From Climate Progress
As I explained a year ago, “CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role“:
* Cost: This is the biggest problem, and it hasn’t gotten better (see Harvard stunner: “Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 — 20 cents per kWh!).
* Scale: We need to put in place a dozen or so clean energy “stabilization wedges” by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes — see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)” For CCS to be even one of those would require a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. That would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure, no mean feat.
* Permanence and transparency: If Putin’s Russia said it was sequestering 100 million tons of CO2 in the ground permanently, and wanted other countries to pay it billions of dollars to do so, would anyone trust them? No. The potential for fraud and bribery are simply too enormous. But would anyone trust China? Would anyone trust a U.S. utility, for that matter? We need to set up some sort of international regime for certifying, monitoring, verifying, and inspecting geologic repositories of carbon — like the U.N. weapons inspections systems. The problem is, this country hasn’t been able to certify a single storage facility for a high-level radioactive waste after two decades of trying and nobody knows how to monitor and verify underground CO2 storage. It could take a decade just to set up this system.
* Timing: As Howard Herzog of MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment said last year, “How can we expect to build hundreds of these plants when we’re having so much trouble building the first one?“
Stuart Haszeldine, a CCS expert at the University of Edinburgh, warned of the danger of opposition towards CCS snowballing into a “bandwagon of negativity” if too many early projects were rejected. “Once you’ve screwed up one or two of them, people are going to think ‘if they rejected this in Barendrecht, there must be a reason’,” he said.
People should think of CCS as a post-2025 solution (at best), worthy of R&D and demonstration funding, especially for projects that include biomass cofiring.
But we need massive deployment of low-carbon technology now, however, and that means efficiency, conservation, recycled energy, natural gas, wind, solar PV, concentrated solar thermal with storage, geothermal, biomass... read full at Climate Progress
Update
And China calls CCS just too expensive...
Is China getting cold feet about clean coal? It certainly sounds that way. Bloomberg reports:
"Carbon capture and storage, particularly for China is not one of the priorities–the cost is an issue," [said Su Wei, director-general of the climate-change unit at China's National Development and Reform Commission] in an Aug. 4 telephone interview from Beijing. "If we spent the same money for CCS on energy efficiency and the development of renewables, it would generate larger climate-change benefits."
Wow. Even though so-called clean coal is still embryonic, there's increasing consensus in the U.S. that making it viable is crucial to meeting emissions goals and keeping the lights on.
That's doubly true for China, where coal is a bigger-and much faster-growing-part of the energy mix. In fact, MIT recently argued that China must not only build new clean-coal plants, but retrofit existing coal plants at great expense if the world is to have any hope of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions.
And the idea that China must embrace clean coal has become a staple of U.S. policy as well, from vice president Joe Biden's famous rope-line comments during the campaign to Energy Secretary Steven Chu's more recent pronouncements. In fact, China and the U.S. just agreed to cooperate on clean-coal research.
Even with China's big push on low-carbon electricity sources-especially renewables and nuclear power-coal will still account for at least 60% of its electricity in 2020.
If carbon capture and storage is simply too expensive to handle the challenge, will "cleaner" coal have to do the trick? And what will that mean for global efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions?
