Carbon offset deals in fictitious Carbon Dioxide Removal technologies

Guest Post by Almuth Ernsting, Biofuelwatch.

Real Zero Europe is a campaign aimed at scrapping the European Commission’s carbon removal certification law. Real Zero Europe opposes Europe’s “net zero” false solutions.

In December 2021, the European Commission published a Communication on Sustainable Carbon Cycles that proposes a regulatory process at the EU-level to certify carbon removals and create carbon credits that could be traded in carbon markets.

The aim of the Real Zero Europe campaign is put pressure on the EU and European governments to take meaningful action now on real, deep emissions cuts.

In November 2022, Real Zero Europe issued a statement highlighting the danger of the EU net zero strategy’s reliance on carbon offsets. The statement concludes that,

Getting to Real Zero and staying below 1.5°C of warming requires rejecting any European Commission proposal for certifying carbon removal offsets in a failed carbon market. It requires halting emissions and restoring ecosystems now.

More than 200 organisations have signed the statement.

Real Zero Europe put out a press release about the European Commissions proposals for carbon removal offsets. In it, Lucy Cadena, coordinator of the Real Zero Europe campaign said,

“Instead of tackling climate breakdown head on, the Commission’s proposal could jeopardise our chances of keeping below 1.5 degrees of warming. They claimed that this framework would regulate removals to avoid greenwash - yet it opens up space for more fossil fuel prolonging technologies like carbon dioxide removal and carbon capture and storage. Pushed by big polluters, this risks propelling the planet past a point of no return.”

Biofuelwatch is an active member of the Real Zero Europe campaign. Almuth Ernsting, co-founder of Biofuelwatch, contributed this guest post about the problems with carbon dioxide removal technologies.

Carbon offset deals in fictitious Carbon Dioxide Removal technologies

By Almuth Ernsting, Biofuelwatch

Wildfires in Oregon, which reduced a large forest carbon offset project funded by Microsoft, BP and other companies to ashes, have led polluters to look for supposedly safer technological Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) options, namely Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), Direct Carbon Capture with Storage (DACCS) and biochar, i.e. charcoal spread on fields, although the latter is controversially classed as a ‘natural’ method.

Drax Power, operators of the world’s biggest biomass plant and the second biggest wood pellet producer, have announced two carbon offset offtake deals for future BECCS carbon removals with great fanfare. One of the deals is with C-Zero Markets, the other with Respira. Danish energy company Ørsted has signed a deal to sell future BECCS carbon offsets to Microsoft. Swiss start-up company Climeworks, which operates a direct air capture pilot plant in Iceland, has partnered with Swiss Re, which says it wants to use DACCS carbon offsets to help offset its carbon footprint.

Occidental Petroleum has signed an agreement to sell future offsets from planned DACCS facilities by its newly acquired subsidiary Carbon Engineering in the USA to Airbus. Airbus and Air Canada have invested directly in that company, too

BECCS and DACCS: Unicorn removal offsets

The two main carbon removal technologies considered by companies and governments are Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) and Direct Air Carbon Capture with Storage (DACCS).

BECCS involves burning or gasifying biomass, such as wood, to produce energy and capturing the CO₂ in the process, which is then transported and pumped into a geological reservoir.¹ DACCS involves using fans to capture CO₂ from the atmosphere and then storing it underground.

There are two problems with both technologies:

The first problem is that BECCS and DACCS, if they were ever scaled up, would likely accelerate climate and ecosystem breakdown. For companies seeking subsidies or carbon offsets for those technologies this is a minor concern, easily dealt with by carbon accounting methodologies that ignore the wider climate impacts.

BECCS would require vast areas of land to grow energy crops or trees, and/or vast amounts of wood from logging forests. Energy crops and tree plantations involve direct and indirect land use change, i.e. ploughing up natural ecosystems or converting land used to grow food or raise livestock (while global demand for meat and dairy keeps growing). Experience with biofuels shows that indirect land use change alone commonly results in an even worse climate impact than that of burning equivalent amounts of fossil fuels. Forest ecosystems play a vital role in regulating the climate, both by storing and sequestering carbon and by helping to regulate freshwater and nitrogen cycling. Across Europe, growing demand for wood bioenergy has already led to a decline in biomass, i.e. mature trees, due to more intensive logging since 2016.

DACCS, on the other hand, requires even more energy than capturing carbon from power plants – 8.8 GJ of electricity per tonne of CO₂ captured, according to one of the main DACCS companies, Carbon Engineering, now owned by Occidental Petroleum. If that electricity was sourced from fossil gas plants, generating it would emit 90% of the CO₂ captured,² not including methane emissions from leaking gas wells and pipelines. Powering DACCS with renewable electricity makes little difference in a world still highly dependent on fossil fuels. It simply diverts wind, solar or geothermal power that could otherwise be used to replace fossil fuel energy in the grid or, via electrification, in heating and transport.

Moreover, BECCS and DACCS would only make sense if one could guarantee that CO₂ pumped into geological reservoirs will actually stay there long-term – which is far from the case.

The second problem with BECCS and DACCS will be of far greater concern to potential investors and carbon offset companies: the technologies simply don’t work at scale and the technical and economic hurdles make future deployment – except for small pilot plants – unlikely. High energy requirements – 31% of the electricity generated by the world’s only power station with carbon capture (the Canadian Boundary Dam coal plant). Other obstacles to capturing carbon from biomass burning are discussed in a Biofuelwatch report.

It appears that companies like Drax, Ørsted and others selling such ‘future’ offsets are doing so to make their plans sound more credible and attractive. In Drax’s case, the company is looking for new subsidies once their existing ones – worth around £1.7 million a day in 2022 – end in 2027. The UK government has said that it won’t subsidise such a plant from 2027 except with carbon capture – but Drax is hoping to get round that by promising BECCS in the future, much the same as coal companies used to try and get permits for “carbon capture ready” plants without any concrete plans to capture any CO₂. The publicity generated by selling future BECCS offsets is playing into that strategy.

Biochar offsets: Don’t count the carbon!

Compared to BECCS and DACCS, spreading charcoal on fields is by far the simplest technology, which is why it is starting to generate some CDR carbon offsets.

Biochar is a glorified name for charcoal, made from wood or, in theory, any other type of biomass. Proponents claim that spreading that charcoal on fields will increase the amount of soil carbon long-term and that it will also make soil more fertile, resulting in better harvests.

Unlike BECCS and DACCS, there are no technical hurdles to making biochar -anybody can do it. One company, Carbonfuture, specialises entirely in trading carbon offsets from biochar projects – with the slogan “Carbon Removal You Can Trust”. Carbonfuture’s carbon removal credits are sold to Microsoft, Swiss Re and Klarna Bank with the promise of “Zero Uncertainty”.

The theory behind biochar is that charring biomass stabilises the carbon so that it won’t be metabolised by microbes but remain in the soil for hundreds if not thousands of years. The amount of “carbon removal” is calculated by establishing the weight of carbon in biochar and deducting life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions for example from the diesel used for tractors applying the biochar to the soil.

In reality, “Zero Certainty” would be a better description as to can be predicted about the impacts of adding different types of biochar to different soils on soil carbon and fertility. This has been shown in numerous peer-reviewed studies over a period of well over a decade. For example, a 2017 meta analysis of greenhouse gas fluxes from soils based on 91 published studies showed that adding biochar to soils “significantly increased GWP [global warming potential] by 46.22%”. The authors conclude that chemical properties of biochar, biochar application rate and method, and soil properties likely determine the impacts biochar applications have on soil carbon. However, they warn: “how these factors contribute to the variable response of soil GHG emissions to biochar application across the globe still remains unclear. If these factors are not adequately addressed the effects of biochar application on mitigating global warming cannot be fully understood.”

Not surprisingly, biochar producers selling carbon offsets avoid measuring soil carbon content before and after biochar use. Instead, they hide behind an unevidenced ‘methodology’ drawn up by biochar proponents and their “European Biochar Certificates”.

So far, biochar is used on such a small scale that it does little to the overall demand for wood, crops or other biomass. However, if demand for biochar carbon offsets was to grow, it could lead to yet more intensive logging of forests and to more crop and tree plantations, both of which harm wildlife and climate and in many cases communities, too.

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1. The term BECCS has also been applied to the capture and storage of CO₂ from ethanol fermentation. Ethanol fermentation releases a pure CO₂ stream which can be easily captured. However, the amount of CO₂ that can be captured in an ethanol refinery is far less than the amount of CO₂ emitted from fossil fuel burning to power an average refinery of this type.

2. Based on IPCC default value for the net calorific value of natural (fossil) gas of 56,100 kg CO₂/TJ and 50% net efficiency of a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power station.