Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has a credibility problem. While industry executives center their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies around it, environmentalists call it a greenwashing excuse to continue and expand the use of coal, oil, and natural gas. Meanwhile, policy makers and lobbyists from all sides wrestle over whether and/or how to incentivize it. Coal-fired CCS/Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) power generation projects simultaneously claim low-carbon coal, low-carbon electricity, and low-carbon oil. It's no wonder people at large don’t know what to believe!The public has neither a common framework for understanding CCS nor uniform metrics to assess its projects or industry progress as a whole. Meanwhile, disparate claims of CCS benefits increasingly bombard them: cars removed from the road, reductions in steel carbon intensity, barrels of market oil displaced, megatonnes per year of CO2 capture capacity added, and more. Without a CCS insider’s knowledge, the public cannot translate these claims into their associated climate benefit, understand the cost, or compare multiple claims against each other.This paper fills this void by providing a simple framework for understanding CCS and by proposing a set of project and industry-level metrics for CCS projects to report. It first describes the need for, and scale required of CCS in the context of basic climate science, the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) “Net Zero by 2050” scenario. Next, it briefly reviews the status and shortcomings of current CCS industry metrics for emissions reduction, cost, and schedule.The paper then presents a simple, interactive Excel-based CCS project simulator that allows apples-to-apples comparisons of the climate benefits, costs, and schedules of CCS projects of arbitrary types, capacities, and technologies. The tool favors ease of use and understanding over detail, focusing only on the most important system parameters affecting a CCS project’s performance. Its goal is to foster a common understanding and discussion of the impacts and sensitivities of system design choices and performance parameters among any group of interested people with a high school education or more.The CCS project simulator first defines and calculates standardized emissions metrics for generalized CCS project production, capture, transport, storage, and downstream elements. Input data values may be measured from actual operating facilities or estimated for a planned or hypothetical projects. Together these metrics account for all the emissions additions and reductions along the CCS process flow to the ultimate net emissions reduction metric which represents the project’s benefit to the climate.Building on these emissions characteristics, the CCS project simulator then develops cost metrics both for the individual project and for its contribution to the CCS share of the IEA Net Zero 2050 scenario emissions reductions (7.6 Gigatonnes per annum (Gtpa)). Finally, it provides comparisons of “actual” vs. “planned” emissions, cost, and schedule metrics indicating overall CCS industry technology maturity, as measured by how predictably the project meets its original expectations.The hope is that this paper will in some small way provide a forum for industry executives, environmentalists, policy makers, lobbyists, and high school students alike to meet in objective, non-confrontational settings, to clear up misunderstandings about CCS, and to work more constructively together as Global Citizens to solve the tremendous challenge of climate change that we have brought upon ourselves
