Going Deep on Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS), with Julio Friedmann

Notable Quotes

• Global scope of CCUS: “We now have 20 projects operating around the world today. Every year, we capture and inject about 40 million tons of CO₂. It's like taking eight or nine million cars off the road … We've got nine or 10 projects [in North America]. There are projects in the North Sea, there's projects in northern Norway. There's three projects in the Middle East, there's a project in Brazil, a very large project in Australia that came online just earlier this year, and, as of recently, a project in China, as well. So, we really can do this globally and are doing this globally.” (6:38)
• CCUS is a feasible strategy: “We've had 15 or 20 years of research and geological assessment and calibration and testing, and that gives us a lot of knowledge. And the conservative estimates for the global storage volume for CO₂ are between 10 and 20 trillion tons of capacity. I'll say that again: 10 to 20 trillion tons of capacity. For comparison, historical emissions for human beings total about 2 trillion tons. We have more than enough volume in the subsurface to do this.” (17:13)
• Many policies can expand CCUS, but consequences vary: “There are lots of different policies that can work, and depending on what you want, you choose different policy. [In our research], we found that revenue enhancements were the best policies compared to, say, tax or capital treatments ... But if you're the government, and you just want to hand people a big bag of cash—you can do that, and we tell you how big it has to be. If you want to give tax breaks, we tell you how to do that and how big it has to be.” (27:34)

Top of the Stack

• "Capturing Investment: Policy Design to Finance CCUS Projects in the US Power Sector" by Julio Friedmann, Emeka Ochu, and Jeffrey D. Brown
• "To Tackle Climate Change, the (Industrial) Heat Is On" by Julio Friedmann
• "Low-Carbon Heat Solutions for Heavy Industry: Sources, Options, and Costs Today" by Julio Friedmann, Zhiyuan Fan, and Ke Tang
• Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy
• Innovation and its Enemies by Calestous Juma
• "45Q&A" blog series about the 45Q tax credit for CCUS

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. This week, we talk with Dr. Julio Friedmann, senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, about carbon capture use and storage, or CCUS. Julio will give us an overview on the status of CCUS deployment worldwide and the costs of CCUS, relative to other approaches for reducing emissions. We'll also talk about policy, including emerging federal policies to increase deployment of CCUS here in the United States. And one quick note, this episode was recorded well before the extent of the coronavirus pandemic had become clear. Stay with us.

All right. Julio Friedmann from Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy. Thank you so much for joining us today on Resources Radio.

Julio Friedmann: My pleasure. Glad to be here.

Daniel Raimi: So, let's start with a question that I ask all of our guests on the podcast, which is, how you got interested in energy and environmental issues and how you ended up working in this field?

Julio Friedmann: Of course. If you go way, way back, I got interested in geoscience, which is how I started my journey, when I took a field trip to Death Valley. And I sat on one side of Death Valley, and I looked across to the other side of Death Valley, and I thought to myself, "Wow, nothing's happened here for 500 million years except mud accumulated along the bottom of the ocean." And there was sort of an incredibly rich response to the moving of the natural world that I voted with my feet and sort of stayed professionally in the sciences, and specifically the earth sciences.

Fast forward to my time working for ExxonMobil. When I left ExxonMobil, I realized eventually, through introduction to the topic of carbon capture, that I could take everything I learned at ExxonMobil and just run it backwards and solve a first-tier environmental problem. And that meant that I entered a field that didn't exist. And that was interesting, that I was able to read all the world's literature in about six months because there was no literature. And I found the fundamental challenge of working the science and all of the moving parts with policy and finance and regulation, and all these things, to be a good fit for me personally. And tackling a tough, persistent wicked problem like climate change everyday means my midlife crisis looks different than other people's.

Daniel Raimi: Nice. That sounds good. Well let's get into the subject of your midlife crisis, carbon capture utilization and storage, or sometimes people say storage, sometimes they say sequestration. I'm not sure if the distinction matters. You can tell us if it does. And so let's start off by just defining the terms. So when you're introducing people to the concept of CCUS, how do you describe it?

Julio Friedmann: Sure. CCUS is really two things: carbon capture and carbon storage. The carbon capture part is something we've been doing since 1938. We've been separating CO2 out of industrial streams as flue gas. So that's either from a power plant or from an industrial facility like a steel mill or a refinery, and we've had the technology to do that for a very long time at commercial scale. We have to do that for the second part, for storage. In order for the storage to work, you need a 95 percent pure stream of CO2. Otherwise the physics doesn't work. The storage part is also very straightforward. That is deep geological isolation of CO2, essentially in the same kind of rocks that hold oil and gas. You can think about it also as carbon capture in return. You're just taking the CO2 and sending it back to its natural home deep in the geosphere.

And in this case, mostly what you're looking at is a saline formation or a depleted oil and gas field. And in either case, you're storing the rocks basically as a liquid. The CO2 goes underground as a liquid phase, essentially. It's a super critical phase. And in that context, it has about the same viscosity and about the same density as oil, so it behaves like oil in the subsurface. So any coarse volume of rock that is able to hold hydrocarbon or any other buoyant fluid because it has porosity and permeability, meaning it has the ability to hold CO2 and it has a good seal, means that's a place you can store CO2.

Daniel Raimi: Great, that makes sense. And I didn't know about that, that we've been doing this since 1938. That's fascinating. Can you just briefly say what those early applications were?

Julio Friedmann: Right. So when people realized that you could separate CO2 at large scale, people began to think about uses for it. And one of the early applications, unsurprisingly, was food and beverage. It was making things like dry ice or putting fizzy water into soda pop, or using it to sparge beer silos and all these other things. And so for brewing, for cleaning rice silos, for all these kinds of things, people found that CO2 was an effective thing to use. It also turns out that CO2 is an extraordinarily good solvent. So people started using it for things like dry cleaning and so forth, and a handful of industrial purposes. A small volume of CO2 is used today to make semiconductors. But really the killer app, if you will, was discovered in 1972 when people realized that you could use it for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). And so we have been separating CO2 from industrial sources and point sources since 1938. We've been injecting it underground since 1972. And so it's really well understood stuff.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. And so with that sort of very brief history in place, can you get us up to speed on the state of deployment of CCUS today, both around the world and in the US? And as you've mentioned, there's all sorts of different applications. So maybe if you could tell us kind of where it's being used today, how it's being used today, and whatever else you think is relevant.

Julio Friedmann: Absolutely. So first order of business is we've been doing this since 1996. And when I mean “this,” I mean keeping CO2 from the air and oceans strictly on a climate basis. We've been separating it and injecting it underground and monitoring to demonstrate it stayed there. The first of these projects was in the North Sea, a project called Sleipner. Since then, we now have 20 projects operating around the world today. Every year we capture and inject about 40 million tons of CO2. It's like taking eight or 9 million cars off the road. And we have another, I don't know, equal number of projects sort of coming online soon. That fleet of 20 projects spans the globe. The largest number of these is in North America. We've got nine or 10 projects here. There are projects in the North Sea, there's projects in northern Norway. There's three projects in the Middle East, there's a project in Brazil, a very large project in Australia that came online just earlier this year, and as of recently, a project in China as well. So we really can do this globally and are doing this globally.

Daniel Raimi: And when you say 20 projects, are these sort of dedicated storage projects? Are they EOR projects? Are they a mix of those two?

Julio Friedmann: So these are 20 dedicated large-scale industrial projects. So by “large-scale,” if it's captured from a power plant that's basically on the order of a million tons a year or more. If it's an industrial plant, it needs to be larger than about 400,000 or 500,000 tons a year, as we define these things today. And that definition comes from the Global CCS Institute. So in each case, this is just a dedicated capture and storage project. It's worth knowing we've had well over a hundred smaller-scale pilots and projects where we sort of learned stuff, that were science experiments or points of calibration and so forth. But all of these are commercial-scale projects running today, and most of those are enhanced oil recovery projects. And the reason they're enhanced oil recovery projects is simple. That's how you finance a lot of these projects today. That's where the revenues come from. But about five of them are just saline formation storage. They're not for EOR, they're just storing it for the purpose of keeping it out of the air and oceans.

Daniel Raimi: Great. That's super helpful. And so when you mentioned financing the projects, that leads us to the natural question of: What do we know about the costs of deploying the technologies and what are the economics that make these projects viable? If we think about both today's technologies and maybe what we'll be looking at in the future, if you could just give us a ballpark of like how many dollars per ton does it take to kind of make these projects work.

Julio Friedmann: So before I answer that question, let me note that carbon capture and storage is the only technology that's graded on this measure, and I find that unsettling and a little baffling. When somebody builds a solar plant or builds a hydroelectric plant, or puts an efficiency program into place, they usually don't ask themselves, "Hey, what's the dollar-per-ton benefit I'm getting from this? How much money am I spending in order to reduce emissions?" And that's for a number of reasons, but CCS has been born with this particular albatross around its neck. It's the only clean energy technology that's graded on this measure. We'll come back to that later in the program. So because capture varies a lot, as a function of things like the concentration of CO2 in the original stream, the costs can vary quite a lot.

So if you're capturing CO2, say from an ethanol plant, like we are in Illinois, at the Archer Daniels Midland facility in Decatur, costs are on the order of $25 a ton. And that's the cost for compression, transportation, and deep injection and monitoring. All those costs together are about $25. Same thing for say the Quest project up in Alberta, where we are capturing CO2 from a hydrogen plant and storing it underground there. That one's a little more because it had a little more capital involved, but it’s the same ballpark. Both of those projects are just for saline aquifer storage. There's no EOR, there's no oil field revenues.

In contrast, if you capture from a coal-fired power plant where the concentrations are much lower, you're talking about something like $100 a ton, which is the cost from the Petra Nova project in Texas. If you were to capture from a slightly lower concentration stream, like a natural gas plant, it would probably be more like $120 a ton, something like that. And if you capture from the air, the costs are quite a lot higher, somewhere between $600 a ton or $1,000 a ton. But I say that because again, if you compare this to other clean energy policies, we actually already pay that level for almost all of our policies. Almost all of the policies we put in place have that level of cost associated with them, we just don't rank on this measure. So for example, Cash for Clunkers was on the order of $300 a ton. That's what we paid for Cash for Clunkers, and we don't use that metric for anything but CCS.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, so I don't want to get hung up on this too much, but those of us at RFF who do climate policy research, we actually do think in these terms a lot and produce the types of studies that make those estimates about how many dollars per ton is this policy worth or that policy worth. So I think at least, among our listeners, I think this concept of dollars-per-ton is not going to be unique to CCS or CCUS. But I think for our audience, this concept will be pretty familiar actually.

Julio Friedmann: But it comes back to then the question of finance. All of the way that we finance all of our clean energy—everything these days, no matter what the policy is—is essentially a policy measure. That's how you finance things. It is trying to internalize an externality: You can't emit anymore. And whether it's a renewable portfolio standard, which helps finance renewable plants, or whether it's an efficiency standard that goes into the appliances, all of these are standards that have a cost associated with them. And so the way that you finance CCS policy, ultimately, is through policy. It's the only way to get the job done. You can't build these facilities, which have capital costs and operating costs, and expect to get your money back unless there's some policy measure that aligns markets with that goal.

Daniel Raimi: Totally agree. And we're going to come back to this in just a couple of minutes, as you mentioned, and talk more about policy and CCUS policy in particular. But before we get there, a couple kind of more general questions that people often ask me when I'm introducing them to the concept of CCS, which I do in a very sort of cursory, basic way. But one of the questions that often comes up as a question of scale. And if we look at the sort of ambitious climate scenarios produced by modelers for the IPCC process or if you look at ambitious scenarios from the IEA or Shell or others, we see a very large scale of CCUS deployment, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, on the order of billions of tons per year. So how plausible do you think that scale is or just sort of how do you think about that scale issue?

Julio Friedmann: So I think about that scale of the issue is that's the work, and if we don't do that, everything costs more money. So the fact that it's hard is sort of beside the point. Everything we're talking about here is hard.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah.

Julio Friedmann: Putting the efficiency measures in place that we need to hit those targets is very difficult, very daunting, and very expensive, say in the building sector. The same thing is true in terms of the transmission build out for clean electricity. Like it's incredibly daunting and very, very expensive. So I just look at CCS as one of those, like it's just like everything else we got to do. But to the point, the reason why integrated assessment models and economic equilibrium models keep generating this very robust result that says, "Hey, something on the order of 14 percent of the emissions reduction has to get done with CCS," is because it is wildly cheaper than most of the other alternatives.

Julio Friedmann: And people think about this in the context, usually of power systems, because that's something they see in their day-to-day life. But half of that reduction comes in the industrial sector, it comes from say the by-product chemistry associated with steel-making or cement, which is an enormous fraction of global emissions. It has to do with other decarbonization of heat of these industrial systems. It has to do with power plants, not in the OECD countries, but in developing Asia, where these fleet of power plants is extremely young, where many of the plants are less than a decade old and have a natural capital life of another 40 or 50 years. That's why these models keep replying with the result that CCS has needed, not everywhere, but in these contexts. And if you don't, replacing those plants with something else, simply costs way, way more money. And when we say way, way more money, I mean like 150 percent addition, two and a half times more money for the same outcome.

Daniel Raimi: Right. That's really helpful. And so just following up on that briefly, I want to plug a report that you authored recently about challenges, or maybe not challenges, but solutions to decarbonizing industrial heat with the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy. That was a really nice report.

Julio Friedmann: Well, thank you.

Daniel Raimi: We'll have a link to it in the show notes. It was really helpful for me to think about this issue. And just to go back to the scale question, very briefly, sometimes people raise the question to me of like, is that even technically possible, right, to store billions of tons? And I think the answer is yes, but if you could just elaborate on that a little bit, it would be helpful.

Julio Friedmann: Yeah. The answer is unquestionably yes. And I can't fault people for not understanding this because most people aren't geologists, and so they don't think about the subsurface ever. But we have done, worldwide, pretty good assessments of the rocks and in various places like North America, really good assessments of the rocks, where we've had 15 or 20 years of research and geological assessment and calibration and testing, and that gives us a lot of knowledge. And the conservative estimates for the global storage volume for CO2 are between 10 and 20 trillion tons of capacity. I'll say that again, 10 to 20 trillion tons of capacity. For comparison, historical emissions for human beings total are about 2 trillion tons. So we have more than enough volume in the subsurface to do this. And one of the interesting things is when you go into a new basin and you study it, those numbers tend to get bigger. That's happened everywhere we've done this in North America, it's happened in the North Sea. You start with a generic assessment of rock volume and then when you start drilling wells and doing your homework and really thinking it through, it looks like the capacity is much larger than you initially guessed.

Daniel Raimi: Great. That sense of scale is super helpful. So last kind of general question and then we'll get into the policy discussion. But again, when people are learning about CCUS for the first time, and they're learning about the scale that some of these projects could be reaching, one of the concerns that they sometimes voice is a concern about permanence of storage. And another concern that they sometimes voice is what happens if there's a leak, or some kind of large release of CO2. So how do you think about those two issues and how do you sort of describe them to people when you're introducing them to this topic?

Julio Friedmann: Right. I tend to start by telling people that the Earth's crust has mass and strength, and that means large-scale releases just don't happen. They just don't. And the 50 years of CO2 injection we have demonstrate that pretty well. The number of people who have been hurt equals zero. The number of large releases equals zero. The number of pipeline failures that have caused harm to people, equal zero. Like, it's just the number zero. And if you were an insurance company, this is the best business to get it in the world. It's like the Arm & Hammer business model for selling baking soda where they just say, "Hey, rip off the top and put it in your refrigerator," and nothing happens. And they're like, "Oh, do it again in a month." Like that's what an insurance company policy on a CCS project is like. So I understand why people have these concerns, but we actually understand this stuff pretty well. And the largest ever release of CO2 from an operational place, a place where we were actually injecting or producing CO2 is actually from CO2 production, from a natural occurring CO2 field in Colorado.

And that well had a completion problem and sheared in the middle of the well. And it ran out of control for two whole weeks, and they intercepted the well and killed it by injecting concrete all the way down the bore, so that works. That released a total of 20,000 tons of CO2, which is like four days of CO2 emissions from a single big power plant. So it's a tiny volume. And since that time, in 1981, the field has operated without fail for 30 years, with no problems. So we know what this kind of looks like, and it is reasonable for people to ask, but they have to understand that this is something where the geoscience is really, really well understood.

Daniel Raimi: Okay, great. So let's move on now from the kind of general discussion of CCUS and turn to the policy discussion and focus in the United States. As many of our listeners will know, the US a couple of years ago enacted a tax credit for CCUS, which is usually referred to as 45Q. I think that references a part of the IRS code. You can correct me if I'm wrong. Can you give us a description of how that policy works and how effective you think it's been in spurring deployment of new CCS projects?

Julio Friedmann: So quite well. And just a quick addendum to what you said, that credit already existed. Recently, it was amended. So it was created in the Energy Policy Act of 2007, and then it was amended in 2018. And that amendment did a number of really important things. The first thing it did is it uncapped the number of total credits. That was important because before that you weren't sure if you were going to get paid. The IRS said, "Well, there's a total cap of 75 million and whoever comes first gets it." So if you're developing a project, you weren't guaranteed to get any of that.

Daniel Raimi: Right.

Julio Friedmann: So they uncapped it. The second thing they did is they increased the value. For saline formation storage, they increased the value to $50 a ton. And for enhanced oil recovery to $35 a ton. The third thing that they did is they allowed transfer of title, or transfer of custody, of the credits. And in doing that they said, "You don't have to have all the tax appetite yourself. If you're running a capture facility, you can transfer the credits to a partner in the business or the person who's taking custody of the CO2 and storing it." And that increased the range of people who could get involved in the program. And all of that's quite good. And already it has stimulated a bunch of projects around the country, where people who were not storing CO2 before are now developing projects to store CO2. One example is an ethanol plant up in North Dakota called Project Tundra. And at Project Tundra, they're planning to capture, again the by-product CO2 from fermentation, and store it underground.

Daniel Raimi: That's really helpful. Thanks for correcting me on the timeline as well. So another question on 45Q, so in this conversation and some of your other speaking engagements that I've seen, you're certainly a firm—well, tell me if you think this is the right word—but sort of a firm advocate for larger deployment of CCUS. In your view, is the 45Q credit enough to spur the development or the deployment of CCUS at the scale that you would like to see? Or are there other policy measures that you think would be appropriate either in tandem with 45Q or in place of 45Q?

Julio Friedmann: Thank you for asking that because it tees up a report that we are about to release. We have another report coming out of the Center on Global Energy Policy written with my young brilliant colleague, Emeka Ochu, and the mighty Jeff Brown out of Stanford. And the analysis is exactly that, because what we know is that 45Q is not enough to activate in many other sectors. So back to our earlier discussion, right now you can get $45 a ton credit for saline formation storage with 45Q. If it costs you a hundred dollars to do that, you can't make that up on volume. So you need higher levels of incentive in order to get this rolling. You need to align the markets to support this kind of deployment. And so we did an analysis just in the US power sector, and we wanted to understand what additional policies would help and we looked at a whole bunch of policies, everything from accelerated asset depreciation, to master limited partnership status, for projects, to a production tax credit, to contract for differences.

We really tried to figure out across a range of policies what would lead to substantial deployment. And we'd looked at an enhanced 45Q case where we just said if you just took the existing policy and bumped it up a bit, what would that take in terms of deployment? And we look just at two classes of power plants, coal-fired power plants and natural gas combined cycle power plants. And we looked at two classes of ownership, ownership by a utility and ownership by a merchant power provider. And we had basically two big punchlines, one of them is on a strictly enhanced 45Q basis, for really any policy, who owns the power plant is a massive, massive determinant of whether you can finance the project, because the costs range just on the basis of ownership between $60 a ton and $110 a ton. That's the project finance costs. That's not the engineering costs.

If you want to get a project financed, you have to think about things like the debt equity split. You have to think about the return. You have to think about the risk to the investor. Again, this has proven true in everything else, it's proven true for nuclear and for small hydro and for offshore wind and all these other policies, it's the same basic issue. And so financing the project, you would need a 45Q that ranges between $60 and $110 a ton. The other thing that we found, as a major finding, is that revenue enhancements for power stations are actually the strongest way to get this done. And there's two reasons why. One, you're paying for what you want. You say, "If you capture CO2, then we'll give you more revenue." It's not an incentive for anything other than zeroing emissions in the power sector. You're paying for what you get.

The other reason why is because that provides the clearest signal to investors that they will get their money back. So if you would get an extra, say, 1.3 cents per kilowatt hour, if you did carbon capture and storage, these projects would just run away, like they would finance themselves. And all of those numbers are going to be published in the order of a week or two, which means by the time this podcast runs, hopefully this will already be published on our website.

Daniel Raimi: I think that's right and we'll make sure to have a link to it on the show page. Just so people know, it is Friday, March 13th, when we're recording this. The podcast may air several weeks later. But we should have a link to it on the show page so people can check it out.

Julio Friedmann: Right. The thing that I want to underscore with this is there's lots of different policies that can work, and depending on what you want, you choose different policy. So we found that the revenue enhancements were the best policies compared, to say, tax or capital treatments on the other side. But if your business model is a big bag of cash and you're the government, you just want to hand people a big bag of cash, you can do that, and we tell you how big it has to be. If you want to give tax breaks, we tell you how to do that and tell you how big it has to be, like you can figure it out one way or another. And it matters in terms of what ends up getting deployed. So, for example, if you do an increased 45Q, that supports coal deployment because you get paid by the ton of CO2, and coal plants make more tons per unit of energy.

The opposite is true for a revenue enhancement. If you wanted to support deployment in the gas space, you would pay a dollar per kilowatt hour because you have less CO2 per unit of energy, from a gas plant. And so, we wanted to just lay it all out there. We're not making a specific policy recommendation. We just say, "Hey, if you want to deploy, this is what it looks like. And if you want one outcome versus another, you need to know what you're doing."

Daniel Raimi: That sounds super useful. And so I look forward to reading the report and when it's out.

Julio Friedmann: Two other quick things on that. We just looked at today's technology. We just said we're going to use retrofit with the liquid base solvent system, which we'll strip out the CO2 as post combustion. We didn't look at any advanced technology.

Daniel Raimi: Right.

Julio Friedmann: The fact is that's one of our next studies. We're going to come out and say, "Hey, if you had capture at $30 a ton and there's a number of companies that say they can do that, what would deployment look like today?" Similarly, we're looking at other sectors. We want to look in particular at chemicals, and at steel and cement, and see if that is a way where we can make additional policies. Here, the policies look different because they are things like a procurement policy, which is not really something, the government doesn't buy power very much, but it certainly buys concrete.

Daniel Raimi: Yep.

Julio Friedmann: And it certainly buys steel. So you have a wider policy aperture and really different sectors in terms of their financeability, age of the assets, geographic distribution, other stuff.

Daniel Raimi: That sounds excellent. So, yeah, we'll definitely keep up to date with your work, and maybe we'll circle back again in a year or two and talk about the status of CCS 2021. But now we're about out of time. So I want to ask you the last question that we ask all of our guests, which is: What's at the top of your literal or metaphorical reading stack? So something you've enjoyed reading or watching or listening to related to energy or the environment that you think is really interesting. And I'll just start off by mentioning a series of blog posts that we're going to be having on the RFF blog, authored by my colleagues and friends, Alan Krupnick and Jay Bartlett, that's called “45Q&A.” A nice turn of phrase there I think, where they're essentially looking at a variety of issues related to the 45Q tax credit. And so, certainly complimentary of our conversation today. And so you'll be able to get all your CCUS wonkery needs by reading Julio's work and also Alan and Jay's work. But how about you Julio, what's on the top of your stack?

Julio Friedmann: There's two bits of reading that I would strongly recommend to people, one of which I'm doing now and one of which I finished recently. The one I'm doing now is called Engineers of Victory. And it talked about what the science and engineering teams did during World War II. Like people were like, "Oh, we just need to mobilize at a World War II level and then this is done." Well, when we did that, what did we actually do? What problems do we have to solve? Who did we pay to solve the problem? How did we organize the science and engineering teams? It's especially useful in the context of something like CO2 removal from the air, which is such a big challenge. Understanding what we did in the past will I think advise how we think about getting things done going forward. That's a book by Paul Kennedy. I recommend it to people, it's a good read.

The other book I would recommend is Calestous Juma's incredible work, Innovation and Its Enemies. And it talks about how innovations are always fought in culture and they can be fought for a number of reasons. It could be fought because there's a commercial interest at stake that's fighting it. It could be because of cultural norms. It could be because of questions of fear or distrust, and he goes through everything from how coffee got into Europe to how the Quran was printed on Gutenberg presses, to how electricity got into the city of New York, to how margarine was marketed. And in each case, there were real barriers and real enemies that fought hard to make sure that these innovations didn't get into the market. And Calestous Juma, rest in peace, is an extraordinary writer and thinker, who himself lived an extraordinary life. And so it's worth picking up this book and reading it just to learn a bit about Calestous.

Daniel Raimi: Wow, great. Those both sound fascinating, so I'll have to look into them a little bit more, and hope our listeners do as well. And just want to say, one more time, thank you again, Julio Friedmann, for joining us and teaching us about CCUS. We really appreciate it.

Julio Friedmann: It was my great pleasure.

Daniel Raimi: You've been listening to Resources Radio. If you have a minute, we'd really appreciate you leaving us a rating or a comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes. Resources Radio is a podcast from Resources for the Future. RFF is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Our mission is to improve environmental energy and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. Learn more about us at rff.org.

The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the participants. They do not necessarily represent the views of Resources for the Future, which does not take institutional positions on public policies. Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason, with music by me, Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.