Capturing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from power plants and the atmosphere could become a booming industry in the coming decade. Global fossil-fuel use continues to climb, and energy-related CO₂ emissions reached a record-high level in 2018. The world is already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming, including extreme weather events and rising sea levels. An October 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; Geneva, Switzerland) warns that to prevent much more devastating consequences, governments need to limit warming to 1.5°C by slashing CO₂ emissions by 45% (relative to 2010 levels) by 2030 and reaching zero net emissions by 2050. Investments in sustainable-energy technologies will need to take priority, but investments in carbon capture and storage (CCS) will likely be necessary as well.

Capturing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from power plants and the atmosphere could become a booming industry.

The International Energy Agency (IEA; Paris, France) sees carbon capture, use, and storage as a massive untapped opportunity. Although commercial use of carbon-capture technology began in the 1970s, the technology has seen minimal deployment since then because of its high costs and a lack of policy drivers. The Global CCS Institute (Melbourne, Australia) believes that because more governments are setting favorable policies and new investments are moving forward, the CCS industry has reached a turning point. For example, 45Q tax credits in the United States incentivize carbon capture and may enable the industry to scale up: Companies that capture and bury CO₂ receive $50 per tonne, and companies that use CO₂ in a productive way receive $35 per tonne. Using captured CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is the most common practice today and is especially lucrative. And in early 2019, the European Commission announced the Innovation Fund, which will use about €10 billion to support low-carbon technologies by, for example, funding demonstration projects for CCS, energy-storage, and other technologies. The IEA estimates that offering $40 per tonne of CO₂ as a commercial incentive "could trigger investment in the capture, utilisation and storage of up to 450 million tonnes of CO₂ globally" (www.iea.org/topics/carbon-capture-and-storage/policiesandinvestment). Although prices on the European Union's carbon-emissions trading system have not reached this price, they did reach a ten-year high of €27 per tonne ($30 per tonne) in April 2019.

Carbon-capture technology is most effective when in use at locations with high concentrations of CO₂ emissions—fossil-fuel-power plants, for example. NRG Energy (Princeton, New Jersey, and Houston, Texas) and JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation (JXTG Holdings; Tokyo, Japan) operate the Petra Nova project, which uses traditional absorption technology to capture carbon emissions at a large coal-power plant in Thompsons, Texas. Petra Nova is economically viable because of tax credits and revenues from EOR. New carbon-capture technologies are also in development. In 2018, Net Power—a joint venture by McDermott International (Houston, Texas), Exelon Generation (Exelon Corporation; Chicago, Illinois), 8 Rivers Capital (Durham, North Carolina), and Oxy Low Carbon Ventures (Occidental Petroleum Corporation; Houston, Texas)—reached first fire of a novel supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂) power plant in La Porte, Texas. The plant's sCO₂ power cycle can produce low-cost electricity from natural gas and includes full CO₂ capture with near-zero emissions. Net Power hopes to develop several full-scale 300-megawatt plants by 2021, taking advantage of high demand for CO₂ for use in EOR to drive commercialization. And scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) recently demonstrated an energy-efficient process that captures CO₂ as a crystallized bicarbonate salt and releases it from the solid state, thereby eliminating the energy-intensive step of heating a liquid sorbent.

Some new technologies aim to remove carbon directly from the atmosphere. The concentration of CO₂ in air is quite low, but direct air capture might become a part of climate-change solutions. In mid-2018, a team comprising scientists from Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Carbon Engineering (Squamish, Canada) reported the discovery of a direct-air-capture process that can remove a tonne of CO₂ from the atmosphere for between $94 and $232. These costs are still high, but experts previously estimated that using direct air capture to remove a tonne of CO₂ from the atmosphere would cost at least $600. Carbon Engineering implemented the direct-air-capture process at a small pilot plant it operates in Squamish, Canada, and the captured CO₂ can see use to produce synthetic fuels such as gasoline and jet fuel. The company aims to build an industrial-scale plant by 2021 and is seeing success in raising funds, closing a round of equity financing in March 2019 with $68 million in investments.

Relying on revenues from the use of captured carbon in EOR and various hydrocarbon-production processes to improve the economic viability of CCS facilities is problematic from an environmental perspective, because such uses of captured CO₂ offset the carbon-reduction impact. Oil-and-gas firm Equinor (Stavanger, Norway) has operated offshore carbon-storage projects at the Sleipner and Snøhvit gas fields for 20 years, although the volumes of CO₂ in storage are quite low. Equinor also plans to begin an undersea project to store 400,000 tons annually of CO₂ by-product from industrial sources in 2020 (and is considering carbon-storage-as-a-service models). Australia may soon become home to the world's largest geological-carbon-storage facility because of Chevron Corporation's (San Ramon, California) Gorgon Project—a huge liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) facility on Barrow Island. Chevron agreed to capture 80% of the CO₂ emissions (3.4 million to 4 million tonnes per year) from the underwater natural-gas field during a five-year period and to inject the emissions into a 2-kilometer-deep reservoir. Although the project began producing LNG in 2016, various issues have prevented it from commencing the carbon-capture-and-storage process.

New circular-carbon technologies could bring about a new era in the way the world uses captured CO₂ emissions. Sponsored by NRG Energy and Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA; Calgary, Canada), the XPrize Foundation's (Culver City, California) NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize (www.xprize.org/prizes/carbon) is a four-and-a-half-year global competition to demonstrate new technologies. In 2018, judges selected finalists to convert CO₂ emissions into useful products at a coal-fired power plant in Gillette, Wyoming, and at a natural-gas-fired power plant in Alberta, Canada.

Fossil-fuel companies will very likely see growing pressure—including lawsuits—from governments, investors, and environmentalists to reduce carbon emissions. CCS technology may become crucial to the viability of coal-based power generation. Oil majors are also facing a carbon-constrained future. For example, Royal Dutch Shell (The Hague, Netherlands) and BP (London, England) recently announced plans to link executive pay to meeting short-term carbon-emissions targets. As social and economic harm from global warming increases, decarbonization efforts may accelerate.