The billions spent on carbon capture over 50 years would have gone much further with wind and solar

Carbon capture has a 50 year history of being good PR for the fossil fuel industry and not much else

Recently, a firm called Carbon Engineering received $68 million in investment from a trio of fossil fuel majors for its air carbon capture solution. This triggered a multi-part CleanTechnica series on Carbon Engineering, its approach and why it is not a serious answer to global warming. The process of researching the series and discussions around it raised the question of what the total global investment in carbon capture and sequestration has gained us. The answer is grim, but there’s a great news story that emerges from the sooty ashes of carbon capture.

Wind & solar are displacing roughly 35 times as much CO2 every year as the complete global history of CCS

The first piece of the puzzle is just figuring out how much has been spent on carbon capture schemes globally. There aren’t good sources publicly available on this point, but there are multiple press releases for major investments. Where there was obviously work being done but not dollar values, some extrapolation was required, so the numbers for China and the Middle East are approximations. Those are only capital costs with no operating costs and they are moving millions of tons around, so the operating…