Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technique to remove carbon dioxide from industrial pollution – and especially from power stations – and compress, transport and store it perpetually in secure underground structures such as expired gas and oil fields and other geological formations.
CCS is experimental, unproven technology at the scale required, and if it works the majority of CCS deployment will not occur until the second half of this century, according to the 2005 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report on carbon dioxide capture and storage.
The Australian Labor government’s CCS initiative, announced on 25 February 2007 when it was in opposition, envisages the technology only “entering the grid” after 2030, a timeline that takes it off the table as a near-term emissions reduction option. If nations in the Asia-Pacific adopted a climate change strategy based on CCS technology, by 2050 emissions would still rise by over 70%.
While a large 2007 study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology expresses confidence that large-scale CCS projects can be operated safely, it worries that “no carbon dioxide storage project that is currently operating has the necessary modeling, monitoring, and verification capability to resolve outstanding technical issues, at scale.”
In other words, it is not possible to know at this stage if the whole technology package will work. Proposed new plants in North America including the much-lauded FutureGen have being scrapped before construction started, largely because they were not cost effective.
As a new and complex technology, CCS, like nuclear energy before it, seems destined to be dogged by cost overruns, unforeseen problems and delays. The biggest concern is that stored emissions could slowly leak over the long term, deferring today’s problem to create a monster greenhouse headache in the future.
CCS is inconsistent with a low-emissions goal because the technology is likely to capture only a portion of greenhouse pollutants, and is energy intensive. If it is possible to capture 80-90% of the carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power station, it would require newly-constructed stations to burn 11-40% more coal to produce the same output; and it would cost more for retrofitted power stations which have lower CCS efficiencies.
The IPCC finds that CCS would double the cost of the electricity where storage sites are distant from power stations, increasing the cost of coal-fired power with CCS to more than that of many renewable energy sources, especially as increasing economies of scale and technology improvements are predicted to halve the cost of renewables generation over the next two decades. Capture expert Greg Duffy told a 2006 Australian parliamentary inquiry that CCS would double the cost of base-load electricity generation, and reduce the output from a power station by about 30%. Dr Lincoln Paterson of the CSIRO told the same enquiry that beyond 100kms the transport costs may become “prohibitively expensive”.
A year earlier, a report from five CSIRO Energy Technology researchers predicted that the cost of electricity from concentrated solar thermal plants would be competitive with coal-fired generation (without CCS) in five to seven years. The report was suppressed by the federal government while hundreds of millions of dollars were allocated for “clean coal” research, and solar thermal initiatives were driven overseas.
EcologyAction, now calm down. Keep the super in place. Hey, it going to be alright ’cause the really super smart stuff (not spoken about at all yet) is just around the corner and this whole problem will actually go away.
Meantime we are paying serious and overdue attention to the really dirty environmentally issues indirectly which is a bonus.
Hey, Carbon Dioxide is rocket fuel for some things.
Nature has the only proven Carbon Capture and Storage process – photosynthesis. In fact it is the very process that millions of years ago captured all the carbon in coal and oil that we are so busy releasing into the atmosphere.
The answer to actually CONSUMING some of the excess carbon dioxide now in atmospheric circulation is NOT technology – it is BIOLOGY.
Visit http://www.soilcarbon.com.au and look at the case studies to see just how critical building soil carbon is to helping reverse climate change.
Nice work, David. I just watched the 7.30 Report on the subject, with Martin Ferguson in the hot seat. He kept repeating the same incomprehensible gobbledegook about `creating competitive environment`, inputs, `clean coal`and carbon trading, rather than answering simple questions of what is the Government doing about letting Australian renewable technology going overseas for want of support, whilst the taxpayer money is being spent on the chimera of CCS. As eminent experts point out, it will be 30-40 years when this system will begin to work, if it will in fact, work. In the meantime, solar technology is now available, including the storage of electricity, a big problem in the past. Of course, one can understand the government and Ferguson, the coal industry is a big player in the economy, (as well as the biggest polluter),so we don`t want to hurt their profits, do we? Anyway, the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, was pure political theatre, such as the Apology to the Stoien Generation
Most experts agree: we could knock 35% off our electricity demand by being smarter about how we use it. The BCA and the Green Building Council are making big strides and Melbourne can be proud of some icon building with impressive green star ratings.
Something else that is not THAT hard is to have a NATIONAL feed-in-tariff that actually works and gets renewable technologies built rather than the limp attempts in SA (and now QLD). Its not just about solar panels, its the other technologies that are on-line and would come on line in the right market for investors and the public alike. No time for motherhood stuff. Sun, wind waves, hotrocks. Just get on with it!
You left the best to last didn’t you. Ouch. What a shame. By the by Rudd gilded the lily about’ Australia being the biggest exporter/China the biggest user’ to justify CCS investments, given our exports to there are smallish compared to other markets apparently (Colvin interview on PM about 3 weeks back). As for the Climate Institute seed funding from … Bob Carr who works for Macquarie Bank now … well whatever the suits at the CI are – great ginger group, strong communicator, incredibly well connected, more spiv than an ALP conference, Peter Garrett’s figleaf, federal election wedge on the Libs v Nats – whatever it is, it ain’t G/green. Bourne got one thing right though for WWF. We are all joined at the hip now on dangerous climate. No one’s emissions are going down, and secular saint James Hansen reckons 350 ppb CO2 equivalence has been well exceeded already. Get your floaties out, spend the super! We are fucked.