Following in the tracks of DeSmog again. So, the $1.8B carbon capture and storage commercial scale demo has fallen apart [archive] due to excess costs (or possibly other things: here is what they say; there seems to be some dispute over the siting. Since this is probably largely a boondoggle, which town gets the jobs is probably an important part of the project). This is bad news for all the people (including Hansen) who are counting on CCS to rescue us from our woes.
[Update, 2015: it hasn't got any less dead says Brian at Eli's.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Or so says reuters and a whole host of others repeating the same story. The source is draft ELECTRICITY GENERATION POLICY STATEMENT from the shouty Scottish government. You won't be surprised to hear that I don't believe a word of it (I've been pretty sniffy before), but lets read on. Oh, but first…
Clean coal - as in burning and capturing the CO2 - is an idea being floated. There are obvious problems (apart from anything else, the capture and storage costs extra energy and so burns even more coal...), and AFAIK only a few pilot schemes exist. So the story that a commercial-scale plant was…
Every corner of my regular morning stroll through the internet is littered with references to coal. One could say that coal is in the air. And it doesn't smell good. First, there's this depressing news from British Columbia:
Teck-Cominco's eye-popping, $14-billion purchase of Fording Canadian Coal…
The word from Canada's most rectangular province is that Saskatchewan could soon be home to North American's first "commercial-scale, coal-fired power plants that would produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions." The estimated $2 billion plant will capture its carbon dioxide and pump it into…
In the old days, there was this thing called "progressive commitment" in R&D organizations (like my old Bell Labs).
1) Research
2) Applied research
3) Exploratory development
4) Development
5) Scale-up and deployment
I don't know enough about this specific project to know, or about the current state of CCS in general, but I observe that nothing guarantees that any given project is the right one, and in particular, one must be really wary of building big projects (4 & 5) prematurely, even though people love to have them in their area.
I can think of 2 Bell Labs projects that managed to burn $1B each (back in the 1970s, when $1B was real money :-)) by disobeying progressive commitment rules.
Put another way, I can't tell whether this is:
a) An unfortunate cancellation of a project in 2) or 3), which would have been of great value in moving forward.
OR
b) A fortunate avoidance of a premature 4) or 5) that would have wasted a lot of money.
Can anyone comment?
any idea how much CO2 could have been offset with $1.8 billion CO2 offsets?
Isn't the IPCC itself counting on CCS for something like 25-30% of total emission reductions to get us all out of hot water?
It's bad news, I think, much worse than some geo-engineering scheme falling apart.
[I only read WGI, who don't have to care about CCS. At the moment, in the US, CCS is obviously non-economic, because releasing CO2 is free. I wonder what price CO2 permits in the EU would have to be to simply make up the extra fuel costs for CCS? -W]
From your link: projected cost overruns require a reassessment of FutureGen's design.
Just to look for hope and the bright side: maybe they will revaluate and end finishing the project after that? It is a very important project!
Dave Briggs :~)
Uhh, hello! Global warming is over. We can all go home now. A new meta analysis of famed groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil's long-winter/early-spring predictions indicate that climate change is reversing since George W Bush got into office. Now that's some good science. Check out the
data...http://republicanfiction.com
The call to reduce the use of coals is valid for western countries but unfortunately, coal statistics show developing economies are more likely to increase their use of coal in coming years because of its affordability and to meet increasing demands for electricity and steel for the coal industry. www.coalportal.com