"Shell CCS Plant Emits More Greenhouse Gases Than It's Captured"

"A new report provides some damning new math on one of the oil giant's much-hyped CCS projects."

"Oil companies love to tell the world about the super cool technologies that have that will allow us to keep burning fossil fuels without cooking the climate. But those technologies are largely bullshit.

A new report from Global Witness documents how a much-hyped blue hydrogen plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) owned by Shell is only capturing a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions that the company claims. In fact, it’s created more emissions in its five years of operation than it’s captured.

The Quest plant, which is located near Edmonton, Alberta, is a facility designed to create blue hydrogen—a much-hyped new kind of fuel—from natural gas, with an accompanying CCS mechanism to store carbon emissions from the process underground. Shell has said that the Quest plant, which started operating in late 2015, has stopped more than 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide—”more CO2 than expected,” Shell’s website claims—from entering the atmosphere."

Molly Taft reports for Earther January 21, 2022.

Source: Earther, 01/24/2022