The Exchanges

Q Can you go one level deeper there? Like, why is it easier to separate the carbon from methane than it is to capture it from coal flue gas?

A It's simply because we had this process, okay, so first of all, when methane comes out of the ground, it's a mixture of water, it's a mixture of hydrogen sulfide, It's got CO₂ in it to various degrees. You have to clean it. You have to get the hydrogen sulfide out. You have to get the carbon dioxide out and use what's called an amine separation process in order to do that, and people thought you could take the standard amine separation process from gas processors and use it for the flue gas for coal, for coal electricity plants. The problem is, for most coal plants, what's coming out, it's full of garbage. Like, it's full of all sorts of It's full of contaminants, it's full of particulates, and it messes with the amine separation process, so you can't just straight off use that, and there were some very high profile and very expensive experiments where it just failed, and they had to replace the amine solution over and over again. It's just, it's not a direct thing that we can do.

AI assessment note: “it's full of contaminants, it's full of particulates, and it messes with the amine separation process”

Q Yeah, so what are, like, benchmark costs, aside from those applications, where it has to be separated out anyway, if you were to attach Carbon capture to a flue stack at a big industrial plant, uh, you know, what kinds of costs would we expect to be looking at?

A Again, it depends on the partial pressure. It, sorry, it depends on the partial pressure and the concentration of the CO₂. Um, there's a cement plant in just south of Edmonton where they're trying to put 95% capture onto it. Um, probably the number is in the range of 120 to 150 dollars a ton for this first First of a kind application. Um, and that includes everything. That's capture, you know, separation, uh, transport, and recompression back into the ground. Um, typically the numbers we work with is if you've got pure CO₂ to work with, you probably have 40, it's 40 to 60 dollars per ton. But if you're using, doing post-combustion with a clean flue gas, probably 80, the end application will be 80 to a hundred dollars per ton. It's 80 to a 120 dollars per ton.

AI assessment note: “probably the number is in the range of 120 to 150 dollars a ton”

Q high-profile cost overruns and timeline overruns and things like that for CCS in the past. Do you think there's a role for CCS in the power sector? I mean, you mentioned net power. Which is a version of that. Um, do you think that you can maybe describe that one in a little bit more detail, and then, like, do you think that's a scalable opportunity in the power sector?

A No, absolutely. The reason I left out power is because I, in air, I was trying to think in every, in most regions, where do you need to think about CCS? And for me, that's cement and chemicals. I think CCS is going to have an application in power for firm, firm, clean power, underlaying the variable system. So I'm sure, you know, I, I think you had Jesse Jenkins on your show a little while ago, right? Where it's, you know, yes, by far the cleanest sources of bulk power are going to be wind and salt, probably solar going forward. But as you raise the levels of that and the variability starts kicking in, you need firm, clean power to underlay it and, you know, set a cost base, right? And that can come from many sources. It can come from, it can come from hydro if you have access to it. It could come from stored hydrogen that's then reprocessed back through a turbine or Or a fuel cell. It can come from, you know, small or large nuclear, but it can also come from fossil fuels with CCS. And net power, to my mind, is one of the most promising, because it goes around the problem of trying to solve post-combustion CCS. It goes straight to a concentrated flow, which we know how to dispose of today.

AI assessment note: “net power, to my mind, is one of the most promising, because it goes around”

Q something to say on, like, which sectors do we need it in, and how important should it be relative to fuel switching, or relative to, you know, carbon removal and direct air capture, or all the other things that we can do. It's always a contentious debate to figure out, should we be attaching carbon capture to point sources So how do you think about the role it should play?

A We, you know what, this was an interesting and long discussion we had in our, in the industry chapter, because we had all these strategic options, and how do we frame it, and how do we discuss it? And around the middle of the chapter, before we got into detailed scenario results and what have you, we framed it up as demand decarbonization and production decarbonization, right? So you've got, you're adjusting demand, you're doing material efficiency, you're introducing circularity more, recycling, what have you. Then you get into energy efficiency and fuel switching. CCU and CCS is what you get to after you've run through most of these other, these other things, because most of these other things are less politically contentious. They can be more or less costly, but it's stuff that, you know, it doesn't attract, attract a lot of fire. Where we focused is like, we, we tried to give policymakers guidance. Where do we absolutely need to, are we going to need CCS? We're going to need it for cement because there are no alternative chemistries coming down the pipe anytime soon, and there's a lot of buildings that need to be built. So we need to figure out how to make basically zero emissions clinker that goes, that gets ground up and mixed, mixed for cement that holds concrete together. The other sector is chemicals. Chemicals is the fastest and growing industrial sector, while demand…

AI assessment note: “We're going to need it for cement... The other sector is chemicals.”

Q be good timing, which is this big, seminal, updated IPCC report just came out that you had a big hand in helping to put together. There's a lot in it, obviously, and I'm sure many folks who are listening have read a bunch of the reporting, but From your perspective, like, what are the key takeaways that we all who care about this stuff should take from this IPCC report?

A Yeah, sure, absolutely. So the first thing is, you know, we're out of time here, you know, and that's been repeated over and over again. 20 years ago would have been good. 10 years ago, but now is better than 10 years from now. We're plus one, and that's just too much. Um, the second is, that's the bad news. The good news, however, is that the You know, the, the dramatically reduced costs for solar, for batteries, for wind, for electrolyzers, all this stuff is coming down way faster than anyone expected, which is transforming our expectations of what can happen. Also, there's a lot of, a lot of progress being made on demand adjustment, material efficiency, thinking about the demand for everything, for materials, what have you, not just the supply.

AI assessment note: “So the first thing is, you know, we're out of time here”

Q So let's talk about the latter of those two, deep saline aquifers. How abundant are they? How hard are they to access? What are the barriers to us taking gigatons of CO₂ out of the atmosphere or from power plants and putting them underground?

A Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of, you'll see a lot of conflicting numbers about deep saline aquifers. They typically underlay most sedimentary basins globally. So where you find oil and gas, you go a layer deeper than That's where you find the deep, the deep saline. Um, so generally it, if you're, if you're bringing up oil and gas, there's going to be a deep saline aquifer somewhere near you that you can, but you have to drill deep, which means that you have to compress. So there's going to be an electricity cost compressing to get it in there. But what's, what it's, once it's in there, there's, there's thousands of, like the number that goes around, the utilizable number is roughly a thousand gigatons, which is more than the current Budget for, you know, for 1.5 C and the, you know, the IA says something like 2000 to 3000 gigatons. And really there's probably tens of thousands of potential deep saline aquifers available globally.

AI assessment note: “They typically underlay most sedimentary basins globally... utilizable number is roughly a thousand gigatons”

Q So do you think that sequestration capacity will be, I understand sort of technically that there's not really a limitation there. Do you think practically speaking, is that going to be a bottleneck to either point source or direct air capture in the next decade?

A I think there's going to be some resistance there, partly just socially. Um, you know, after the experience with the shallow fracking that brought up a lot of math, methane, people are worried about drilling, right? So deep saline is you're going 800 meters down. There's not going to be a problem if you properly do the well casing, um, but you're going to have stakeholder issues there. Um, in Alberta, they just let out a bunch of the deep pore space, one to a cement project that's going ahead right now, but you do have to run through a process, but partly in Canada, it's because the pore space Basically belongs to Canada, to the crown. Whereas I believe in the U.S., it mainly, the subsurface rights belong to the landholder. But again, that's going to be different by jurisdiction.

AI assessment note: “I think there's going to be some resistance there, partly just socially.”

Q that the two sectors that are, you think are really going to need CCS are chemicals and cement, and then, but we also talked about the sectors that are deploying CCS right now, which tend to be ethanol and ammonia, which are, ammonia is a chemical, but not cement. We mentioned at least, right? Is that, is there a divide there? Why aren't we doing CCS on cement plants now?

A No, no, that's a, that's an excellent question. And I have a lot of contact with the Canadian cement industry and the global cement industry, and they want to do it because it's challenging because they actually have to do post-combustion. Um, but it's at a very high part, a very high concentration. So we, you know, if we're going to make a breakthrough in post-combustion CCS, It will likely be in the cement sector, and there are three pilots happening, ah, that are built, high capture pilots happening right now. We'll make the, we'll make the breakthrough there, and if it's easy, we'll start to apply it to other sectors, but in the end, we'll probably just keep it, keep applying it there. Now, for ammonia, there may in the short run be an argument for using blue hydrogen to make, you know, to make ammonia for fertilizers, but in the long haul, like past 20, 30, really, You know, the cost of electrolyzers and the cost of solar, you would just make, you would make fertilizer where electricity, green electricity is cheap. You wouldn't try to make it where there's hydrogen with methane and CCS.

AI assessment note: “it's challenging because they actually have to do post-combustion.”

Q So then meanwhile, um, you said we could have been doing this with ethanol plants and ammonia plants and stuff like that for the past 20 years. We, we had not been, but it feels like we may be coming up. Like, what's the current state of affairs?

A I, I think we're on the verge of doing that, right? The 45 Tax credit in the US and similar credits in that are developing in Canada and what have you. Um, I think we're on the verge of these things being reapplied. Um, there's still a tussle about who pays for what, and I, and I think politicians have been a little afraid just to mandate. Like, if we'd just gone with a mandate and, and the companies could cost it back in the rate base for gas and what have you, it would have just happened. The problem is we're allowing this to be a negotiation and we're not requiring it And then, and then compensating them for their extra costs.

AI assessment note: “I think we're on the verge of doing that, right? The 45 Tax credit”