Demonstrated success dwarfed by carbon dioxide emission problem's immensity

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation’s organization that has been studying global warming, released a report in September 2005 on CO2 emissions. Worldwide a total of 7,887 industrial facilities each emitted a total of 100,000 metric tons or more of CO2 that, combined, generated 13.46 billion metric tons, according to the report.

According to the IPCC report, there were 4,942 power plants worldwide that emitted a total of 10.53 billion metric tons.

The immensity of the problem dwarfed AEP’s brief two-year experience, which demonstrated that the infrastructure needed to capture and bury even 10% of all the CO2 worldwide would be massive.

As time passed some of the stark numbers involved with developing and commercializing CCS may have led to pessimism among some who initially supported the technology.

There was a telling exchange of opinions in a July television program between Bruce Nilles, Sierra Club’s national coal campaign director, and Evan Tracey, vice president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, in which support for CCS seemed to have undergone a reversal.

Tracey said industry wants CCS but because Congress did not pass cap-and-trade “there is no incentive, on the company’s standpoint, to just go ahead to do this.”

The Sierra Club’s Nilles referred, however, to CCS as "a pipe dream." He said AEP had pulled out “because it was too expensive. We can’t afford it. It would double electricity prices.”

Nilles said, “There is not a single home in America powered by a coal plant that captures carbon,” and he suggested that there is no logical or practical way to capture or bury or even use all the CO2 that needs to be captured to make a dent in what is emitted.

Instead, the Sierra Club official said he believes CCS is being pushed by the coal industry to keep the industry alive, when, in fact, the environmental group believes coal should no longer be used to generate electricity.

Doubts and questions

As the US government with its $3.8 billion in CCS stimulus funding pushes forward on what it hopes will be five to 10 commercial CCS demonstration projects online by 2016, the private sector is now being pressured to get involved (See related story: CCS projects come and go; enhanced oil recovery plays a role.)

The universe of possible investors in CCS, however, is currently limited to the US government and to those who would directly benefit -- coal and power companies and equipment manufacturers. Financial groups have thus far been noticeably absent because of the lack of projected returns from most CCS projects.

More broadly, there are questions not only about the high cost of projects but also about what is seen as the immaturity of the technology, and whether and over what time period CCS can be made to work on a large enough scale as a partial solution to global warming.

Analysts have argued in recent reports that CCS is a “crucial technology” for meeting “aggressive, long-term climate policy objectives,” but as Robert LaCount, senior director of climate change and clean energy at IHS CERA, recently wrote, “Lower natural gas prices, technical and regulatory questions for CO2 storage, and an uncertain climate-change policy environment, are at the core of CCS' challenges."

According to another IHS CERA analyst, Michael Arne, the CO2 scrubbing technologies currently moving through demonstration are “very expensive” and, he said, “it is hard to see how to significantly bring down their cost."

There are promising CCS approaches on the drawing board, but they are “at least 10 years away,” Arne said.

The CCS concept has been around for almost 15 years. Norway’s Statoil has been operating a CCS project in its Sleipner West natural gas field in the North Sea since October 1996. More recently, Statoil postponed development of an onshore project at Mongstad because of a need for more research on the effects on health of amine technology.

CCS’ biggest boosters

Since CCS is crucial but does not generate revenue and thus cannot pay for itself, it is precisely the type of investment that governments should nurture, some in the industry would argue.

The US Department of Energy launched its Carbon Sequestration Program in 1997. The program is implemented by the National Energy Technology Laboratory within DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy.

The Office of Fossil Energy is currently cooperating with 13 different countries through bilateral agreements to identify areas of collaboration in promoting and developing fossil energy technologies.

On August 25, the DOE said it would invest $41 million over three years in 16 projects that it said were aimed at developing advanced post-combustion CCS technologies. DOE said the projects are to focus on “reducing the energy and cost penalties” associated with using currently available CCS technologies.

In late 2007, the IPCC called for a reduction of global greenhouse gases by 50% to 80% by 2050 “to avoid dramatic consequences of global warming.” It said, “Scenarios from the International Energy Agency indicate that the potential for reduced CO2 emissions through enhanced energy efficiency and increased renewable energy production is limited.”

According to the IPCC, a delay in CO2 emission reductions “can lead to dramatic consequences, and a new strategy for reducing CO2 emissions as soon as possible is required.”

It said, “CO2 Capture and Storage is a technology with potential for large reductions in CO2-emissions within 10 to 20 years. Therefore, the strategy for reducing global CO2-emissions must be a combination of (1) increased energy efficiency, (2) more renewable energy production and (3) a wide implementation of CCS.”

By establishing “stronger incentives favoring energy efficiency and renewable energy and by ensuring wide deployment of CCS, global CO2 emissions can be reduced by approximately 70% by 2050 compared to emissions today,” the IPCC said.

Under the Bush administration, the DOE launched its FutureGen project based on the idea that “clean coal” technology could be developed, such as integrated gasification combined-cycle facilities, or IGCC, that could also be designed with CCS capacity.

As initially designed, the FutureGen project never got the necessary backing from the private sector. The Obama administration’s DOE recruited backers from the coal industry and scaled down the project.

When the Obama administration came into office, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as the stimulus package, which allocated the $3.8 billion for CCS. The Obama administration also set up a multi-agency CCS task force in the White House.

In June 2009, the US House of Representatives approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act, otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey Bill.

That bill, never approved by the Senate, set a 2025 deadline for the installation of 4,000 MW of installed CCS at coal-fired facilities to help cut CO2 emissions.

Drafters of the bill also hoped to see a price on CO2 by 2020, believing that only if there is a price on carbon would developers be motivated to build CCS projects.

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