carbon capture and storage

The Obama administration announced the winners of the first phase of "clean coal" dollars from the economic stimulus package, with the largest sums going to oil firms.

Only $21.6 million of the $1.4 billion for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies was made available in phase one. The money was awarded to 12 companies that will test ways to catch and compress CO2 from polluting plants, transport it by pipeline and pump it underground.

The biggest winners were C6 Resources, a Shell Oil affiliate; ConocoPhillips; and Shell Chemicals, another division of Shell Oil. Each nabbed $3 million to demonstrate their technologies for seven months.

In the announcement, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu recycled the 'clean coal' boilerplate of past releases: "These new technologies will not only help fight climate change, they will create jobs now," although there was no estimate of how many jobs will be generated.

He also repeated this claim:

"The investments will help position the United States to lead the world in carbon dioxide capture technologies."

America still has a long way to go, though. A few subsidy-funded R&D tests are now being carried out, but none is considered economically feasible on a large scale, or even that clean.

The world's first coal plant to pipe its global-warming emissions underground will soon grind into action in West Virginia, at a time when support for funding a global carbon capture and storage (CCS) scale-up may be waning.

The 1,300-MW Mountaineer plant, one of America's largest coal facilities, will house the first commercial CCS demonstration of its kind. The operation will nab 1.5 percent of the plant's annual CO2 output and bury it 8,000 feet in a layer of dolomite rock.

The eyes of the world will be locked on the $100 million-plus experiment in the coming months. But the hype may be getting ahead of reality.

Hiding something in the ground is an impulse known to man and dog alike. So it’s no wonder that humans, having realized that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could warm the planet catastrophically, are looking to bury the greenhouse gas deep underground.

In the last few months, that impulse has become super-charged as a result of accelerating government support around the world for CCS – carbon capture and sequestration – a technology that promises to capture CO2 emissions, inject it deep into porous rock and store it there forever.

In the U.S., the potential of CCS has been seized on as a solution to reducing global warming emissions in pending federal legislation.

Coal supporters are using it as an argument against forcing polluters to start paying for power plant emissions now. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) put it bluntly to Congressional Quarterly: “We want to see coal-fired utilities held harmless until such time as the [carbon capture and sequestration] technology is deployed.”

But conversations with scientists and experts reveal that deploying this technology on a wide scale is still at least two decades away in the best of circumstances.

That means, despite the excitement, CCS can’t be relied on in the near term as a climate policy solution.

The European Union has pledged to have 12 demonstration carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) power plants -- so-called "clean coal" -- up and running by 2015 and the technology fully commercialized by 2020.

But there is not a single utility-scale CCS plant now functioning in Europe, nor on the planet, and not one on the horizon. On top of that, some experts say EU dollars have all but dried up for funding the overpriced, pie-in-the-sky fossil fuel "fix."

Cloudy forecast? Yes. But it's way too premature to write off "clean coal" on the continent, because even as the economy crumbles, projects press on. A full reality check on the state of CCS technology in the EU follows, courtesy of an analysis by global research firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors.

Clean coal isn’t having much luck.

The latest project casualty is a carbon capture and storage plant planned for Kwinana, Australia – south of Perth.

BP pulled the plug on the $2 billion venture on account of an unforeseen geological defect in the area: The leaky rock formations can’t seem to seal in CO2 for the long-term.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) would take coal out of the ground, burn it for energy in coal plants and put the leftover gas back in the Earth where it came from.

It’s an idea whose time may never come, and here’s another reason why, from a new article in the Energy Tribune, Carbon Sequestration: Injecting Realities: The number of new wells needed to store the CO2 at large scales is likely to be huge and unrealistic.

As many as 100,000, in fact, depending on geological factors.