This article is not a diatribe against Shell Oil per se. My revulsion with Big Oil isn’t limited to just one company. Shell just happens to be a convenient word play on an industry-wide scam being rolled out with your tax dollars — CCS (carbon capture & storage) and CCUS (carbon capture, utilization & storage). It’s cousin, DAC (direct air capture) another scam differs, but is based on the same premise; that we can capture all that naughty CO2 and store it underground or under our oceans forever. Forever is quite a long time, don’t you think?
Proponents claim these technologies can mitigate globally soaring CO2 levels without deindustrialization. And I can lose weight by eating double cheeseburgers.
This cynical tech is a fatal scam, central to justify the continued burning of oil with impunity.
The flawed 1997 Kyoto Protocol (international emissions trading anyone?, no room for hanky-panky there) was delayed until 2005, brilliant, and the largely unspoken of impending failure of limiting global warming to 1.5° C as per the 2015 Paris Climate Accords have been ignored.
Our hope for 1.5° C was predicated on reducing the burning of fossil fuels, not on mechanically removing green house gases before their release or by vacuuming the atmosphere with enormous fossil fuel powered facilities. That’s a rather inefficient approach at best, wouldn’t you say?
And pumping billions of tons of odorless CO2 through thousands of miles of pipelines that inevitably leak and pass near your community or through your yard is simple disregard for human lives. On April 3, 2,548 barrels of carbon dioxide leaked from Exxon pipelines in Louisiana. Just months later, Exxon is planning on laying more pipe, endangering the people of St. James Parish. Known as cancer alley, Louisiana has long been home to oil industry activity and its coast is defined by seventeen LNG terminals. It is also one of the most vulnerable coastlines as sea level rises. Here’s a bonus: Louisiana reports five deaths from flesh-eating bacterium in coastal waters, a result of sea surface temperatures rising.
Successful capitalism requires victims.
This is bogus technology, a subterfuge and proven failure in the coal industry, where it was tested and abandoned with billions of taxpayer dollars invested. Don’t worry, it’s baaack like a zombie in a George A. Romero movie. They call it clean coal. LMAO.
1.5° C is dead, as is limiting warming to 2.0° C. In fact, it grows ever more likely we’re on track for as much as 3.0° C of warming by 2050. Only Hell knows beyond that. Our irresponsibility is now completely unleashed by the Trump administration’s denial of science, attack on educational institutions and filling of the EPA, NOA and DOA (Department of Agriculture, not dead on arrival) with oil industry lackeys and straight up climate change denying morons.
Although the carbon intensity of our economy has improved, the sheer size of it guarantees failure. Without cutting consumption and with it fossil fuel burning we’re on a fast track to disaster.
From pages 7 and 8 of this 2025 paper reliant on numerous documented scientific studies titled, The history of a + 3° C future: Global and regional drivers of greenhouse gas emissions (1820–2050):
…the carbon intensity of economic output has fallen substantially over the last two centuries and has done so especially fast in the last few decades. Nevertheless, the annual rate of change between 1820 and 2018 (0.9 %) is far from the levels required to meet economic projections and climate agreements by 2050 (Fig. 6). In recent decades, the pace of efficiency gains has been faster and more wide-spread than before, allowing for a yearly fall in global carbon intensity of 2.2 %. But even if these recent trends persist for the next three decades, carbon intensity by 2050 would be of 0.02 kg CO2e per $ of GDP, which would still result in temperature increases over 3° above pre-industrial levels.
From the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature:
“Geologically storing carbon is a key strategy for abating emissions from fossil fuels and durably removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.”
Let me put this dilemma in more direct words, since I don’t have to follow scientific decorum. Without sequestering carbon dioxide, which is rising at record rates, we are dead. Problem? CCS, CCUS and DAC are carbon shell games. Sane analysis demands the obvious — curtailing the burning of oil as rapidly as possible, an act we have proven incapable of — such is our drug-like dependence. However, reducing oil burning would impinge on my right to purchase Labubu dolls, clearly a leftist attack on my personal freedom. So fuck that, I have guns.
The carbon budget
Let’s pretend for a minute CCS and DAC can magically work, no leaking pipelines, and the fossil fuels burned in these gigantic plants are more than offset by storing CO2 in abandoned oil wells and geographic formations deemed safe forever.
Here’s a question, do we have enough capacity in the planet to store it all? The answer is no. We have a planetary limit of around 1,460 (1,290–2,710) Gt of CO2 storage as estimated in this study. A gigaton equals one billion tons.
Forgive me for the next diatribe. There’s a little something called the carbon budget, figures will be provided after my little rant. That rant has to do with cows, far and away the biggest contributor to global warming in the agricultural sector, both dairy and meat.
The carbon budget measures what we can supposedly afford to spew into the sky without cooking ourselves to death like the charred bits of the global warming cattle we grill, taking food out of starving mouths to feed cows rather than humans, animals that belch global warming methane into the sky as they ruminate (and we don't), driving carbon sink destruction through deforestation forced upon Indigenous people in favor of fast food pasture and soy, their cultures destroyed, cooking what once was aware, last moments spent in narrow chutes, ankle deep in blood, panicked bellows of terror, witnessing their mates swinging on hooks, upside down, throats slashed and conveyed off for the merry old barbie, yo, grilling made possible by our personal sacks of CO2 spewing coal purchased at BJs Warehouse, trucked by diesel, pallets 30 feet high 50 feet wide and 40 feet deep, releasing their gases to the sky. Or it’s a tank of LNG. Pretty much the same dif.
Once again, I have guns, so don’t touch my beef.
In their 2022 Assessment Report 6 (AR6), the IPCC calculated that for just a 50 percent chance of restricting global warming to less than 1.5°C, total cumulative CO2 released into the atmosphere since 1850 must be kept below 2,900 billion tons. Ironically, the same weight as a Lincoln Navigator SUV bumbling through the burbs on a critical five-mile errand to procure a 64 ounce bag of Doritos and 48 ounce Mountain Dew in its heroic quest to save the planet.
Between 1850 and 2019, GHG emissions totaled 2,400 billion tons. A stunning 42 percent of that total occurred in just 20 years, between 1990 and 2019. This means that from 2020, our maximum carbon budget was just 500 billion tons. An 83 percent chance of staying below 1.5° C requires a budget of just 100 billion tons. Ain’t gonna happen. That budget increasing to 1,150 billion tons presents a 67 percent chance of global warming increasing to 2°C by 2030. These stats are courtesy of Our World in Data, but they may be optimistic. Science Direct has a more dire take.
From the AR6 report
From Our World in Data
From Science Direct:
Meeting climate targets now requires the carbon intensity of GDP to decline 3 times faster than the global best 30-year historical rate (–2.25 % per year), which has not improved over the past five decades. Failing such an unprecedented technological change or a substantial contraction of the global economy, by 2050 global mean surface temperatures will rise more than 3 °C above pre-industrial levels.
To date, CCS has removed just 0.1 percent of global CO₂ emissions per year. This bad faith solution would face enormous challenges to reach the necessary one billion metric tons of captured and stored by 2030 if it was actually genuine. It’s bullshit for profit as usual.
Let’s pretend CCS and DAC are real, and humming along, the real deal sequestering CO2 like a dad with a precious teenage daughter. Let’s pretend Big Oil grew a heart. Doesn’t matter. Without reducing consumption, without deep societal change, without changing the measurement of success in society as GDP, the Earth cannot hold enough of our unnecessary GHG emissions in quest of Labubu dolls, Doritos and Mountain Dew.
The absurdity, like accelerating emissions is infinite, but the planet is not.
Rearranging deck chairs
They’re disappearing people and using the military to intimidate us from exercising our rights. They’re deporting legal citizens without cause. They’re separating children from families. They’re cracking down on free speech, Colbert and Kimmel the first famous victims, as soulless corporations Sieg Heil the idiot chief. They’re raising racists like Charlie Kirk up on pedestals. We’re living in fascism now and if we don’t fight it’s going to become far worse in a hurry, unbelievably so, as agriculture and insurance crumble from the effects of global warming. Your voice, my voice and others writing in spite of growing fear, together can defeat the zombies. We must try. We must assume the risk.
Good post, and very well researched! Thank you.
I will add a couple of comments:
Rarely mentioned is the energy required to capture carbon is not insignificant. Most carbon capture technologies need considerable energy to scale to any meaningful level of carbon capture, and where will that energy come from, especially as it will presumably need to be close to the sites identified for carbon storage. Like out at sea!
Secondly, despite over 20 years of discussing carbon capture and various technologies and businesses touting their successes, not one, single scaleable, costed system currently exists that has captured more than a token 'test' quantity of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The last time I looked, the most advanced system was the Orca project by Climeworks in Iceland. The plant can capture 4,000 metric tonnes of CO2 per year, so to scale up such a facility to capture just 5% of the excess CO2 emissions (total around 40 billion tonnes of CO2 a year) means capturing 2 billion tonnes and would require 500,000 such installations.
They would consume 3,000 kWh of electricity each, so the resulting energy consumption would be around 5 terraWatt Hours . That works out about 20% of the current world's electricity consumption!
Just a reminder, those numbers are for just 5% excess CO2 production, and even if it were possible to achieve 100% excess capture (which it is already obvious we cannot), then that would not reduce the excess already in the atmosphere, so would not reduce the climate heating effects of current CO2 levels already underway! Or indeed deal with all the other carbon gases like methane!
The whole situation is so ridiculous, it beggars belief.
While your pace may have slowed a tad, your quality persists, my friend. You have been a wonderful addition to my literary diet and have greatly increased my understanding of climate change.
Ignorance is bliss, so yours is an uphill battle.