Carbon Capture and Storage: Streaming the Database Update Process; Carbon Capture and Storage’s History to Determine Its Future as A Climate Solution

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a dangerous fake climate solution that has consistently been performing below expectations for years. Oil Change International has been tracking the success and failure of these projects with their global carbon capture and storage database. My capstone project works to ensure that the upkeep of this database is as easy as possible, which frees up resources to research and publicize the truth of CCS. My STS research focusses on uncovering the mechanics of CCS and identifying if CCS has a spot in the collection of climate solutions fighting climate change. As the impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dangerous to the world and its inhabitants, I wanted to contribute to the effort to effectively counter climate change with my STS research. Both my capstone and STS projects focus on furthering research related to the effectiveness of CCS as a solution to fight climate change. Both projects also contribute to the increasingly large collection of research showing that CCS is not an effective climate solution.

Before the implementation of my capstone work, Oil Change International was updating their CCS database in a largely manual manner, which often took longer than a month. Implementing each step of the update process in a Python script will decrease the manual work involved and decrease the amount of time needed to update the database. For the source database with consistent unique identifiers associated with each project, the python scripts can identify new projects and projects with updated details given the current and new databases. The other source database only started implementing these unique identifiers in the most recent database update, so they could not be compared to the previous database projects. To solve this problem, a text similarity function is employed to ensure the identification of CSS projects with different project names across this source database and across the two source databases to enable the updates to be merged.

With the implementation of the improved update process, the database update is expected to take around one week, which is a 77% decrease in time. Importantly, the absence of project IDs in the second source dataset is the primary obstacle to this process being fully automated. The project IDs are expected to be continued in future updates, so the identification of project updates will only take as long as the code takes to run, which was around three hours for the most recent update. This is about a 98% decrease in time for future updates. As we get closer and closer to the point of no return for climate change, fine-tuning the climate solutions becomes more and more important. Oil Change International’s carbon capture and storage database must be kept up to date for accurate analysis to be continued.

My STS research explores why carbon capture and storage, a theoretically promising climate solution, paradoxically appears to be falling short in addressing the climate crisis despite increased investment. The impacts of climate change are already present today, and they will only get worse if our emissions continue at their current rate. As scientifically proven deadlines are rapidly approaching, fighting climate change is very much a race. Critical analysis of proposed climate solutions to identify which solutions are effective to know which solutions need focused support is incredibly important. In my STS research, a literature review organized by actor types will be completed first. The actors involved in CCS are governments, climate activists and scientists, the environment, the public, technology, and big oil and gas companies. These actors and their interactions will be analyzed with the Actor Network Theory to answer my research question.

The Actor Network Theory analysis of the information presented in the literature review uncovered some interesting actor interactions. Primarily, oil and gas companies can benefit financially from a carbon capture tax credit that includes a process called enhanced oil recovery, which does not actually decrease carbon emissions. These companies profit from enhanced oil recovery while also impacting the environment and public negatively by increasing reliance on fossil fuels and letting the taxpayer’s foot the bill for it, respectively. Regardless of these impacts, oil and gas companies still claim that their EOR projects are environmentally friendly by ignoring the indirect emissions from burning the addition oil recovered from EOR. Additionally, these CCS projects have had high hopes for years, but most projects fail mostly due to the high costs associated with extreme customization. While CCS has had some successes and has the potential to have even more, CCS is currently not set up for success and even at max capacity it is far from other mitigation strategies in terms of both cost and effectiveness. Given its current usage, CCS is not an effective climate solution.

School of Engineering and Applied Science

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Technical Advisor: Rosanne Vrugtman

STS Advisor: Pedro Augusto Francisco