Advanced Energy Technologies
What's the Deal with "Advanced Energy Technologies"?
Why are Chevron and NMOGA promoting these “Advanced Energy Technologies” and will they actually reduce emissions with the urgency needed?
“CLEAN” HYDROGEN - Does it reduce emissions? No.
Hydrogen is expensive to produce, difficult to transport, and a sub-optimal solution for almost all proposed applications. More energy is required to manufacture hydrogen than hydrogen contains. The useful energy contained in “green” hydrogen produced via electrolysis is, at best, just over 60% of the energy required to manufacture it. This fundamental fact makes hydrogen a false climate solution, causing each kilogram of hydrogen produced to result in carbon emissions from the energy required in the production process. An economic analysis from the Manhattan Institute concludes that “the contribution of hydrogen to the reduction of CO2 emissions will be negligible and have no measurable impact on world climate.”
Who stands to profit from the hydrogen industry, and who will pay the price?
Hydrogen is being promoted in New Mexico because the Inflation Reduction Act provides taxpayer dollars to fund tax credits of $3/kg for the development of “clean” hydrogen, and because “blue” hydrogen produced using fossil fuels with carbon capture essentially creates a new market for natural gas, a boon to the fossil fuel industry that is seeking to repackage its climate destroying product as a “clean” fuel. In truth less than 1 percent of hydrogen is produced by electrolysis with clean energy, with the remainder overwhelmingly from natural gas (76%) and coal (23%). The public will pay the real costs, funding billions for a false climate solution, and paying for the astronomical cost of climate change on our infrastructure and health.
Learn more: A realist approach to hydrogen. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, January 2024. https://itif.org/publications/2024/01/16/a-realist-approach-to-hydrogen/
CARBON CAPTURE & SEQUESTRATION - Does it reduce emissions? Not at a meaningful scale.
Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) has primarily been used as an excuse to continue fossil fuel combustion. In fact 81% of ‘removed’ atmospheric carbon is actually reused to extract more fossil fuel, and the operational capacity of CCS projects around the world is less than 1% of global emissions. A review of Industrial Carbon Removal found “no viable market exists for the amount of CO2 that must be removed and sequestered in order to have a climate-significant impact,” and pointed to complications, including the massive land requirements for operations and transport pipelines, the prodigious amount of chemicals needed for direct air capture and the impacts of massive storage operations, including potential fugitive emissions, groundwater contamination, air pollution, and earthquakes related to underground injection.[4]
Who stands to profit from Carbon Capture, and who will pay the price?
The IPCC includes carbon capture as part of a “net-zero” pathway, but only assuming that fossil fuel combustion for energy is phased out and carbon capture is utilized to mitigate pollutants already affecting the global climate. Investing in carbon capture now, while we are still burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate, is a futile endeavor. The only industry that stands to profit from delayed reductions in drilling is the fossil fuel industry. There is no “customer” for sequestered carbon. The public is paying the price for every delay in fossil fuel reduction and every subsidy offered to help them continue that delay.
Learn more: The Carbon Capture Crux: Lessons Learned, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, September 2022, https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-learned
CARBON CREDIT MARKETS & OFFSETS - Do carbon markets & offsets reduce emissions? Unknown.
Under cap-and-trade carbon credit programs, polluters can earn millions for reductions in planet-warming emissions that are not real. In 2024 New Mexico passed the Clean Fuel Standards Act, which established a credit market for transportation fuel emissions reductions, allowing transport fuel retailers to buy questionable credits they can use to pollute in the future. Researchers found that California’s similar Cap and Trade program overestimated emissions reductions by 80 million tons, and may only have accomplished 18% of the reductions it claims to have made.[5] A 2022 investigation revealed that more than 90% of the rainforest carbon offsets sold under the verified carbon standard of Verra – the world’s biggest provider of such offsets – are “worthless.”[6]
The NM law specifically included agricultural, aviation, chemical, dairy, energy, forestry, manufacturing, mining, oil & gas, waste management or wastewater treatment, utility, carbon and methane capture, and transportation, creating the possibility for polluting industries such as utilities and oil and gas to use the carbon credit and trading scheme to prolong their use of New Mexico as a sacrifice zone. Carbon markets can also allow polluters to buy carbon credits for areas of land protected from development or exploitation in schemes involving Indigenous Peoples’ lands. These schemes do little or nothing to benefit Indigenous Peoples, and in some cases actively harm their rights, violating principles of Free Prior and Informed Consent necessary to a Just Transition.[7]
Who stands to profit from Carbon Credit Markets, and who will pay the price?
Carbon Credit Markets concentrate environmental harms in or near indigenous and low-income communities and in the global south, where existing dirty industries purchase credits so they can continue operating as usual, or violate the rights of land-based people, and serve to subsidize the growth of harmful greenwashed industries like “Renewable Natural Gas” aka biomethane from factory farms and crop-based biofuels, leading to higher emissions, deforestation, rising food prices and significant land-use changes around the world.
Learn more: Carbon offsets are incompatible with the Paris Agreement, Cullenward, Danny et al., One Earth, Volume 6, Issue 9. September 2023.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332223003937
"Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8892349/
PRODUCED WATER REUSE - Does reuse of produced water solve our water scarcity issue? No.
The oil and gas industry in New Mexico has a significant waste disposal problem, generating 4-7 barrels of liquid fracking waste (aka produced water) for every barrel of fuel produced, and disposal underground is causing earthquakes. Reuse is being proposed as a solution, but the amount of treated fracking waste that could potentially be recovered is a drop in the bucket compared to the 25% water shortage predicted by 2050. Even if scientists figured out how to transport all the waste injected in disposal wells between 2019 and 2023, about one billion barrels[8], (unlikely) and even if they were able to figure out a treatment that could recover 50% of that waste as usable water (also unlikely), the total so-called "new water" they would obtain is about 64,000 acre feet. In 2015 NM used more than 3 million acre feet.[9] Fracking waste reuse is not a serious water solution.
Who stands to profit from produced water reuse, and who will pay the price?
The Strategic Water Supply envisions using New Mexico taxpayer dollars to purchase treated produced water from private treatment companies using “advanced market commitments,”[9] and then selling it, potentially at a loss, to industrial end users like hydrogen producers. Fracking waste is highly corrosive, salty, toxic and radioactive, and even the scientists working for the oil and gas industry have not yet figured out how to treat this waste safely at the scale the Strategic Water Supply envisions. Any investment of public dollars to help the oil and gas industry dispose of this toxic waste amounts to an expensive taxpayer funded subsidy that will only serve to lower costs for oil and gas producers, worsening the climate crisis and potentially leading to contamination of our land, rivers, acequias and wells. If fracking waste treatment could be accomplished safely and cost effectively, the $71 Billion[10] oil and gas industry in NM would already be doing it.
Learn more: As New Mexico Shakes, State Cancels Dozens of Planned Wastewater Injection Sites, Jerry Redfern, Capital and Main, September 2024. https://capitalandmain.com/as-new-mexico-shakes-state-cancels-dozens-of-planned-wastewater-injection-sites
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Footnotes
[1] Green Hydrogen: A Multibillion-Dollar Energy Boondoggle. Manhattan Institute, February 2024. https://manhattan.institute/article/green-hydrogen-a-multibillion-dollar-energy-boondoggle
[2] A realist approach to hydrogen. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, January 2024. https://itif.org/publications/2024/01/16/a-realist-approach-to-hydrogen/
[3] 81% of ‘Removed’ Atmospheric Carbon is Reused to Extract More Fossil Fuel, The Energy Mix. January 2021. https://www.theenergymix.com/81-of-removed-atmospheric-carbon-is-reused-to-extract-more-fossil-fuel/
[4] Sekera, J., Lichtenberger, A. Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science, and Societal Need. Biophys Econ Sust 5, 14 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41247-020-00080-5
[5] Managing Uncertainty in Carbon Offsets: Insights from California’s Standardized Approach, Barbara Haya, Danny Cullenward, Aaron L. Strong, Emily Grubert, Robert Heilmayr, Deborah Sivas, & Michael Wara. (2020). Climate Policy. DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2020.1781035.
[6] Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe
[9]https://www.ose.nm.gov/WUC/wucTechReports/2015/pdf/2015%20WUR%20final_05142019.pdf