This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

removing carbon out of the air has long been technically possible. The problems have always been finding a means of removal that was not prohibitively costly, as well as storage and scale. In a market economy that means finding customers interested in buying a whole lot of captured carbon. Which is where the decision to pitch the eleven most promising entries in Calgary started to gel. Since the mid-2000s, the oil industry has been increasing its use of a method known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)—a set of techniques that mostly use high-pressure gas or steam injections to squeeze more oil out of existing fields. Most commonly, wells are injected with CO2 and research shows that this use of CO2 could cause the U.S. proven oil reserves to double or even, with “next-generation” technologies, quadruple. But there is a problem (other than the obvious planet-cooking one): according to Tracy Evans, former president of the Texas oil and gas company Denbury Resources, “The single largest deterrent to expanding production from EOR today is the lack of large volumes of reliable and affordable CO2.”50 With this in mind, several of Branson’s group of eleven finalists have pitched themselves as the start-ups best positioned to supply the oil industry with the steady stream of carbon dioxide it needs to keep the oil flowing. Ned David, president of Kilimanjaro Energy, one of Branson’s finalists, claimed that machines like his have the potential to release huge volumes of oil once assum...