Next Generation Energy

The goal of carbon capture and storage (CCS), also called carbon sequestration, is to take carbon dioxide that would have been emitted into the atmosphere from new or existing power plants (usually coal) and instead store it someplace, hopefully forever. It is an attractive idea across the political spectrum because it might allow us to continue using a major fossil fuel, but in a way that does not destroy the climate.

Unfortunately, CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role:

1. Cost: Coal plants with CCS are very expensive today. The total extra cost for this process, including geological storage in sealed underground sites, is currently quite high, $30 to $80 a ton of carbon dioxide, according to the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy, "Carbon Sequestration R&D Overview." In the future, it seems rather unlikely that CCS would be a low-cost solution. The modeling work done for the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) on how to comply with the AB32 law (California's Global Warming Solutions Act), online here puts the cost of coal gasification with carbon capture and storage at 16.9 cents per kWh. Energy efficiency along with lots of low-carbon generation sources beat that easily now or will very soon.


2. Timing: The world does not even have a single large-scale (300+ MW) coal plant with CCS anywhere in the world. The first moderate-sized (30 MW) pilot plant with CCS just started up this month in Germany. Earlier this year, President Bush dropped the mismanaged 'NeverGen' clean coal project. In the past year, most governments and most U.S. utilities have scaled back, delayed, or cancel their planned CCS projects. As Howard Herzog of MIT's Laboratory for Energy and the Environment said in Feburary "How can we expect to build hundreds of these plants when we're having so much trouble building the first one?"


3. Scale: We need to put in place a dozen or so clean energy "stabilization wedges" by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes, see "Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 1." 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.


4. 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.

The bottom line is that we should continue to pursue CCS research, development, and demonstration in a serious effort to turn this long-term strategy into a medium-term one. But efficiency, wind, solar PV, and baseload solar are where we should be placing the big deployment dollars right now (see "Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal's out, can't wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?")