This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

He explained that if carbon that was removed from the air were used to extract oil, “you’re making hydrocarbon fuel with a very low life-cycle [of] carbon emissions.” Maybe not so low, because according to a study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, EOR techniques are estimated to be almost three times as greenhouse-gas intensive as conventional extraction. And the oil is still going to be burned, thereby contributing to climate change. While more research is needed on the overall carbon footprint of EOR, one striking modeling study examined a similar proposal that would use CO2 captured not from the air but directly from coal plants. It found that the emissions benefit of sequestering CO2 would be more than canceled out by all that extra oil: on a system-wide basis, the process could still end up releasing about four times as much CO2 as it would save.