Problems with Carbon Sequestration

Carbon sequestration does not greatly effect our global carbon emissions yet. Why? Surprisingly, it all boils down to economics and natural limitations – and a need for further research/development.

Natural Limitations

Firstly, our carbon sinks are being used up - theres only so much carbon our oceans and trees can hold [5]. Planting and growing trees can be cheap and relatively easy - but comes at the cost of available land and water, and all that work can be undone by a forest fire or deforestation [5]. With this in mind, we need to move to artificial methods of sequestration - like CSS and DAC.

But, both of these technologies use significant amounts of energy - especially DAC. Companies like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering get around this problem by using "a combination of renewable energy and natural gas, depending on conditions [10]". However, until these kinds of technologies are scaled up to a viable point, especially smaller plants could be emittimg more CO2 than they remove - depending on how they get energy.

Economics

Carbon dioxide isn’t a particularly valuable resource – Eric Williams, a professor at our Golisano Institute of Sustainability, had this to say to the Reporter magazine: “The money that you’re going to spend to turn the carbon dioxide gas into something solid is going to cost more than what you’re going to get from being able to sell whatever that is” [6].

Professor Williams has researched the carbon capture technology used at coal plants, and while very effective, they draw up to 20% of energy from the system – causing those plants to burn more coal to compensate. Direct air capture has worse issues, taking “an astronomical amount of volume, time and energy” [6].

In essence, carbon sequestration is an unsustainable industry; there needs to be something worthwhile in the end to make it worth investing into – and turning carbon into biofuel, or chemicals like polypropylene or polyethylene – isn’t profitable at scale yet [6].

There are some solutions, however. The DAC market is not known for its profit - but recently, companies like ClimeWorks are financially stable enough to expand, and scale up their technology. Heavy investment into the industry is one reason – in 2018, ClimeWorks received 30 million in funding. In 2020, it received over 100 million [4].

This funding allows for expansion, which in turn lowers their average cost to pull carbon from the atmosphere. In addition, ClimeWorks ‘sells’ the carbon they remove via carbon offsets, where someone buys the offset to compensate for their own emissions [8], allowing for some margin of profit in an otherwise unprofitable system.