Next Generation Energy

Ubiquitous consultants McKinsey and Company have just released a report on the technology that predicts it could actually pay for itself "if obstacles to the technology are removed and polluters are forced to pay more to emit CO2 in cap and trade schemes."

...early full-scale CCS projects are expected to cost in the range of 35 to 50 euros per tonne CO2 abated. With opertaing experience and scale effects, it is estimated that these costs can drop to 30 to 45 euros per tonne CO2 abated by 2030. Cost at these levels would make such CCS installations economically self-sustaining at a carbon price of 30-48 euroes per tonne CO2 as forecasted by various financial institutions. There is potential for even lower costs if a global roll-out of CCS takes hold, of is some breakthrough technologies, now still in the laboratory stage, emerge.

The report goes on to note that early demonstration projects will cost two to three times as much. Retrofitting, meanwhile, will cost a lot more than incorporating CCS into future plants. So even in a best case, no-global-financial-crises-at-play scenario, CCS will only make economic sense if it's heavily subsidized until 2030. And that's the good news.

The bad news is, the McKinsey numbers assume CCS plants can capture and permanently sequester 90 percent of the CO2 coming out of smokestacks. But until just a couple of weeks ago, we had no idea whether that was even remotely feasible. Which brings us to a new paper in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control.

"Life cycle assessment of a pulverized coal power plant with post-combustion capture, transport and storage of CO2" appears in the latest issue of the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control. The authors, a trio of researchers from the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development and Innovation in The Netherlands, set out to detail as best they could, given the lack of a working history of the technology, "a full-chain perspective, from cradle to grave, to assess whether and to what extent the implementation of CCS will increase environmental impacts."

They compared one of the most promising candidate technologies, which uses monoethanolamine, a molecule that can absorb CO2 given the right environment, with a standard "sub-critical" coal-fired plant the likes of which dominate the industry today, and a "super-critical" plant, which uses high-temperature furnaces that are only now being introduced around the world.

First, they say, capturing all that carbon dioxide, compressing, transporting and burying it might, if you're lucky, net you a reduction of 71 to 78 % in greenhouse gases, compared to today's coal-fired plants. That's short of the 90 % conventional goal, and even farther from the 100% reduction that popular understanding associates with the process, and it still leaves us with a significant emissions problem. You could, in theory, use clean power from CCS plants to cover all phases of the process, but that assumes that even transportation fuels are clean, and unless you're talking about plug-in tractors and electrified rail, that isn't really a fair assumption. Here's how Patrick Barry of Science News summarizes the problem:

Captured CO2 must be compressed to about 100 times atmospheric pressure (which takes energy), transported to a suitable underground reservoir (which takes energy) and pumped into the ground (which takes energy). A coal-fired power plant that sequesters its CO2 must burn about 30 percent more coal than conventional plants to cover these energy needs. And that extra coal must first be mined (which has environmental effects) and transported to the plant (which takes fuel) -- the list goes on and on.

Second, and just as worrisome, a conventional plant is actually easier on the environment in several other ways, most notably when it comes to "eutrophication, acidification and photochemical oxidation," which means water pollution, acid rain and ozone layer depletion. And none of this addresses the absurdity that is the coal industry's most offensive characteristic: mountaintop removal mining. I explored the issued further here.

So even in a perfect world, you'll have to increase the cost estimates in the McKinsey report by at least 30 percent. And that puts a competitive technology even further away than 2030. And you'll have other environmental problems to contend with, which will cost even more money to clean up. Why not just avoid all that hassle and expense, and give up on CCS for now? Sure, we can throw a few research dollars at the problem in the meantime, although it really should be up to the utilities to fund their own efforts to find a way to make running a coal-fired plant easy on the environment, no?

If you are willing to subsidize technologies, and direct the market toward clean energy sources, then it simply makes more economic sense to focus on solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and other genuinely clean and wholly renewable source of energy, rather than trying to salvage a technology that is fundamentally dirty. There is no such thing as clean coal, and even CCS can't put enough lipstick on that pig to make it look good.