Get a hold of it, you can't escape!

During this year's RIGC (Romanian International Gas Conference), the Minister of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism, Ştefan-Radu Oprea, stated that green energy and carbon capture and storage can provide a competitive advantage to our economy.

"Regarding carbon capture and storage, as an oil and gas engineer, I can tell you that it is a safe technology and this is very important," Minister Oprea said, according to information from the economic press. "We have wells that are no longer functional and represent the ideal place for this new carbon capture and storage technology," the Minister of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism emphasized.

How safe and cost effective is carbon capture technology?

The answer was provided by a Bloomberg article from last month, which states that "Occidental has quietly abandoned the world's largest carbon capture facility".

But why did Occidental Petroleum abandon the Stratos complex, worth many billions of dollars, if the technology is safe and effective? Should it be about economic efficiency, or better said about its complete lack?

Big names from the American business environment, along with the White House, expressed their support for the project that was supposed to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it in underground caverns.

Warren Buffett himself, the largest investor in Occidental Petroleum, gave his silent blessing, as Bloomberg writes.

However, the results are slow to appear. The American news agency recalls that Occidental also built a carbon capture facility in 2010, for use in a natural gas processing plant. Unlike the technology for capturing CO2 from the air, the 2010 facility was built on a much better-understood and cheaper technology, as Bloomberg points out, but which "has consistently failed to deliver."

The facility, called Century, has never operated at more than a third of capacity in the 13 years since it became operational.

"After decades of implementation, the total annual carbon sequestration capacity worldwide is only 45 million tons of CO2. According to the International Energy Agency, this represents only 4% of the carbon dioxide sequestration requirement by 2030 to reach the goal of net zero emissions by 2050," Bloomberg also emphasizes.

Against the background of the lack of economic efficiency, the Century project was sold last year by Occidental Petroleum, very discreetly as Bloomberg writes, for "a fraction of the construction cost".

The US news agency then points out that "the Century project now joins a growing list of carbon capture and storage projects that have failed to live up to high expectations," and "carbon control is far more temperamental than it lets on." supporters believe, as evidenced by decades of failed projects."

The Bloomberg article highlights other particularly costly failures of carbon capture and storage projects. One of these, a coal-fired power plant in the state of Mississippi, was abandoned due to technical problems amid cost overruns of up to $7.5 billion.

Another example is provided by the investment of the oil company Chevron, which "constantly failed to get the Australian carbon capture and storage plant up and running after seven years and $2.1 billion invested".

When the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its World Energy Outlook 2023 report, Bloomberg pointed out that the optimistic forecasts for carbon capture and storage are completely out of touch with reality, as it shows that "there has been virtually no expansion of carbon capture and storage over the past three years." carbon storage".

Even the president of the IEA, Fatih Birol, who can be said to be a fanatical supporter of the transition to green energy, admitted that "the history of carbon capture and storage has been one of great disappointments".

A financial analyst quoted by Bloomberg characterized carbon capture and storage as "a mature technology that has failed", as "companies are spending billions of dollars on these facilities and they are not working according to their parameters".

This is the situation on the international level, which seems to be completely unknown to the ministers in the cabinet led by someone named Ciolacu.

It seems that nothing matters to our "authorities", who know better the right and cheap way to turn Romania into a world leader in carbon capture. They're probably thinking of explaining to carbon dioxide that "resistance is futile", and if CO2 doesn't obey, then they'll switch to an ultimatum like "Get caught carbon, you have no escape!"

"Any capital-intensive project is not for the faint of heart," a former Occidental Petroleum executive told Bloomberg, because "you find out years from now if you've been successful."

Indeed, but only if it is private equity. In the case of political tricks that promise the sea with salt, the volume and cost of the capital "invested" in all kinds of phantasmagoric projects are irrelevant variables, because there is no direct responsibility, both criminal and material, in case of failure.