Will CCS make a lot of these other questions moot?

The post reframes greenhouse gas as a waste problem rather than an energy problem. Humans almost never solve a waste problem by ceasing to produce the waste; we isolate it, treat it if we must, and put it somewhere it does little harm, which is what sewers and landfills are. So Lubershane asks what a third waste stream would cost. Run a third of American carbon dioxide emissions through capture and burial at an assumed $150 a ton and the bill is roughly 1% of national economic output, about double what the country already spends on sewage and municipal trash combined. That sounds ruinous until it is set against how much energy spending has swung historically, where he argues 1% is close to noise. The conclusion he draws is deliberately narrow, and he says so: the thought experiment shows that affordability in the abstract is not the obstacle, and it applies to the cost of emissions abatement in general, not only to capture.

What stands in the way is physical and institutional. Capture itself works: the dominant method cycles liquid solvents called amines through a bind and release loop, which he places in an awkward zone between technically proven and commercially ready, with only two power-plant-scale demonstrations in North America and both having spent long stretches offline. Underneath the choice of technology sit two variables he expects to govern cost whatever the technology, the scale of the source and the concentration of carbon dioxide in its exhaust, and that pairing explains the industry’s history and its present. Coal plants are enormous and concentrated, which made them the obvious test beds and made their troubles unusually damaging; the current lowest-hanging fruit is the opposite shape, smaller sites like gas processing and ethanol plants with far more concentrated streams. Storage space is not the binding constraint either, since the geology is ample and reasonably well distributed. Getting at it is the hard part: rights to pore space the carbon may wander into, pipelines, and the injection step itself, which he says the big surveys gloss over and which conversations with operators have left him worried about. Someone must then maintain the site in perpetuity, a liability he notes investors and insurers dislike, and the whole thing meets the local opposition that stalls transmission lines. The economics also lean heavily on network scale, since a project going it alone pays many times more for transport and storage than one inside a shared system. Capture is regional infrastructure more than a retrofit a single facility can buy.

Whether it gets built depends on what it competes against, and he splits the verdict by sector. For coal power he still expects wind and solar to win in most places, because coal emits so much carbon dioxide that its concentration advantage is swamped by the sheer tonnage to be captured, and because the North American and European fleets are old enough to make a large retrofit a poor bet. Asia is where he is curious, since a young Indian coal fleet is unlikely to retire soon even though India has the world’s cheapest solar power, which makes a retrofit more compelling. Gas power is mixed: renewables should hold the edge where the wind and sun resource is good and transmission can expand, but capture looks more attractive where nuclear is the alternative to beat. Industrial heat is where he thinks capture has its best chance, because burning fuel to make heat rather than electricity puts fewer tons of carbon behind each unit of delivered energy, which leaves less for renewables to undercut. Every part of that verdict is conditional on capture costs falling into the ranges the Department of Energy has estimated, and he notes that many developers and financiers fear they will not.

The last third turns to the emissions point-source capture cannot reach. Buildings, vehicles and agriculture are together about a third of global emissions, and he admits to being extremely skeptical that plumbing millions of small, scattered and moving sources could ever be affordable. That leads to the post’s most counterintuitive step: for those sources it may be easier to pull carbon out of the open air than to catch it where it is made, even though the atmosphere is roughly a hundred times more dilute than a tailpipe or a flue and the energy penalty is real. The reason is that air capture is freed from place and time. It can be sited wherever storage geology, strong renewable resources and an absence of neighbours coincide, which he illustrates with Montana and North Dakota, and it needs neither carbon pipelines nor transmission lines. He believes a path to affordability exists but calls it one of the hardest and most uncertain in climate technology, and says his personal view is that we do not really need it, at least not for the next couple of decades: until governments enter carbon removal in a major way it stays too dependent on a small group of climate-forward buyers, a market he cannot see sustaining the deployment pace a cost curve needs.