Kerry says companies must use technology to avert climate disaster
WASHINGTON – Oil and gas companies are talking about technological breakthroughs they say will soon allow the world to extract hydrocarbons without worsening global warming. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry says it’s time for those companies to show they can make those technologies a reality – at scale, affordably and quickly – to avert climate disaster.
Still, Kerry says he has “serious doubts” about whether the companies will be able to pull it off.
Kerry’s comments, in an interview with The Associated Press, point to one of the most crucial issues in the fight to curb global warming: the companies’ argument that they will soon have the technology to extract the gases that make hydrocarbons the main cause of climate change, allowing companies to continue extracting crude oil and gases without concern.
Kerry said the ideal solution is a rapid switch to renewables, but states and oil companies have the right to give their technological solution a chance.
“If you have the capacity to reduce emissions, do it,” Kerry said at the climate team’s office at the State Department. “But we don’t have that at scale yet. And we can’t sit idly by thinking we’ll automatically have something we don’t have today. Because we may not have it. It may not work.”
Globally, the issue is important because oil and gas companies hope the technology will someday help limit emissions and thus ease the pressure they are under from governments and peoples to move away from fossil fuels and focus on solar, wind and other clean energy sources.
“What they are relying on is that they will be able to capture emissions,” Kerry said of oil and gas companies. He listed the operational steps that would be involved.
“If you can do all those things, you might be able to make it economically competitive,” he said, adding, “I have serious doubts that that will be price competitive.”
Especially since 2015, when the United States and nearly 200 other nations pledged to cut emissions in order to stave off the worst forecasts of global warming, oil companies have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on public relations campaigns, projecting themselves as protectors of the environment. Advertisements and social media campaigns suggest that the technology is already being applied, extracting gases from oil and gas plants around the world.
“Technologies to capture and transport carbon dioxide have been operating smoothly around the world and in the United States for several years,” says the BP oil company’s website.
“The technologies capture CO2 emissions at their source or directly from the atmosphere,” says Saudi Aramco, adding that the emissions are either stored underground or converted into “useful products”.
In reality, the technology to capture a particularly noxious gas, methane, does exist, and only investment is lacking for it to be applied at scale. But the technology to capture the most climate-damaging gas, carbon dioxide, still exists only on a limited scale and is very expensive and energy-intensive.
The International Energy Agency, some governments and many experts and activists insist that while gas capture technology can play a role, oil and gas production must be phased out.
“The experience is that commercial-scale carbon capture projects have fallen far short of expectations,” said David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.