Hard Numbers Show Carbon Capture & Storage Is a Smokescreen

There are five thousand coal plants worldwide, and three thousand more are likely by 2030. Industry and elected officials say carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will save the day. But the hard numbers contained in peer-reviewed research published by the US government's National Institutes of Health reveal that CCS is a smokescreen for business-as-usual.

There are three parts to CCS technology: the capture of carbon dioxide, its transport through pipelines over great distances, and its storage in suitable geologic locations deep underground or underwater. In the whole world, there are three individual operations where CCS is working on a commercial scale - in Norway, Canada and Algeria. Nowhere in the entire United States. Further, IGCC coal plants - the kind that can efficiently capture carbon dioxide -- are extremely rare. There are only 5 of those in the whole world.

In the US, coal plants produce more than 1.5 billion tons of CO2 every year. To capture and store it will take a vast new infrastructure of pipelines and storage sites, and widespread construction of new IGCC plants, which are at least 20% more expensive to build than traditional plants. No one knows how to even start. Here's one MIT's expert's assessment:

None of the (CCS studies underway) are getting us to the answer we really need: how are we going to manage storage in the millions of tons over long periods of time.

Everybody is banking on a project called FutureGen -- the only CCS demonstration project currently underway in the United States. First floated in 2002 by President Bush, now five years later, the project has yet to select the construction site. Results from operations aren't expected until 2016. The article concludes:

Leslie Harroun, a senior program officer at the Oak Foundation, a Geneva-based organization that funds social and environmental research, warns that industry might leverage the promise of CCS as a public relations strategy today while doing little to ensure its broad-based deployment tomorrow. "The coal industry's many proposals to build 'clean' coal plants that are 'capture ready' across the U.S. is a smokescreen," she asserts. "Coal companies are hoping to build new plants before cap-and-trade regulations go into effect—and they will, soon—with the idea that the plants and their greenhouse gas emissions will be grandfathered in until sequestration is technically and financially feasible. This is an enormously risky investment decision on their part, and morally irresponsible, but maybe they think there is power in numbers."

In a sense, the inertia surrounding CCS might reflect a collective wilt in the face of a seemingly overwhelming technical and social challenge. To make a difference for climate change, a CCS infrastructure will have to capture and store many billions of tons of CO2 throughout the world for hundreds of years. Those buried deposits will have to be monitored by unknown entities far into the future. Many questions remain about who will "own" these deposits and thereby assume responsibility for their long-term storage. Meanwhile, industry and the government are at an impasse, with neither taking a leading role toward making large-scale CCS a reality. How this state of affairs ultimately plays out for the health of the planet remains to be seen.

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