CO2 Can’t Be Shipped In LNG Ships, So It’s Not A Circular Economy Possibility | by Michael Barnard | The Future is Electric | Aug, 2023 | Medium

Midjourney generated image of LNG tanker ships passing each other going in opposite directions

CO2 Can’t Be Shipped In LNG Ships, So It’s Not A Circular Economy Possibility

More carbon capture and sequestration follies comes with the idea of capture CO2 from burning LNG and returning it from whence it came

Michael Barnard

Published in

The Future is Electric

5 min read

Aug 19

In the past three years, another nonsensical idea has sprung up to somehow allow shipping of molecules for energy. The premise is that liquified natural gas (LNG) goes in one direction and liquified CO2 (l-CO2) gets put in the same tanks and goes the other way. It sounds so obvious!

The premise is that CO2 from natural gas has to be captured, and then has to go somewhere. And the ships that bring natural gas in liquid form from its origin to its destination would have to sail home empty, which has no economic merit. And the gas fields love to put CO2 underground, even if only to get more oil.

This is, of course, being proposed by faculty members at the University of Houston, and solely for methane extracted from underground with CO2 returned to the oil fields for enhanced oil recovery. Given the high upstream and downstream methane leakages in the US system, and enhanced oil recovery’s premise of injecting CO2 underground to get more crude oil out which when used as directed creates more CO2 than injected, this is a remarkable idea in any event. It’s part and parcel of the shell game that is carbon capture and sequestration in the fossil fuel industry, where CO2 is extracted from underground in one place and put back underground in another for enhanced oil recovery and claimed as a win while still remaining a tiny fraction of ExxonMobil’s annual emissions.

But Fortescue, an Australian resource extraction company trying to make exported Australian green hydrogen an energy source for the world despite the realities of economics and thermodynamics, is considering going much further down the entropic rabbit hole. They are proposing converting green hydrogen to more manageable but high global warming potential methane, then liquify the methane into LNG, then ship the LNG to energy markets, and then re-use the LNG tankers to return the CO2 for reuse in the green methane manufacturing process.

Let’s start with whether this is even possible, and the answer is yes. Economically…