Climate and carbon – control or catastrophe?

Professor Stuart Haszeldine, University of Edinburgh

Scotland and the UK were cradles of the industrial revolution – built on low cost coal energy creating vast wealth and empire. But since the 1850s and 1930s, and certainly from the 1970s, it has been clear that huge emissions of CO₂ from burning fossil fuels are driving global heating, creating ocean acidification, causing sea level rise and accelerating dangerous climate change. Combating that requires: greatly decreased use of fossil carbon, capturing all CO₂ released by use of fossil carbon, and replacing all possible CO₂ into permanent geological storage. Features of UK offshore geological storage sites will be explained, and can mimic hydrocarbon accumulations. But achieving this at industrial scales of tens of millions tonnes CO₂ per year in Scotland and Europe will require commercialisation equivalent to the present North Sea oil industry. Many successful pilot tests have been made, and recent legal victories in UK courts may now presage compulsory storage enacted on coal, oil and gas company producers. The weakest link remains the timidity of global governments to disturb the profitable status-quo, for harder to explain benefits in the 30, 100 and 10,000 year future.

Complete success is possible, but unlikely.

References

Haszeldine, R.S., 2009. Carbon capture and storage: how green can black be? Science, 325 (5948), 1647-1652 (open access). DOI: 10.1126/science.1172246

Hudson, M., 2024. Carbon Capture and Storage in the United Kingdom. Routledge.

Tucker, O., 2018. Carbon Capture & Storage. DOI: 10.1088/978-0-7503-1581-4 (e-book).

Stuart studied geology at the University of Edinburgh, then did a PhD on coal geology at the University of Strathclyde with Roger Anderton. Instead of working on post-doctoral study, he was employed by the British National Oil Corporation in Glasgow for 3 years. Then he returned to teaching and research at Strathclyde, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The first half of his career was helping to produce fossil carbon out of the North Sea. The second half was developing the research to show that CO₂ derived from burning fossil carbon could be safely stored deep below the seabed, leading many of the first surveys and investigations of feasibility to create a new industry in Scotland.

The third half of his career has been to investigate large geological storage of hydrogen, removal of CO₂ from air with biochar and basalt, and trying to convince UK and Scottish governments to fund the projects of carbon capture and storage they like to support.