The US ethanol producers are wagering intensely on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology to bring down their greenhouse gas emanations and secure a spot for the corn-based fuel in an environmentally amicable future, as indicated by industry groups and executives.
However, the plan poses huge risks. The still evolving carbon capture and storage industry has been tormented by significant expenses and unsatisfactory performance, pivotal government stimulus for carbon catch remains obstructed in Congress, and public resistance to the pipeline framework required to deliver produced gas is ever mounting.
The oil refineries of the United States have been mandated to infuse around fifteen billion gallons of ethanol into the country’s gasoline pool each year, an approach that was devised to help the corn farmers, to bring down the dependence on import, as well as to lower the emissions. However, the Biden administration is scrutinizing the policy to make sure that it fits perfectly into its long-term economic and environmental agenda.
United States President Joe Biden has promised to take the across economy, greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by the year 2050, that has immensely pressurized the industries to come clean. That means elevated investigation and research of ethanol’s discharges profile, and the ever growing competitiveness from the electric vehicles in the transport domain.
The government assesses that ethanol is somewhere in the range of 20 percent and 40 percent less carbon exhaustive than gasoline. However, a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences observed that ethanol is reasonably at the minimum 24 percent more carbon concentrated than gasoline, which is generally because of the emissions produced as a result of growing enormous quantities of corn.
The Renewable Fuels Association, which is the primary trade group for the ethanol industry, said last month in a report, which was written by Emery, that carbon capture and storage is a “central technology” and “one of the biggest and most practical moves” that the producers can undertake to reduce carbonization.
The report suggested that 90 percent of the ethanol producing units should execute the technology by 2050 so as to accomplish the net zero objective.
In the meantime, multiple Midwest ethanol producing units have come on board with the proposal of the three new pipelines that would ship caught carbon from their premises to the underground storages.
A proposition to elevate the credit to 85 dollars per ton was incorporated in the Biden administration’s Build Back Better resolution bill, which remains obstructed in the Congress. The administration thinks about carbon capture and storage as a significant tool to confront climate change and will most probably be making an effort to inflate the credit in a future legislative.
As per the Global carbon capture and storage Institute, the United States has in all, 12 operational carbon capture and storage projects. But the technology has, up until this point, has disappointed and has failed to measure up to the previous expectations.
For an instance, the Department of Energy spent over 1 billion dollars on a total of nine carbon capture and storage projects between the years 2010 and 2017. But, based on a report from a government organization watchdog filed in December, out of the nine projects, at present only two are functional.
The carbon capture and storage projects have seen multiple evident and extraordinary failures in the recent years as well, such as the suspension of the 1 billion dollar Petra Nova project in Texas in the year 2020, which missed its carbon catch objectives by around 17 percent.
If the emissions are higher than what is estimated by some government agencies, then, at that point carbon capture and storage by itself may not prove be to adequate to bring down the industry’s emission level to zero, said Jonathan Lewis who is the senior counsel and director of transportation decarbonization at the Clean Air Task Force (CATF), a climate focused non-profit group.
Further reading: Cutting down on the Hydrofluorocarbons can help cool the Earth
