Sliding Off the Cliff with Carbon Capture and Storage
By Sandra Steingraber
Reuben “Rube” Goldberg was an American sculptor and engineer whose day job was political cartooning. In 1948, he won a Pulitzer Prize for a syndicated cartoon that depicts a house, a birdbath, and a picnicking family perched on a nuclear bomb that is balanced on the edge of a cliff. The face of the cliff is labeled WORLD CONTROL. The dark empty space into which the bomb is sliding is labeled WORLD DESTRUCTION. And the title of the cartoon is “Peace Today.”
By the time he received his Pulitzer, Goldberg had already attracted so much anti-Semitic hate for his satirical commentary on, among other things, the rise of fascism in Europe and the failure of political institutions to contain it, that, fearing for his children’s safety, he felt compelled to disguise the family identity and so changed his sons’ surname to “George” before they went off to college.
But if none of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you know Rube Goldberg as the creator of the iconic cartoon character Professor Butts, the fanciful and foolish inventor of convoluted devices designed to carry out tasks by the most complicated, outlandish, and inefficient means possible, typically involving unnecessary automation and an uncontrollable chain reaction.
In one of his signature drawings, “Professor Butts and Self-Operating Napkin” (1931), the eccentric professor, wearing an elaborate contraption on his head, slurps soup and wipes his oversized moustache via a string attached to his spoon—which pulls a ladle that tosses a cracker that is snatched by a parrot that tips a bucket that ignites a lighter that sets off a rocket that cuts a string and so frees a clock pendulum to swing back and forth in front of his face…with a napkin attached to it.
By 1965, Rube Goldberg’s name had become a dictionary-worthy adjective to describe any wacky process intentionally designed to do some simple thing in the most indirect, devious, exotic, and confusing way possible. There was even a popular boardgame, Mouse Trap, inspired by the folly and comedy of overwrought machines as imagined by a mid-20th century Jewish political cartoonist who saw all of human civilization precariously tilting toward the unstoppable chain reaction of world war and nuclear annihilation.
Well into the 21st century, we now confront another existential threat: the precarious tilting of all of human civilization toward the unstoppable chain reaction of runaway climate change. The cause of the crisis is clear: the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, which are loading up the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases in the form of carbon dioxide—which pours into the air whenever coal, oil, or natural gas is burned—and its vaporous sibling, methane—which pours into the air whenever coal, oil, or natural gas is exhumed from the earth.
The solution to the crisis is also clear: let’s stop doing that. Let the fossils rest in peace in their stony graveyards and pursue a full-bore affair with renewable energy. Electrify everything and run the grid on wind, water, and solar power.
Is this necessary? Yes. Is this doable in the terrifyingly short timeframe remaining to us? Also, yes.
And will we do it?
Well, that remains to be seen for many reasons, but one big new reason to worry that collective distraction and delay will win the day over collective decarbonizing action is the new version of the Mouse Trap game now being rolled out by the fossil fuel industry.
It’s called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), and it’s complicated, impractical, unsafe, expensive, unworkable, largely theoretical, impressively ludicrous, and based on magical thinking—everything that made Rube Goldberg cartoons funny except that Professor Butts now works for Exxon and is busy inserting the blueprints for this technology into Department of Energy policy and writing billion-dollar subsidies into federal legislation which will serve as lifelines to the fossil fuel industry and that could otherwise be used to deploy renewable energy technologies. So, it’s not funny at all.
Carbon capture and storage works like this: instead of retiring, say, a decrepit, Eisenhower-era coal plant and replacing it with some solar panels and batteries for energy storage, we keep it going but hook the plant’s smokestack up to a machine that sucks carbon dioxide out of the emissions stream while allows all the other air pollutants—soot, benzene, mercury, smog-making nitrogen oxides—to go into the atmosphere as per usual. And because the machine doing the carbon dioxide-sucking also needs energy, the plant has to burn more coal to run the carbon-sucking machine and hence whatever community that coal plant is located—likely an impoverished community of color—will breathe in more toxic air pollution and also the electricity will be more expensive.
Meanwhile, another machine compresses the carbon dioxide, transforming it from a gas into a liquid and requiring immense amounts of pressure to do so, which also takes energy, and then sends that liquid via a vast network of pipelines across America where one of three possible things will happen to it.
Possible Thing #1: The carbon dioxide will be pumped underground into a depleted oil or gas field or under the ocean or into a saline aquifer, in which case the brine has to be pumped up to the surface first to make room for the liquid CO2, which then creates a brine disposal problem, which will be solved with “brine management strategies,” necessitating GIS modeling and “regionally appropriate brine use sequence.” And the acronym for that, friends, is BUS. Do we know that the carbon dioxide will now stay in the ground forever? No, we do not, and there are reasons, like earthquakes and potential leakage pathways within caprocks, to think otherwise, and also there is evidence that escaping CO2 can leach metals and contaminate overlying drinking water aquifers. Do we know that the pipelines carrying the carbon dioxide are safe for the communities they traverse? No, we do not, and there are reasons, like corrosive powers of carbon dioxide, to think otherwise. When in the presence of moisture, carbon dioxide turns into carbonic acid, which can eat holes through steel, necessitating special chrome-lined pipes for its transport. See also the town of Sartartia, Mississippi where in February 2020, after days of heavy rain, a CO2 pipeline ruptured and spewed a CO2 cloud throughout the community, sending 49 people to the hospital, some of whom were found foaming at the mouth in their stalled cars, overcome while trying to evacuate. Not only is carbon dioxide a human asphyxiant, it displaces oxygen in ways that stop internal combustion engines from burning gasoline. So, no escape.
Possible Thing #2: The captured carbon dioxide will be piped to a chemical plant where it will be used as a feedstock for manufacturing petrochemicals and plastics. Will this keep the CO2 out of the atmosphere forever? No, it will not. Eventually, that CO2 is released back into the atmosphere when those products decompose in or are incinerated. Also, we get more plastic and also their manufacture requires more energy and so emissions go up rather than down. And the answer to that problem? Hook those petrochemical smokestacks up to carbon-capture machines, too.
Possible Thing #3: The captured carbon dioxide will be used for something called Enhanced Oil Recovery, which means that we direct those CO2 pipelines to the oil fields of America where oil companies will shoot their contents into nearly depleted wells, which loosens everything up and allows more oil to flow to the surface and also allows those companies to receive tax breaks and subsidies for buying and using captured carbon, and so Big Oil gets to make money by both causing the climate crisis and solving it. Except it’s not solving anything because even the studies that industry pays for show that the carbon emitted from burning the oil extracted using captured carbon far exceeds the carbon captured. It’s important to say here that CCS was originally developed, nearly a half century ago, for the sole purpose of getting more oil out of the earth—not to prevent more CO2 from getting into the atmosphere—and that 80 percent of the carbon capture and storage projects currently up running are for this very purpose. What’s new is dressing up Enhanced Oil Recovery in a green costume and marketing it as a climate solution.
And this is how carbon capture and storage schemes use our tax dollars to wipe the moustache of the fossil fuel industry and keep it slurping soup at our collective table. Here at Science and Environmental Health Network headquarters, we are working to expose CCS fallacies and dangerous distractions before the whole Rube Goldberg contraption contributes to our sliding off the climate cliff into that dark cartoon space labeled WORLD DESTRUCTION.