Storage wars - carbon edition

Welcome back to the Strawman, the daily climate newsletter that’s kinda like cleaning out the attic and finding your favourite teddy bear from when you were a kid - we give you that warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Today, we’re looking at carbon capture and storage - the UK’s taking a stand, and we’re all here for it. Let’s dive in.

What is carbon capture anyways?

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is more than a bunch of big words put together to make you sound smart at dinner parties.

It’s like the climate equivalent of ordering a pizza, regretting it, then sending it right back to the store. The idea is to grab carbon dioxide before it has a chance to do its party trick (warming the planet), bundle it up, and tuck it safely away.

Here's how it works: Picture a chatty molecule of carbon dioxide (CO2), fresh from a factory chimney or power plant, ready to join its friends in the atmosphere for a greenhouse gas reunion. But wait! Instead of heading skyward, our unsuspecting CO2 is intercepted, captured, and stored, so it can't contribute to global warming.

This capture happens in three stages:

Capture: CO2 is grabbed from the flue gas (the steamy breath of factories and power plants) through a process that makes use of certain chemicals called amines.

Transport: The captured CO2, now compressed into a less cheeky, more manageable state, is transported via pipelines or ships. It's a bit like the captured CO2 has been sentenced to confinement, and it's now being escorted to its cell.

Storage: The final destination of our captured CO2 is typically deep underground, in depleted oil and gas fields or saline aquifers. It's a life sentence – without the possibility of parole.

License to kill (greenhouse emissions)

The UK has started handing out golden tickets – or rather, carbon storage licenses – to 12 lucky companies, marking a significant stride towards developing a full-scale CCS industry.

Spirit Energy, one of the chosen ones, and owned by Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, is poised to stash carbon dioxide in depleted oil and gas fields off the British coast. It's a license to kill - and by kill, we mean drastically reduce - greenhouse emissions.

Oil fields on a redemption arc

Oil fields might seem like unlikely environmental heroes, given their fossil-fuel-filled pasts.

Turns out that their capacity for redemption is as big as their old carbon footprints.

These sites, now set to become carbon storage facilities, offer a new lease of life for the spaces while helping to solve our carbon problem. And while the carbon capture industry is still in its nappies, there's hope that it will quickly grow up to be a strapping climate saviour, storing about 9% of current UK emissions by 2030.

Investment details are still a bit foggy, and the industry is in its infancy, but one thing is clear: it's a welcome move towards innovative strategies in our battle against climate change.

While these oil fields might not completely wipe their slates clean, they're certainly getting a good scrub.

That’s it for today gang - see ya tomorrow,

The Strawman