2005... the G8 committed to building a global infrastructure for "carbon capture and storage" (CCS), which means burying carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ground. Now, seven years later, that infrastructure is being built worldwide. The centerpiece is the Global CCS Institute created in 2009. (The "S" in CCS can stand for "sequestration" or "storage" but it's the same thing -- burying pressurized CO2 in liquid form about a mile below ground.)...CCS is being readied for that time when the chaos, heat and misery from global warming become intolerable and people start begging (or rioting) for relief -- say, sometime between 2015 and 2030.
The problem is that is will fail horribly... why? Just read recent Letter to Lisa Jackson (head of EPA)
The problem is that is will fail horribly... why? Just read recent Letter to Lisa Jackson (head of EPA)
Recently CCS has been critiqued by scientists and engineers from Harvard, Georgia Tech, University of South Carolina, and Dillard University, calling themselves the Environmental Justice and Science Initiative. In April 2011, 18 members of the Initiative signed a long letter to Lisa Jackson, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) opposing the PurGen proposal in Linden and spelling out a host of technical concerns about CCS.
The Jackson letter makes some of the following points, among others:
- Every dollar spent on CCS is a dollar that can't be invested in a modern energy system based on maximum efficiency and renewables. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that a CCS system large enough to manage 20 percent of global CO2 emissions in 2050 would cost $45 trillion. And sooner or later, we'll run out of affordable fossil fuels, so eventually we'll have to pay to develop renewables anyway. Why not skip the costly, experimental CO2 burial stage and go for efficiency and renewables now?
- A CCS industry large enough to make a real difference in global warming would have to be enormous. Burying one-eighth of global CO2 emissions today would require an infrastructure the size of the global petroleum industry.
- CCS only buries CO2 and does not address the other health or environmental effects from mining, transport, processing or burning of fossil fuels.
- A CCS system requires large amounts of energy to operate. When equipped with CCS, an industrial plant requires 25 percent to 40 percent more fossil fuel than the same plant without CCS. In other words, for every four power plants fitted with CCS, we'd need a fifth plant just to run all the CCS equipment. This large "energy penalty" for CCS contributes to high costs, excessive wastes, and more human disease from mining and burning fossil fuels.
- An industrial philosophy that promotes wasteful technologies violates the principles of both green chemistry and green engineering.