Last month, when Taiwan’s Science and Technology Council celebrated the fact that a Taiwanese research team had developed a machine capable of converting CO2 into less harmful substances, “with a processing capacity of 50 kilograms of CO2 per day,” it reminded me of a conversation I had last year. Speaking to one of the academics involved in drafting Taiwan’s carbon fee, he told me that his next career move would likely be into carbon capture.
The contradiction didn’t immediately hit home, but it has since. Even the people in charge of controlling carbon emissions in Taiwan don’t actually believe they will do it successfully. They’re instead betting on a get-out-of-jail-free card that operates at a scale measured in kilograms, while taking on a problem measured in thousands of gigatons*. Or, if you want to put it another way: a technology that — functionally — doesn’t exist yet.
Carbon capture — a variety of techniques for removing CO2 from the atmosphere or preventing it from getting there — promises are laced through the heart of Taiwan’s most important climate legislation.
Both its Climate Change Response Act, which established the 2050 net-zero emission target in law, and its Pathway to 2050 Net Zero Emissions, the first comprehensive strategic planning document for Taiwan’s climate governance, feature carbon capture as a central mechanism through which net-zero will be achieved. The latter went as far as allocating 5% of its NT$900 billion ($27.5 billion) budget toward “low carbon and negative carbon technology,” though it notably did not commit to how much carbon would be captured.
This is discouraging for three reasons.
First, this suite of technology’s current results do nothing to suggest its impact on total carbon emissions can be anything more than negligible for decades to come. At the end of 2023, an Oxford University study found the cost of carbon capture implementation had not declined at all in 40 years — “in contrast to renewable technologies like solar, wind, and batteries, which have fallen in cost dramatically.”
Second, the whole idea of carbon capture is built on false assumptions about the way that climate change works. The premise is that the world can go above a safe temperature and then, when carbon capture matures as a technology, simply turn back the temperature gauge. This ignores the fact that climate “tipping points” such as the accelerating ice melt from the Greenland Ice Sheet and the death of the coral reef lead to catastrophic, irreversible consequences — whatever the Earth’s temperature happens to be in the future.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, carbon capture has from the outset been used as a crutch for fossil fuel generators who wish to avoid responsibility for climate change mitigation while maintaining profit margins. Its coming of age moment was during the Paris Agreement, as climate scholars Andreas Malm and Wim Carton described in their new book “Overshoot.” At that meeting, the headline 1.5 degree temperature limit was tied to the concept of “carbon zero,” which quietly allowed for the removal of emissions in the latter part of the century. At the same time, the Obama Administration arranged in a private meeting with China, India, Brazil and South Africa for all emission-lowering commitments to be voluntary.
The list of carbon capture devotees in Taiwan reflects this connection.
At the end of this January, Taiwan’s largest emitter, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, commissioned a membrane carbon capture system to treat emissions from a zero-waste manufacturing center in Taichung. At the end of January last year, CPC Corporation — Taiwan’s state-owned petroleum, natural gas and gasoline company — announced a “goal” to “inject 5 million metric tons of CO2 annually into selected sites and gradually [emphasis added] build up to 14 million metric tons per annum.” And at the start of last February, Taiwan Cement began a project to develop a more efficient carbon capture technology of its own.
Behind these always vague (unregulated) commitments is a material world facing real crisis now. Taiwan experienced its hottest year on record in 2024, while its Minister of Environment Peng Chi-ming (彭啟明) said in August that Taiwan’s emissions had only reduced by 1.8% between 2005 and 2022. He added that reaching the goal of reducing emissions by 23 percent to 25 percent compared with 2005 by 2030 would “in reality be hard.”
No one would argue that carbon capture isn’t worth exploring. It is. But positioning it as a central plank of climate policy is a mistake. And in no other policy area would such fantastical optimism be tolerated. The only realist position here is that this should be tackled through replacing fossil fuels with green energy developments at breakneck speeds and reducing overall energy consumption.
*One gigaton is a trillion kilograms.
Taiwan’s Science and Technology Council media contact did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Taiwan’s Energy Bureau or its Carbon Capture Storage and Utilization Association. We will add in their comments should they send them.
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