science, the motivation at the time, this is this is really important to the overall arc of CCS technology is that at the time, if you looked at you looked at the portfolio of technologies that we derive energy services from, so right you know, crudely categorizing things as electricity generation, other industrial point sources of co2, and then transportation, immobile sources okay, but roughly think of things gasoline diesel fuel in the latter category, principally coal and natural gas In the the power generation category, this is circa 2002. And she looked at all this portfolio of sources of co2. And you say, Well, how can we how can we replace? How can we how can we generate electricity without without emitting carbon dioxide in a cost effective manner. And at the time, solar energy was very expensive. Solar energy, circa 2003, was something you put solar panels were things you put on satellites, and you put them on satellites, because that was the best salute when you when effectively money wasn't an option. And you were in the middle of space, and there was no pipelines around you put them on satellites, or other very remote, very remote power supply. That's what solar was for. It costs something like $15 a watt for a solar panel to buy a solar panel, the cost of the panel would be however many watts it would generate at peak power times $15 A watt. Today, 20 years on the cost of solar is like 20 cents a watt, it has not just come down by an order of magnitude, it's come down by almost two orders of magnitude over two decades. It's staggering. I did not predict that in the mid aughts. And in fact, I can make a strong case that nobody actually predicted as strongly as it's come down. But that's that's kind of a side point. In the arts, we were looking at looking at electricity, knowing what we needed to do to solve climate change, we need to address the electricity sector, as well as the other large point sources, things like cement, manufacturing, steel manufacturing, other chemicals, other specialty chemicals, and but power being the big one. We're asking the question, how can we make low cost low carbon power, the idea of capturing the co2 from the smokestack, and then separating it from the other gases, compressing it to high pressure and injecting it deep underground. That sounds expensive and adding all those things together. But if you did the arithmetic in the mid aughts, I think adding the capital expenditures and the operating expenditures to do that, you could make a pretty compelling case that it would be the cheapest source of low carbon power. And the reason it would be the cheapest source of low carbon power is not because it was cheap. But because solar was very expensive. Wind was also expensive coming down and coming at that point cheaper than solar, but it was still, you know, kind of a niche really needed very, very high quality wind resources didn't seem like didn't seem like a general platform technology. So that was the principal motivation I got I got my doctorate in 2008. And rather than rather than staying in academia, I wanted to go actually deploy this technology go make, you know, go make a dent in global warming. And so I started started a company Charlie was on the was the was a founding member of the Scientific Advisory Board of this company. We raised a lot of money from well known investors. And we scoured the earth for good opportunities to build low carbon, low carbon projects, power and other projects by capturing the co2 and injecting it cheap. And now fast forward to today. And what has if you were doing the same arithmetic today, if I was a graduate student today, I would not make the same choice, I would do the arithmetic and say, Oh, solar is incredibly cheap, and batteries to levelized the solar to shift the load from from the daytime to nighttime become much, much cheaper. And wind turbines, we've got 10 megawatt wind turbines, and they're much much cheaper. During that time. CCS has gotten more expensive for reasons that we should talk about later. But it's gotten more expensive. So now it's not close. It's just not close. And so you look at it you say the this is this is really glorious news. Actually, this is like this should be something that we celebrate Celebrate very explicitly that we've had this tremendous technological progress in renewable energy generation. So the now it is it is basically the cheapest source of electricity, it's blended. It's spectacular. And so CCS is just CCS for power generation is just a total waste of time now and yeah
Dina Rasor:Okay, Charlie, you want to add to that to when you know how you got into it and and your when you had your aha moment?
Dr. Charles Harvey:Yeah. Well, I am a really a hydrogeologist by training and I wanted research project that would be important for for climate change. And, and this is an area where my expertise is useful understanding how fluids move around underground. co2 is just a different fluid than water. So, so I jumped at the chance to do it, it also happened to be the case that it's very easy to get research money still is, and it was then on this topic because the oil companies funded it. And, and so you didn't have the the difficulty and stress of competing for for research money from, say, the National Science Foundation. So that made it kind of easy. But I realized that research wasn't really the barrier to doing this. Oil companies have been injecting co2 for 5060 years. And we didn't really need to do research on how to do that. And Kurt had this idea to really do it to do the practical part of it. And and if I wanted to address climate change, then that's what I needed to do is join, join a company that that was going to actually do it. And then the aha moment of you know, it's not going to work, let me think there are a couple things. I remember learning, we were looking for a solution for the future Gen project in Illinois. And, by a solution, what I meant was, we were looking for a place where they could put their co2. This is a project that was originally funded under the first Bush administration, and I forget how much money they've spent, but you know, over a billion dollars by the end, and I thought the Company C 12 did a really good job of finding a place to do it. And we were very excited to sort of present that to future Gen. And then they weren't interested. And part of the answer we got back from them was, well, we don't want to do it the easy way. We want to do it the hard way. So they're very curt.
Dr. Kurt House:And effectively, yes, yeah.
Dr. Charles Harvey:And that that definitely set something off in my mind to be what kind of organization or company that really wants to get something done for the first time, says we want to do it the hard way. And that I started to become kind of suspicious of the whole thing at that point. And then the main thing is just just tremendously good news, you know, somewhat sad for See 12 That are the, the you know, the business plan didn't make sense anymore, when you could build solar and wind. But tremendously good news for, you know, the point of view of reducing carbon emissions. So
Greg Williams:I want to back up and dig a little bit deeper on, you know, it's hard to imagine somebody just saying, I'm, I'm a masochist. And I want to do this the hard way, you know, unless you're trying to build muscle mass or something like why? Why did somebody undertake to do something the hard way?
Dina Rasor:Yeah, what was the what was the
Dr. Kurt House:what the details of that idiosyncratic, but effectively, effectively, we had, there was this, it was one of these demonstration projects, and there was well over a billion dollars that had been appropriated for it. And they put out for public bid the sort of, like, where are we going to put the co2 in the company that I was running at the time had done was the only really professional company and like, it's just true, the only professional company dedicated to that exact question, right, like, and so so there was this, we had had, we had all the legal control over this, what we call an anticline, or structures, think it's a geologic structure that looks like an upside down dome, okay. And think of like, yeah, it's thinking like a bowl upside down, right? These domes, that's where most conventional oil and gas reservoirs are found. They're found in these domes, because the fluid, the buoyant fluids, natural gas, or oil, they migrate in the subsurface until they come into one of these domes, and then they and then they sort of fill up the top. So we were drawing, we were saying, well, for the for the early solutions, we want to we want to put co2 into the structures that we have high high confidence will retain them both vertically and laterally, we'll know where the co2 is, right? Which as opposed to not know what the co2 is, and they be quite explicitly Hardway to them was, well, those domes are hard to find. Because they're logical they're they're not that common. which is not really true. But yeah, but they sort of said, so we want to just be able to inject it anywhere, because that way we can we can roll out CCS all over the planet and the globe just by injecting it straight down. So we want to do it over in this location that doesn't have a dome. And then we're like, Well, okay, but that means that you won't be able to control where it goes, it's gonna, it's going to migrate all over the place. And they're like, yeah, we're just we're not that worried about it. Right. And that was very, very surprising to me that that's really, really weird. And, you know, there's not, there's never been a clear, and of course, it wasn't done the project never really got off the ground. Some fraction, some small fraction of the appropriated funds were actually spent. Because the, because the budget, the budget kept escalating, and everything like that, and so never actually did the unconfined co2 experiment. But that was that that was what they meant by by not wanting to do the easy peasy thing.
Dr. Charles Harvey:Yeah. Well, it's certainly hard in a legal sense now that if you you're CEO, you don't know where your co2 is going, whose property is going underneath. That's one advantage to the anticline is, is that you can you can get the mineral rights so that there's no problems with escaping co2 under property that that hasn't, given the mineral rights.
Greg Williams:So I'm interested to hear you say that because, you know, we've heard other experts say that that's precisely the risk, you know, it's very hard to put co2 in the in the ground and be sure that it's going to stay there. And that sort of imply that there wasn't this controlling legal mechanism to ensure that it did stay in the ground, or that there were consequences for someone. So is that a theoretical?
Dr. Kurt House:Well, the three yeah, there's, there's two, two orthogonal issues there. There's the legality of it, and then just the physics of it. And the physics is, in some ways, an easier question. The physics is, you can you can put in the ground in under certain circumstances and have high degrees of content have a high degree of confidence that it will, that it will stay confined to a region that you've sort of pre pre predetermined. But you But you, but to do that, you have to be careful about where you put it, you can't just put it anywhere. Right. That's kind of obvious and common sense. Right. And, and that that was was effectively the, if you will, the disagreement that Charlie just sort of referred to? Was that, that we were saying? Well, you know, if you do it here in this location, it will, you'll be you'll be able to maximize the likelihood of vertical lateral control. And, and the response wasn't, we disagree with that. The response was, we don't care about lateral, lateral and vertical control, which is weird, right? And it's like, oh, that's odd, because we would think that that would be, we would think it'd be a major legal issue at MIT, just and just a major public health issue and everything else if you just didn't know where it was go.
Dina Rasor:I have a real basic question. I know that the carbon, carbon dioxide when you take it out, goes the pipe pipeline has to be highly pressurized. And but it once you get it to the sequestration point, I've never been able to get an answer this is it have to be pumped underground under high pressure.
Dr. Charles Harvey:Sure, yeah. It has to. So as you go deeper underground, the water is at a higher and higher pressure. Just as if you were in the ocean, and you get higher and higher pressures, the deeper you go. So to push it out of the well say a kilometer deep, you have to overcome the pressure of the water in the pores. And it's quite high.
Dina Rasor:Is it is pressurized as it is in the pipelines?
Dr. Charles Harvey:Probably yes.
Dina Rasor:And I understand water also can cause you know, can cause explosions with it. Is that true?
Dr. Charles Harvey:I know that I'm not sure what you mean by that water.
Dina Rasor:They talked about pipelines. There. They've talked about pipelines as you can't let any, you know, water leak in.
Dr. Kurt House:What you're getting at is that co2 dissolves in water and forms carbonic acid. So co co2 Is is acidic, which is which is true. co2 pipelines have to be kept more dry than natural gas pipelines say because natural gas just is very very insoluble. So it doesn't really form any any any acids, you know, acidic solution. That's not a big deal, to be honest. It's, it's not that hard that even though even though natural gas doesn't have that doesn't have that problem, natural gas pipelines are quite dry. It's not that hard to keep to keep get to keep pipelines dry. That's not That's not the that wouldn't be on my top 10 critiques of CCS, you know, which, fundamentally, fundamentally, my critique of CCS is that it's just not a cost effective solution to climate change anymore.
Dina Rasor:Okay, well, we're gonna, near the end, I want to ask you more questions about pipelines? Because I just, I've never been able to get really good answers on that. So you had mentioned that welcome phase, where it was the preferred technology and all that kind of stuff. Could you may name first of all, may name or give examples of some of the private and public failures of large past CCS technology? I have yet to find one, a project, private or public that really succeeded and was practical. So I'm asking you guys, you know,
Dr. Kurt House:well, Dina, it's not. It's not because you're, you're a poor researcher, that you haven't been able to find one. You could continue to search for decades and decades, and you wouldn't find one because there hasn't been one. Right? And there's a there's a sorted long list of failures. Charlie just mentioned one a future Gen, which got how spinning hat was, was, was appropriated well over a billion dollars and spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars and there's nothing to show for it. There's the Texas project. There's the hydrogen energy California project. There's the there's the Petra Nova project there's the I'm blanking the one in Alabama.
Dr. Charles Harvey:Kurt you're forgetting Kemper, you got to Yeah,
Dr. Kurt House:this is probably the most, the most fun one from a in a certain sense. We mentioned this in our in our op ed. So Kemper is a power plant in Alabama. That was a coal gasification to with with CCS plant, the carbon was gonna go to enhanced oil recovery. So it was gonna be used to get more oil out of the ground, the co2 is gonna give us more oil on the ground. Seven and a half billion dollars were spent, spent, not just appropriate spent wasn't all federal spending. Most of it was actually ratepayers in Alabama ratepayers. That got that had to pay a slightly higher electricity bill every month for years and years and years. In order to build this plant, it was two or three times over the original budget, I mean, some totally ridiculous amount. I can't even I can't remember how much was over when it was finally killed. You know, formally, I think in 2017, if my memory serves correct, when it was formally formally canceled, here's the great, the great sort of almost poetic irony. It was cancelled in let's say 2017. In 2021. It was the plant was demolished, literally by you know, professional demolition crews. And you can find and you can find videos online of this actually happening. It was intentionally demolished. And that was about five weeks before President Biden signed the infrastructure bill that included $12 billion for CCS. So so this case, they literally blew it up, blew up the most recent project that was three times over budget, and then then then allocated another 12 billion for it. So like, you can't you can't come up with a clear example of good money being thrown after bad.
Dina Rasor:And I believe there was a former SEC Secretary of Energy, I can't remember more Tez Moritz Moniz Moniz. Yeah, I just remember him from his haircut. But I just but he, he was one of the people that was the real, you know, daddy rabbit behind it. And so I'm sure that his name went to a lot to people who wanted to invest in it. Okay, Charlie, you want to say anything about that?
Dr. Charles Harvey:Yeah, our Greg had something.
Greg Williams:So it's just going to ask, do you guys have any theory as to why this technology Despite the fact that it doesn't make economic sense continues to drive so much investment, whether it's private, or public. For example, you know, if the fuel industry likes to fund this, why wouldn't they just fund big solar farms and charge ratepayers for the electricity?
Dr. Charles Harvey:Yeah. Yeah, so, one, there's a number of reasons for this, some really subtle, some I don't think we understand yet. Some really obvious. And one really obvious one that we haven't talked about yet is that almost all of these projects, the co2 is used for enhanced oil recovery. So you'll often see instead of CCS acronym, CC, U, S, carbon capture, use and storage, and that use is enhanced oil recovery, you know, small other uses, like filling fire extinguishers are insignificant. And this really useful for oil companies to get the carbon dioxide to push out oil. And the amount of co2 that's produced from burning that oil is more than the amount of co2 which is put into the ground to push it out.
Dina Rasor:Yeah, isn't that kind of like a dog chasing its tail in the sense that, you know, here we are, this is supposed to take carbon out of the atmosphere. But it's we we, we dig, dig it up, we burn it, we take it out of the atmosphere, not very successfully drink it over. So we can put it back down into the ground take more oil out to more carbon in the air. I never understood why they thought. I mean, there's no way to make this thing carbon neutral, right? Yeah. So
Dr. Kurt House:yes, let me let me unpack a little bit this everything Charlie said is exactly right. And listeners might be a little bit confused right now, because I just went through this litany of projects that failed. And then all of a sudden, we said, oh, yeah, but we are actually doing it in in, in in these other places. So I want to separate two different concepts. I want to separate. Um, I'm gonna call it CCS from industrials, from some, let's say power plants to keep it simple CCS from power plants into geologic into geologic storage repositories. Okay, category one, Category Two enhanced oil recovery projects. I'm gonna start I'm gonna start with category two. So enhanced oil recovery has been around for over 50 years. And it's, the way it works is when you after you've been operating an oilfield for some time, after you get, say, 30% of the oil out of the ground, you the ratio of water coming out of the ground to oil coming on the ground goes way, way up, becomes really hard to get more oil on the ground, even though seven tenths of the of the oil are still down there. And that's because the oil gets separated into little blobs surrounded by water. So very smart Petroleum Engineers figured out like in the 1960s and 70s, they figured out if you inject certain fluids, co2 happens to be the very best one for this called miscible fluids, they will even inject them into the ground, they will dissolve into the oil. And then you create the single phase solution of co2 and, and oil. And you can inject as much co2 as you have produced that co2 and oil and get the oil out of the ground. So the cotton that technology was designed, like I said half a century ago, for the purpose of getting soy oil out of the ground, not getting co2 into the ground. And if you were listening carefully, you will have heard me say you have to produce the fluids together the oil and the co2 together because it's a single phase. That's what makes enhanced oil recovery work. So the goal is not to inject co2, the co2 is not pushing the oil out and staying in the ground, you are injecting the co2 into the ground with the intention of getting the co2 back out of the ground with the oil that it does that dissolved into the co2. Okay. That's the AOR that was designed for totally repurpose. Something that is that we pointed out in our New York Times essay, it is ironic, and and unbelievably wasteful, is that these old enhanced oil recovery projects are now getting money from the government. The federal, they're getting taxpayer money now, today, projects that were that were built in the 1980s for the sole purpose of getting oil out of the ground, are now getting money from the federal government now in order to, you know, in order to sequester carbon, but they're not really sequestering. And so the effect the net effect of that subsidy is to is to make that oil Enhanced Oil Recovery Project more profitable and then fora extend the longevity of that project, resulting in more fossil fuel, fossil fuels produced than would have otherwise been produced and more co2 put into the atmosphere than would have been put into the atmosphere. So this is a very perverse subsidy.
Greg Williams:So what happens to the co2 after it's produced up with the oil?
Dr. Kurt House:Yeah, great question. So in standard do our project, co2 comes out of the ground with the oil, once it gets to the surface, and the pressures are low, they separate. So what you could do is, like out gas, the co2 and just vented into the atmosphere, but petroleum engineers are smarter than that, because that co2 is useful to us again. So they put it into a tank where it just naturally separates. And at the top of the tank, they take co2, they pipe co2 At the bottom of that take, they drain out the oil, so the naturally separates just because it's low, low pressure, they're no longer miscible. And then you re inject the co2 to get more oil. And you do it again. So someone will, if someone was arguing with us on this video, they would say, Yeah, that's exactly right. And we do it again and again, and again, and a little bit of a co2 dissolves into the water every time. And so over time, we lose that co2, lose it underground. So it is effectively sequestered. And I won't, I wouldn't disagree with that characterization. But the net effect is that you've produced a lot more oil than you wouldn't have otherwise you would have otherwise produced. And there's a second component to the story. Where did the co2 come from, that you're injecting in the first place? Or the best example here is that is one that we highlight in the New York Times essay, and this is the LaBarge facility in Wyoming. Okay, go ahead, Charlie.
Dr. Charles Harvey:Yeah, this is one of my favorites. So this is the big success in a sense, and that it, it sequesters more co2 than, than anything else. They claim about seven mega tons a year. But the story, a lot more interesting and complex than that. It's been around for for almost 50 years. So it was operating, before anyone was even really worried that much about climate change. And what it does is it combines gas extraction, natural gas extraction, with enhanced oil recovery, the gas is interesting, the gas is only 15% or so methane, right? So natural gas, when you sell it needs to be almost all methane. That's what burns. So only 15% methane is not very good. But it's got helium in it also. And then a lot of co2 and maybe some nitrogen and other gases, I don't know. So it's profitable to pump this gas out, separate out the gases and the helium is very, very valuable, and separate out the methane for natural gas, and then you have a huge amount of co2. So they used to just vent that co2 co2 directly to the air. So it's like the opposite of a sequestration project. Right, you're unser Questrade naturally sequestered co2. But with the then over time, they realized that they could, they could sell this for enhanced oil recovery. And you use it that way. And then the 45 Q subsidy comes along and pays you for injecting that co2 for enhanced oil recovery. But my understanding is that they don't always do this when the price of oil is low, then there's no profit in enhanced oil recovery. So then they just vent it. And the price of oil is high, there's more enhanced oil recovery. So you might say, Oh, this is terrible. They're just venting it. The question that I think kind of what Kurt was just saying, question that comes out of that as well, which is worse, just venting the co2 to the air or using it for enhanced oil recovery to produce more oil that makes co2 When When you burn it. And interesting calculation here is that with the new inflation Reduction Act, you know, the climate bill, basically the Q 4545 Q subsidy goes up a lot. So Exxon doesn't need to do anything, to now make 10s I think it's almost 200 million additional dollars, just continuing what they're doing with this project. And I suspect that when an exon is advertising about how many megatons of co2 They've sequestered, they're talking about this project. They don't I haven't seen them actually lay that out. But I think this is probably what, what they what they're referring to.
Greg Williams:So essentially, government subsidies that are designed to encourage reduction of carbon in the atmosphere are instead very true. directly subsidizing oil extraction.
Dr. Charles Harvey:In this case, absolutely, yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you're the question that you asked a while ago is sort of what's in it for oil companies. So yeah, here's a good example of that. I think there's more more to that answer that, you know, one is, is things like building the pipelines and building, you know, just direct subsidies. Now, that $12 billion that you mentioned the beginning, they'll probably go to oil companies. Another thing that's a little squishier, but I think is really important is that all of this cast doubt in some members of the public anyway about whether it's really necessary to stop using fossil fuels. Right, because if you make this argument that we that CCS works, then there's sort of this satisfying kind of notion, well, we don't really need to change that much we can we can just do this. And I think they're well aware of that. And that's why there's been this big advertising push. I'm sure you've seen the different different ads from different oil companies promoting carbon capture and sequestration, particularly over the last last year, I would say,
Dina Rasor:Well, how frustrating it must be to you because you know, that they're using it with, you know, basically greenwashing to, you know, look at it, but yeah, they're, it's, you know, it's giving them permission to continue to do doing that. And it must be frustrating for both of you to sit here and watch a tech technology that you actually, you know, learned a lot about and did a lot, a lot and then found out it didn't work. What made you guys decide to write the New York Times article, which we will have on our website? To you what was your motivation here? I'm sure you guys. Yeah.
Dr. Kurt House:Yeah, let me say one quick thing. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say we realized it wouldn't work. It'll work. We just realized it wasn't economically competitive. That's, that's that first category of low carb, it is no longer a low cost option for low carbon electricity. And that was the motivation that got us into it got out competed by renewables. And you know, there's this great line, what does it have? Someone was talking, it's probably apocryphal, but someone's debating John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, right. And they said, you know, sir, your your view is different than it was a year ago, you're inconsistent. And he says, he says, Well, when the facts change, I changed my mind. What what do you do, sir? Of course, that that's the point, right? We we went into it, I think, with the idea that this would be, this would be the way to make low carbon electricity. That is, we were wrong, like we were wrong, there's a much, much, much cheaper, and therefore more effective ways to build the renewable or to build a low low carbon power, power grid. And, and that's why we're no longer working on it.
Dina Rasor:So really, you could have I know this from working in the Pentagon, that you can have a technical problem that can be solved. But it one is not has anything to do with the mission or the weapon. And I remember there was one missile Maverick missile, they kept fixing it, fixing it, fixing it and everything else. And I kept saying none of this works. It's not practical in law and all this. And they were all the engineers were hurt. They said, Well, it's the technical challenge. You know, here's the technical challenge. And of course, they're not free. They're not free market, people are getting money to fix this weapon. And this sounds like the same kind of thing. Yeah, you know, you can pretty much do anything with technology. But can it you know, how, what expense especially when there's something that is better? And I know one plant the woman was talking about in New Mexico, there was an engine and engineering group looked at it so it didn't work. They said at the very most that pulls off 40% of the carbon. Yeah. Okay, well, Greg, do you have another? Did you have your hand?
Dr. Kurt House:Charlie was gonna was gonna answer what is motivation? Right.
Dr. Charles Harvey:Yeah. Oh, yeah. What was I gonna say? Well, I think it's kind of interesting. We started writing this, what, two and a half years ago, and we had I can't remember we first submitted it and we we didn't, they didn't take it. So it part of it is I think, we don't sound so radical as we sounded then. I mean, people like you are an example of this. When Kurt and I were talking about this maybe five years Years ago, I think we were unusual, really unusual in reaching these, these conclusions and facts have sort of caught up with us. And another another point that's worth making, I think, is that we actually, in a sense, retracted from the New York Times, when well, it became clear that they wanted to publish it because it was timely now, with the inflation Reduction Act. And when I say we retracted it, we really we just delayed it. Because we didn't want it to come out before the Act passed. So we're not so arrogant as to think that we would have affected the outcome of the vote. But if the app hadn't passed, we would have had a really hard time living with ourselves. Because, you know, the rest of it is very good. And this was something that was sort of put through to satisfy Joe Manchin and, you know, his, he's supported by the fossil fuel industry.
Dina Rasor:Well, that that brings me to the next exactly into the next question is, are we in a situation where, because of politics, because this, the CCS industry has a, you know, it's like a freight train that's been rolling and hard to stop? Do we have to like, give, you know, part of the climate money to appease the oil gods, to be able to get to do what we want to do? And a lot of people have said that to me, a lot of people say, Well, yeah, just kind of heavy. But you know, and what would happen if you could take that to a billion dollars and put it more into renewable energy? I mean, no renewable energy is getting money. But
Dr. Kurt House:it's getting a lot, right. And actually, that probably is from the infrastructure bill, is the the newest IRA in place Reduction Act has something closer to 20 billion, in addition to that, for CPS, although it's it, the scoring is based on the tax credit. So it's actually very hard to predict if it could be more than that. But so all over it's, it's, it's a, it's a big absolute chunk of money. It's a small, it's a it's sort of 10% ish, of, of the overall clean energy investment, maybe a little more 10 to 15%. That's it, I'm okay, paying that kind of a bribe. But given that, given how important how important solving climate change is, and how it is to accelerate the development of renewables, it's inefficient. And no, Charlie, and I like we insisted the New York Times piece get published after the after the bill was passed. Because the point was, like, we're okay with that kind of a bribe. And in this instance, you know, it kind of narrowly was, there's an interesting thing I want to add, though, because the, the, you know, the Exxon and shoot Creek case is just this, like, very blatant wealth transfer, right XL has been operating shoot creek for 40 years. They did it for entirely different reasons, they're going to now get paid something like $200 million a year from taxpayers money to continue to operate it. And either either they're going to continue to do what they've done anyway, which is a direct direct wealth transfer, or they're going to operate at longer than they would have otherwise, which means more more oil and more natural gas, which is counterproductive for the point of climate change. So that's a kind of a really obvious incentive, like a really explicit one that I almost doubt anyone would even challenge because it's just so it's so clear and factual. There's another set of you asked the question earlier, effectively, why if it's failed so much, and it's so unambiguously expensive? Why? Why do we have so much interest in it? And there's, so besides the blatant direct wealth transfer to certain oil projects, there's kind of a weird subtle one here that I just want to mention, which is that researchers at universities get funded from the from the Department of Energy and from fossil fuel companies, small, small absolute dollars, but large but very levered dollars, to sort of work on scientific questions. And I know this because I was one of them, both at Harvard and MIT. And so and so it was Charlie. And there's a whole community of them and they have the ear of they have the ear of policymakers, and there's a become sort of senior administrative officials in the DOA and things like that. And so there's there's actually a weird constituency that wants that, that really wants to continue, you know, continue this. You know, continue the gravy train effectively. And so and it's a, it's a much more sympathetic constituency, then, you know, just a big rich oil company, right? It's Oh, those are those are good researchers are they're studying how to solve climate change, right? But there's, there's still cognitive dissidence affects us. All right. And they've been working on it for a very long time and, and will still make the case that it's important. And so what, what the reaction, what reaction we've gotten to our piece from people in that research community, almost universally is you're right, about CCS, power not being competitive with renewables. You're right about the co2, EUR not being a climate solution. Okay, those are the two pieces we those are the two arguments we make. And they're basically like your right, then they say, but you didn't mention cement and steel. Okay. And in truth, we hadn't a paragraph about cement and steel, but the editor is kind of complicated. But the reason I want to bring it up here, because because it is the soul, the soul, quasi legitimate objection we've gotten, but it's also very addressable. So the issue there is cement production and steel production produce produce co2. And, for four reasons, very inherent to the actual processes and then feel manufacturing, it's difficult, it's very difficult to to replace that with a different process that doesn't produce co2. And nobody has yet but for, certainly for the for the taste of cement, nobody, that there's no substitute technology that I'm aware of, that will just not release co2. So therefore, people will say, we need CCS for those two industrial applications, because there aren't good substitution. It was that Oh, yes.
Greg Williams:Well, it's some point now or maybe circle back to it. To what extent do steel and cement produce co2 Just because they consume a lot of energy versus something more inherent in the process? So if renewable energy has gotten so cheap, why doesn't that produce all the heat for the calcite or stuff like that? It's
Dr. Kurt House:absolutely brilliant. Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So let's, let's just take the cake. Just to keep it simple. Let's take the case of cement because it's, in some sense, the hardest case. So cement, the way you make some edges you take, you make limestone, that's calcium carbonate. So ca c, oh, three calcium carbonate, extremely common rock, you take calcium carbonate, and you put it in a in a cow signer, which is just a cement cement maker, and you and you heat it up a lot, you blow really hot air over it, okay. And when it does, when this calcium carbonate heats up, it releases co2 In terms of new what's called line calcium oxide. So if you can picture this chemical reaction that goes CAC oh three goes to co2 plus Cao slime, so you make pure you make co2 There, okay. And in rough numbers, kind of, you know, approximately half of the total co2 from the cement manufacturing plant will be from generating the heat to generating the energy to heat up the limestone, and the other half of it will be directly from the limestone. So, to your point, Greg, you're 100%, right, you could replace, you can replace the thermal component of it with a heat pump or some other electricity, you know, renewably generated electricity form of heat, you could do that. And that's what what you can't do is replace, or at least you at least, I'm unaware of any way that you can replace the co2 that directly comes off of the limestone. So that's, that's what both sides is that co2, they're that half of the co2 coming from the cement plant. That's got to be done with CCS, okay. But here's the response to that. turnoff. However, those cement plants response scale, and dilute, dilute, I mean, the co2 in the exhaust gas is a slow concentration, which means that capturing the co2 from that exhaust gas, it's very, very, very expensive. And it dramatically increases the price of the cement itself. So all that means is that it's just it's a very expensive co2 source to mitigate, doesn't mean we shouldn't mitigate it. But it means it's like one of the last ones you should mitigate. We should do the cheap stuff first, right? And the cheap stuff means building a full renewable electricity grid. It's every single person in the world driving an electric car, right? We should do all of those things. And once you've done all those things, then which will be you know, which it would be glorious and amazing and unbelievable if we can achieve that. But in the next 30 years, you know, then you start to deal with maybe maybe the last couple of percentage points from things like cement, but that's 3040 years from Now it's not today, right? And this is just this just really this is just basic economics that we want to do the thing, we want to have the largest marginal impact per dollar of it of investment.
Dina Rasor:So how many of how many of these academics who say we still have to do this, we still have to study this? Because there's cement steel? How many of them have gotten grants specifically for cement and steel versus the pipe dream of, of capturing the carbon out of the coal and natural gas plants?
Dr. Charles Harvey:As a great question, yeah, I can't give you the answer. That's a really good question.
Dina Rasor:I can say, I have a lot of money for steel and cement that I've never really heard about all I ever hear the academics playing against.
Dr. Kurt House:I'm willing to I'm willing to go on that go on. I'm willing to bet I'm willing to wager I don't know the answer. Let me say that first. So I'm guessing it's an educated guess, based on various grants I've reviewed over the years over the years and research I'm aware of that's going on, I would bet that it's significantly less than 20% of the grant money. It's explicitly that's explicitly Yeah. You know.
Dr. Charles Harvey:So I'll give you something that maybe you find useful is a recent paper from MIT. Not not MIT faculty, but what are called research scientists or research engineers, so they're not tenure track that is very enthusiastic about CCS was cement. This paper, the research was funded by Exxon, there's a Exxon researcher, as a co author, and something I've never seen before the scientific paper is copyrighted by axon, it's got the little C with the circle on it, and axon next to it. I'm not even sure what that means. But I'll happily send it to you.
Dina Rasor:Yes, please. Because that that's a nice thread in the sweater to call up Exxon and say, Why did you write this? Are you going?
Dr. Charles Harvey:Right, right. Funding a thing?
Dina Rasor:Are you going into the cement business?
Dr. Charles Harvey:You know? Right. Right. So it's just arguing that you should keep making cement in the way we are? And, you know, I everything Kurt said is right. We don't know how to how to stop getting the co2 out of the, you know, the formation of calcium oxide, but there are there are things out there, I mean, you can make stronger cement and just less of it. So there are you know, it wouldn't, it wouldn't eliminate the problem, but there are other potential ideas. And as long as the subsidies are just for co2 injected into the ground, rather than than reduction in co2 emissions, than these other ideas can't be subsidized. And you know, the playing field is tilted towards processes that make a lot of co2 and inject at least some of it, you could still admit a lot of it and get the subsidy, right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And one other thing. I thought, Kurt, you're sure really good points about sort of academics for this. And just in your my experience, and this is sort of how the story changes tells you a little bit is that when we're first doing this, this sort of story you hear from, they're all oil companies. I don't know anyone working on CCs in academics, that is an oil company funded. I don't know if there's any way but they're all oil company funded. So the story originally was sort of this, this thing that used to drive me nuts, because it's so tautological. And that is, come on, we're burning oil, we're gonna keep burning oil, because let's be reasonable, we burn a lot of oil, you know, that kind of thing. Don't know what to do with that. But that story is kind of gone now. Now. Now, the story that we get, I think both of us have heard since we published the Op Ed. Is is this Yeah, but what about cement? And what about steel? So now Now the story is about whether it's hard to decarbonize sectors and CCS is absolutely necessary for them. And it's just interesting, it's shifted the kind of motivation from from the same group of people
Greg Williams:so the question that always comes to go, Hey, I was just going to point out that you can buy a lot in the form of direct air carbon capture, which I see you have operating in the background of your room, you know, just by protecting plant life.
Dr. Charles Harvey:Yeah, so I think that topic, yeah, I can talk about this topic forever. This is where my reach Churches gone in this area since abandoning carbon capture and sequestration. So I'm all about about plants storing carbon and peat. Now peat is just a big pile of carbon.
Dina Rasor:We recently had a podcast from out in Marin County, in California here, they're, they're really working on these. This, you know, this guy is an egg farmer and with a bunch of farmers, but he also was educated in it on how you how much you can save by changing farming is huge, just changing little bit in farming, so you don't release it out of the soil or what you plant.
Dr. Charles Harvey:So we did have a whole nother thing. Maybe they're so complicated. And there's so much we don't know about how this works. And there are places where we know this works. And Pete is one of them. The farming stuff is a lot of that is still really up in the air.
Dina Rasor:But this guy was saying we think we're onto something. A couple of issues. Yeah, yeah. Nobody will fund it. That was pretty much the end of the podcast is even if there are some of these hopeful things, nobody will fund it. And right,
Dr. Charles Harvey:right. And I completely agree with this money now raffle? Yeah, this is me, if you could take that $12 billion and put it into researching how to put more carbon in soils and forests and grasslands. That would be a use that I would applaud.
Dina Rasor:Okay, I have one more question about pipelines, which is sort of my bugaboo. Because I actually think it's one of the Achilles heel, because the public knows about pipelines, and they don't like them. But the Princeton, we can put this up to Princeton, and we put it up another is Princeton did this study of the network of pipelines, they're going to have to build in the next 20 or 30 years to pipe this stuff all over the country. And it was pipelines. And I'm like, and also the, there was a small eight inch pipeline, explosion that was done co2 explosion, test explosion. And it's really great because they have a drone over the pipeline, you know, and they, it blows up, and it's really impressive blowing that pipeline blows. But the shockwave was so big and hit the drone, and the drone was never quite the same. It really damaged the quality of the picture. But the they're talking about 24 to 48 inch pipelines. And you know, it is a huge network of pipelines. And we can't they can't even get pipelines done in Iowa, because the farmers don't want them for, you know, for Sia, co2, moving ethanol around and all that kind of stuff. So it I just wonder how you know where it's going to be this? Yeah, huge upper up thing of how we're going to pipe this stuff around safely. And you know, when it blows it, you know, it blows it goes down into valleys, and there was a you know, that explosion in Mississippi, I think it was and the people in the town were just by sheer luck. Nobody was killed because it takes all the oxygen out for the year and then a lot of them had brain damage. Very nice.
Dr. Kurt House:The, I would actually say this mostly just goes to the cost. The Cortes pipeline has been taking co2 from the from the four corners region from the Miguel mo natural co2 dome and the Four Corners region down to the Permian Basin for enhanced oil recovery. Since the 1980s. Government built it, they rebuilt its private enterprises wouldn't and it was it was motivated by increasing domestic oil production after the after the Arab oil embargo. There was lots of different lots of efforts. That's a 24 inch pipeline, I believe. Double check me on that it's a big pipe. It's a big pipe. And you know, it's it's it's not any more dangerous. I would actually say if co2 pipeline is probably it's probably less dangerous than natural gas pipeline, because now Yes, co2. co2 can smother you and co2 can freeze you because it expands really fast, it gets really cold. But But natural gas blows up also. So at the right at the right level of expense, I wouldn't be too worried about operating co2 pipelines. I think it can be done safely. But or you know, as within the safety bounds of saying our existing natural gas distribution system, which I think is is mostly safe. There are accidents, of course, but it's mostly a safe, pretty safe system given given the extent of the operations. The thing that the but the thing is, it's expensive. You And so you add in so that's this is where I think you're spot on, is that if you're gonna be, if we're gonna be building, not only I mean I'm, I'm actually I would say CCS, CCS major industrial facilities, particularly power generation, but even most others uncompetitive, even if there was no pipelines involved, even if just all you had to do was capture the co2 and inject it directly underneath the pipeline underneath the power, you can't do that. Because a lot of power plants are in locations without good without good geology for sequestration. So you have to move it, you have to move it around. And that just makes and then if you're gonna move around safely to your point, that's expensive. So just make the eat that much worse economically. And actually, to come full circle to the you were you were you were wondering why the future Gen project didn't want to inject it into a dome, because it would have to move the co2 to do that. And that was that would add cost to the project. And they wanted to prove that you could just inject it anywhere, because that would decrease the cost. Right. So I think ultimately, this just this does come down to cost. And and it makes the product that makes DCS even even less economic than then it would otherwise be.
Dina Rasor:So there is there the political will to come up with the money for that kind of pipeline? And is there the political will of putting more pipelines across more farmlands or smaller towns and whatever? Because, you know, part of it is science, which you guys concentrate on, and the other part of this perception and perception, right now pipelines a nasty word. And for sure, Spence,
Dr. Kurt House:yeah. Yeah, for totally, for sure. And I think you make a fantastic point that, that, you know, in addition to the cost, yeah, pipelines always get, you know, always get opposed. And, and you look at a map, you know, you look at a map that would come out of, I'm not, I'm not sure I know, the exact map you're talking about from Princeton, but I've seen many, many, many maps, just like that. And these are fun. You know, I'll give Charlie a hard time. These are fun things that academics like to do. You know, using optimum optimal control theory, where they were they were they were, they come up with the perfect distribution of pipelines, that assumes perfect information, zero transaction costs, no opposition, you know, perfect permitting, processes, all those things, and which is all just sort of totally absurd if you've ever actually tried to build something in real life. So I mean, I think I think this is cold to Newcastle. But the point is, the point is, you know, it would be it would be outrageously expensive. If you didn't have to build any pipelines to get to pipeline, it makes it to makes it even worse. And then if you have to pipeline in the reality of building pipelines today, in which is your point, you know, that those always get delayed, and that always, that always hurts projects, it just makes it it just makes it absurd. So where's the money going to go? Then if it's not going to actually be spent on that it's gonna go to things like Exxon's operating project. So it's gonna be a nice, nice check for Exxon every, every month? Well,
Greg Williams:well, I usually like to try to find a positive note. But I think short of that will go with a pithy note. That certainly was, I do look forward to meeting with you guys again, especially if we're going to talk about more reliable, more sort of nature based and cost effective carbon capture approaches. But in in any case, I hope we see you again, either talk about investigations that Dean and I have undertaken, or further work that, that you do on natural carbon sequestration or progress that you make. And in searching for better materials for batteries, it's been a, it's been a great conversation.
Dina Rasor:And also, if anybody contacts you who says, I know this, or I know that or this isn't working, or they're hiding the money here, send them to us, because we work with was, you know, it is we haven't gotten far enough along in the spending for whistleblowers to start coming out, but they will owe us and if you guys come up with other ideas, you know, things that you see in going on in this area, or, you know, other areas, too, that you think is another bribery situation is talking about, you know, just feel free to contact us and I'm saying that to the general public to we are now hanging out our sources. We don't just do whistleblowers, we have anonymous sources, and I've never had a source cotton fired. So in my 43 years of doing this, so anyway, we really would like to thank you and we may also just be calling you guys up occasionally for clips. technical advice because, you know, neither will I know what I don't know. And that's why I always love to find scientists like
Dr. Kurt House:Well, thank you for the opportunity. Yep.
Dr. Charles Harvey:I enjoyed it's good. All right, well have a good night. Yep. Good night.
Dina Rasor:Thank you so much.