Plastic Bags Might Kickstart the Carbon Capture Industry

A team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory worked out a CCUS model that just might deliver the financial return investors need. It relies on a surprising source: the ethylene manufacturing plants that make plastic bags and packaging from natural gas.

The Los Alamos–led research team explored capturing CO₂ from ethylene manufacturing plants. The ethylene plants, clustered in the U.S. Gulf Coast, can recover their carbon capture costs by selling the CO₂ to nearby depleted oil fields and using the gas to extract up to 15 percent more oil.

Capturing CO₂ emitted from ethylene manufacture and using that CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery lowers the carbon footprint of gasoline use by approximately one third.

The team’s study found that large, clustered sources of ethylene coupled with the high demand for CO₂ in enhanced oil recovery could support an integrated pipeline network from New Mexico across the Gulf region to Mississippi. This kind of a large, commercially viable and fully integrated CO₂ capture network could stimulate wide-ranging industry “buy-in.”

The implications are global. Even as nations increase their share of renewable energy, fossil fuels will remain an economic driver for decades. For instance, China and India are committed to coal-fired electric plants for decades and CCUS is the only technology capable of reducing those CO₂ emissions. A large-scale carbon-capture network can go a long way to reducing the environmental impact of fossil fuel use.

Most researchers recognize that turning around climate change involves deploying multiple strategies, and CCUS has the advantage of reducing carbon emissions during a transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources. As such, it is poised to help transition the global energy economy to a cleaner, more diversified energy future. (US DOE)