I'm just watching the highlights now and I noticed the end-boards running an advertisement saying "Carbon recapture and storage is one path to lower emissions" and I wanted to let everyone here, particularly the more impressionable ones that this is a blatant and bloody lie by oil companies to continue with their business. Carbon recapture cannot be done at the scale it needs to be done at the cost that people would be willing to pay.
This sort of '1% true, 99% lies' advertisement really should be outlawed. My blood is boiling seeing that ad. What a load of f***ing shit.
The best carbon capture is keeping the damn hydrocarbons in the ground.
As someone who will soon be defending a doctorate in that field (specifically carbon conversion using renewable power sources but I have lots of friends in capture), I have to disagree.
Dow Chemicals just committed to putting $9B into a zero emissions ethylene (plastics) plant in Fort Saskatchewan.
If I could wave a magic wand and put us all in electric cars, fuel cell planes, and biomass derived plastics I definitely would. But expecting businesses to just lay down and die because of that ideology isn't realistic. I'm not even addressing the job loss that will happen to people employed in those industries and how we will have to spend to retrain them in more sustainable fields.
They're free to put tons of money into the problem because we have a democratic capitalist system, and the kind of money they can put in just to make sure their business keeps going will probably end up with the right scaling to get to net zero by some measures.
Basically saying it will never happen at scale is ignoring that every car for the past five decades has a catalytic converter and emissions control. Or that every polluting factory smoke stack has needed a NOx/SOx/CO scrubber since like the 70s. Or that we effectively banned CFC's in the 90s. Now we're looking at doing for CO2 what we did with those emissions.
Is it "one path"? Absolutely? Is it a sustainable, or efficient path? Probably not, and I hope that declining renewable energy costs will just wipe them off the map eventually. But in the meantime (and TBH after) how are we going to reduce our dependence on plastics or aviation fuel? Those are two very intractable problems even with tons of solar/wave/wind power at cheap prices.
Right now despite a lot of hand wringing from all sides we aren't really sure how this energy transition will go or what technologies will or won't work in which segments and specific use cases. All we know is that it's upon us.
Mods feel free to delete if this gets out of hand.