Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates’s investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter — which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks — can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years.
The high cost of CCS means that almost all for-profit business faced with a choice between installing it and replacing their facilities with new ones which don’t burn stuff is going to end up doing the latter. There are a handful of exceptions where the high operating cost of CCS might make it worthwhile, but they’re a minority of what needs doing.
To be fair, there are things like concrete production where the process itself inherently produces large amounts of carbon where capture might help, but yes, in general if there is a choice between a process that produces carbon and a more expensive one that doesn’t the one that doesn’t will still be cheaper than capture.