Given the state of climate policy in Washington, one could be forgiven for thinking that carbon capture and storage, or CCS, had pretty much fallen off the global to-do list. CCS is shorthand for a host of technologies that promise to let us continue imbibing fossil fuels without the greenhouse gas hangover. Put simply, CCS works by nabbing CO2 from coal, gas, or oil — either before, during, or after the fuels are combusted — and diverting the greenhouse gases back into some sort of permanent storage, usually deep within the earth.
However exotic this may sound, technology probably isn’t the biggest hurdle that CCS faces. Engineers already rely on a variety of proven chemical processes to capture CO2, and in a small number of sites, are even pumping it into the earth. The bigger problem — as evidenced by Washington’s off-again, on-again efforts to build FutureGen, a pilot CCS facility — is of the sadly familiar chicken-and-egg variety. Sky-high costs preclude progress in CCS; yet the pricetag won’t fall until many more projects have been built.
It will cost hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of dollars to scale-up today’s pilot-scale approaches to handle the gargantuan emissions from our fossil fuel industries. Critics charge these costs up will be too enormous to bear; others say it’s unclear if the earth is even capable of storing all the CO2 it may need to.
So how to break this impasse? At a CCS conference in Pittsburgh last week, Lord Nicholas Stern emphasized that the answer is to accelerate public-private collaboration in CCS. Stern, who authored an influential report on the economic advantages of tackling climate change as soon as possible (Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, 2006), spoke at a meeting of the Global Carbon Capture and Sequestration Institute.
“About 50 percent of the world’s electricity is coal-based,” Stern said in an interview. “Given the intensity of emissions from coal, we have to be able to use coal in a clean way. Or we won’t be able to achieve the 50/50 chance of holding to 2 degree Celsisus of temperature rise [established in the Copenhagen agreement]. If we are going to be successful, there is no alternative.”
Stern acknowledged that plowing money into CCS can frustrate fans of renewable energy, who feel that public funds are better spent on wind, solar, and the like. “It’s absolutely not a conspiracy against renewables. We need everything here,” Stern said. CCS will be necessary in the coming decade, he explained, to retrofit existing coal plants and help bridge to a period when renewable energy sources and nuclear power can be built up to replace fossil-fuel infrastructure.
Efforts are further ahead in Europe than in the United States, Stern observed, given sustained public-private investment there. Earlier in May, the Dutch government announced plans to subsidize efforts to bury CO2. Worldwide, governments have committed about $16 billion for CCS projects, according to James D. Wolfensohn, ex-head of the World Bank, who also spoke at the conference. Although CCS policy remains dormant in the U.S., the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill includes billions in subsidies for technology development.
Stern emphasized that CCS efforts in the West are vital to helping shepherd China and India away from their dependence on coal and toward lower-carbon alternatives. “The power of the example is fundamental here. China looks to us in the rich countries to see how it will work,” Stern said, adding that given the pace of technological progress and investment in China’s power sector, the country is a vital partner for experimentation in these technologies. “I think ten years now from now, many CCS examples will be found there,” he added.
If and when CCS is to roll out on a large scale, a still tougher challenge awaits: public anxiety. After all, if windmills can stir firey opposition, imagine what massive subterranean stores of CO2 might stir up. In Holland, for example, Paul Voosen of Greenwire describes intense opposition to a proposal from the Dutch government and Royal Dutch Shell to stash 10 million tons of CO2 in depleted natural gas formations a mile or so beneath the town of Barendrecht, a suburb or Rotterdam.
In the U.S., federal and state regulators have taken nearly a decade to evaluate Cape Wind’s offshore project in Massachusetts or Verdant’s Power’s tidal power station in New York City’s East River. Even in the worst-case scenario, both pose relatively little environmental threat. How long might it take, then, for authorities to greenlight high volumes of CO2 injection near large population centers?
On a more optimistic note, Stern was surprisingly upbeat on the broader outlook for global climate policy in the wake of Copenhagen. Check out his take on the below-the-radar progress at Copenhagen, and what to expect at coming climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, this year and South Africa next year, starting at 17:50 in this video:
Watch live streaming video from globalccsinstitute at livestream.com
OnEarth contributor Adam Aston also blogs at GreenerGotham.com.
2010-05-20