An Inconvenient Thought

Propensity to fight losing battles

  • CCUS in Malaysia

    A few days ago, the Malaysian Parliament passed the Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Bill 2025. RimbaWatch, an NGO conducting research on climate-related issues, analysed CCUS projects announced in Malaysia, and found that, unsurprisingly, almost all of them support extracting and burning of fossil fuels:

    Of the 6 initiatives being proposed in Sarawak, five are linked to fossil fuel expansion, either through enabling sour gas developments or encouraging the development of a gas power plant. These CCUS initiatives are linked to some of the biggest gas discoveries in Malaysia, and the Kasawari and Lang Lebah fields alone hold a combined 16 trillion cubic feet of gas and 20.4 million barrels of oil equivalent of crude reserves.

    In Peninsular Malaysia, all four initiatives can be linked to fossil fuel production, either through enabling the development of a high-CO2 field with 4 trillion cubic feet of gas, or being attached to fields with either existing or future production.

    Some of the most high-profile CCUS projects in Malaysia, such as Kasawari, will be used to extract so-called “sour gas”. These are fossil gas fields that contain high percentages of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2). These acidic (“sour”) gases can corrode and damage pipelines and equipment, so they need to be removed (“sweetened”) before the hydrocarbons can be used.

    After the CO2 is removed, where would it go? The simple (and cheap) answer is: just release (“vent”) them into the atmosphere, where they can hang out with all the other anthropogenic greenhouse gases! Or you can bury them somewhere underground, but that would cost more.

    Fossil fuel companies have to capture the CO2 in sour gas if they want to sell hydrocarbons, but they don’t have to store the CO2 like these proposed Malaysia CCUS projects. How nice of them!

    Why would they bother to store the captured CO2? I have two guesses:

    1. CCUS for these fossil fuel expansion projects is a smokescreen. This is classic greenwashing. By touting their flashy, futuristic CCUS, they try to recast themselves from climate villains into climate heroes.

    2. They can make up for the higher cost of storing CO2 by selling carbon credits, charging more for “low carbon natural gas”, or extracting more oil from depleted oil fields (“enhanced oil recovery”). 1

    If these companies are going to drill and pump fossil gases anyway, with or without the CO2 storage, then what’s the problem with having CCUS? Wouldn’t it be better to have CCUS, ceteris paribus, than not for these projects?

    A basic, well-known problem is, empirically, large-scale CCUS simply doesn’t work. There is a long list of high-profile CCUS project failures, including Chevron’s infamous Gorgon LNG project in Australia which happens to be “sour gas” too.

    But the most glaring, fundamental problem is that fossil fuel is fossil fuel is fossil fuel. No matter how much CO2 (or methane, for that matter) can be captured during the production processes and squirrelled away safely, all fossil fuels will eventually end up in the atmosphere as pollution. It’s simple: if something is good for fossil fuels, it’s bad for the climate.

    1. EOR is the most common use of CCUS, and historically, the financial viability of CCUS projects are inextricably linked to oil prices. Higher oil prices means more profits from EOR, so more likely the CCUS investment will pay for itself. RimbaWatch noted that, while the passed CCUS Bill prohibits using imported CO2 for EOR, it doesn’t say anything about using domestically sourced CO2 for this purpose. If Petronas can pump sour fossil gas, capture the CO2, and use the CO2 to pump more oil, isn’t it nice？ ↩

  • Apple Intelligence fiasco

    John Gruber asking how Apple got itself into announcing but not being able to ship its headline Apple Intelligence feature:

    What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.

    Until WWDC last year, that is.

    […]

    Why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year, and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why, for that matter, do they now claim to “anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” if they still currently do not exist in demonstratable form? (If they do exist today in demonstratable form, they should, you know, demonstrate them.)

    […]

    The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It’s also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They’re inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.

    […]

    Keynote by keynote, product by product, feature by feature, year after year after year, Apple went from a company that you couldn’t believe would even remain solvent, to, by far, the most credible company in tech. Apple remains at no risk of financial bankruptcy (and in fact remains the most profitable company in the world). But their credibility is now damaged. Careers will end before Apple might ever return to the level of “if they say it, you can believe it” credibility the company had earned at the start of June 2024.

    Damaged is arguably too passive. It was squandered. This didn’t happen to Apple. Decision makers within the company did it.

    […]

    Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.

    […]

    It’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing “We need to show something that only Apple can do.” But it turns out they announced something Apple couldn’t do. And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.

  • Red Bull’s driver merry-go-round

    Oleg Karpov and Jose Carlos de Celis reporting for Motorsport.com:

    Liam Lawson could be replaced at Red Bull by Yuki Tsunoda as early as the Japanese Grand Prix, Motorsport.com understands.

    Red Bull’s toxic, cut-throat culture is well-known, and Lawson didn’t do himself any favours in the first two races of the 2025 season. But firing him now is not just cruel, it’s also counterproductive.

    When Lawson tested Red Bull’s 2024 car (RB20) in July last year, he got within 2 tenths of Verstappen’s lap time. This was also around the time when Perez started his run of poor form and Red Bull started to lose its dominance. Up to this midpoint of the season, we could assume Red Bull had a reasonably fast and balanced car.

    From what I could learn, as the season evolved, RB20 became more oversteer-y (“pointy”) and harder to drive. Like Apple with its ill-fated “trash can Mac Pro”, Red Bull designed themselves into a bit of aerodynamic corner. Verstappen happens to like a pointy car, so it didn’t stop him from winning the world championship. But for any other driver, that RB20 must be a proper handful to drive.

    Lawson was given the second Red Bull seat because of his 3-lap performance in a much less extreme mid-2024 RB20, and a quarter of a season in a VCARB (where he did about as well as his then teammate Tsunoda). Now, is it any surprise that he struggled with an even more pointy car just 2 races in? At this point, Red Bull seems to be expecting its second driver to match Verstappen’s performance in a car that Verstappen is uniquely suited to handle. Such a driver may not exist.

    Oleg Karpov and Jose Carlos de Celis continued:

    After finishing sixth in the sprint, Tsunoda was asked in his media session whether he would agree to swap places with Lawson in Suzuka. He replied: “Japan? Yeah, 100%. I mean, the [Red Bull] car is faster.”

    Yes, the RB21 is faster than VCARB02 when Verstappen drives it. As much as this may seem like a big break for Tsunoda, I fear it’s going to turn into a trap, just like how it turned out for Lawson.

  • Renewables for energy security

    Anika Patel, outlining key takeaways from Chatham House’s climate and energy summit for Carbon Brief:

    A key benefit of the UK’s “climate leadership”, [Rachel] Kyte argued, is that the energy transition will “make British people more secure”.

    [Ben] Parsons said the argument – recently deployed by Conservative leader Badenoch – that the energy transition replaced reliance on Russian fossil fuels with reliance on Chinese technology was incorrect.

    “Fossil fuels are fuel – they require constant replenishment. Renewables are infrastructure,” he said, adding that arguably the UK should be accelerating its deployment of clean-energy technology.

    When you hear people arguing for fossil fuel in the name of “energy security”, please interrupt and correct them.

  • Transition carbon credits are an unwise distraction

    Patrick McCully in an opinion piece for Eco-Business:

    The two largest offset standard-setting bodies are currently developing protocols to enable the creation of a market in carbon offsets from the emissions avoided by shutting down coal plants and replacing them with renewables.

    Like other voluntary carbon market methodologies, these protocols will suffer from the tendency to overestimate emission reductions. They also fail to recognise that offsets are a zero-sum game: the emissions benefit from closing coal and building renewables will be lost if polluters elsewhere are able to buy offsets from these retirements in order to avoid cutting their own emissions. Large scale coal retirements will require governments and financial institutions to accept that they will not be able to recoup all of their investments in coal plants, and will require large-scale support for the rapid deployment of sustainable power.

    Spot on. Like all avoidance-type carbon credits, the so-called “transition credits” let polluters “offset” their very real emissions (and harms) with imaginary reductions (and benefits). The seemingly robust and rigorous modeling to calculate the amount of potential emission reduction is based on two assumption-riddled speculations about the future. That’s some serious sleight of hand.

    In Southeast Asia, the key barriers to shutting down coal power plants are often political. Project developers (coal interests with significant political influence) and investors (mostly commercial banks and multilateral development banks) who built new coal plants in the late 2010s are now holding energy transition hostage to protect their financial interests. Instead of undermining their coercive power, transition credits represent capitulation.

    McCully also pointed out that carbon credits are particularly attractive to fossil fuel companies like Shell (world’s largest purchaser of carbon credits in 2024 by far). They use all forms of carbon credits to avoid reputational and regulatory pressure, but transition credits can be particularly beneficial to oil and gas interests. By paying a small price for these credits, oil and gas companies (with the help of governments, banks, and philanthropies) can get rid of the incumbent coal power in these fast-growing economies and make room for their “cleanest form of fossil fuel” gas solutions.

    My simple rule-of-thumb: if something is welcomed by fossil fuel interests, it’s bad for the climate.