CO2 sequestration not dead, Vattenfall energy company insists

Dec 6 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - dpa, Berlin

Despite the cancellation of a major project in Germany to seal carbon dioxide in the ground so that it does not worsen global warming, the technology is not dead, the head of a main energy company said in an interview published Tuesday.

Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) is one of the possible solutions under discussion this week at the Durban conference on climate change.

Instead of being emitted from the chimney from coal-fired power plants and cement works, the gas would be sequestered and injected into deep rock.

Swedish-owned Vattenfall Europe aborted Monday a 1.5-billion-euro (2.0-billion-dollar) plan to build a CCS plant by 2016 at its existing power station at Jaenschwalde, south-east of Berlin where lignite fuel is burned.

"The decision not to build the CCS demonstration plant does not mean we are abandoning the technology," said the company's chief executive, Tuomo Hatakka, as reported in the daily newspaper Die Welt.

"We are pushing ahead with research and development because we believe this anti-climate-change option is badly needed."

He said research on extracting carbon dioxide from chimney gas would continue at Vattenfall pilot plants in Germany, the Netherlands and Britain.

The European Union had committed a subsidy of 180 million euros to the Jaenschwalde project, which was to capture 1.7 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. But Vattenfall this week announced a corporate cost-cutting drive with the project as one casualty.

CCS has been hailed as an interim technology to cut emissions until the world is able to fully move towards renewable sources.

German geologists have identified exhausted natural gas wells and hundreds of other sites where layers of rock would form an impassable lid on top of the gas after it had been pressed into the earth's crust.

But Germany's state governments have obstructed a law to licence the technology after conservation groups claimed that the gas might seep out again. Hatakka accused the German government of a lack of "willpower" to apply EU-approved policies.