Have you been feeling a little cynical about the โclean coalโ lobby’s claims that we can simply and neatly bury our greenhouse gas emissions and forget aboutย them?
A comprehensive, in-depth report was released yesterday by Greenpeace International called โFalse Hope: Why Carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate.โ The bottom line, as I’ve written here on DeSmog before, is that the timeline is just too long for Carbon Capture and Sequestration to have the desired affect on greenhouse gasย emissions.
The likeliest year we will see any commercially viable CCS will be 2030. And that’s pie in the sky according to Oil-giant Shell who โdoesn’t foresee CCS being in widespread use untilย 2050.โ
Here’s some of the facts from the Greenpeace report, these make great crib notes sheet when you’re out and about in the โclean coalโ blogosphere:
CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change.
The earliest possibility for deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected before 2030. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not expect CCS to be commercially viable until at leastย 2050.
CCS wastes energy
The technology uses between 10 and 40% of the energy produced by a power station. Wide scale adoption of CCS is expected to erase the efficiency gains of the last 50 years and increase energy consumption by one-third.
CCS is expensive
It could lead to the doubling of plant costs, and an electricity price increase ofย 21-91%.
โCapture Readyโ coal plants is greenwash
CCS is being used as an excuse by power companies and utilities to push ahead with plans to build new coal-fired power plants branding them as โcapture ready.โ Promises to retrofit are unlikely to be kept. Retrofits are very expensive and can carry such high efficiency losses that the plants becomeย uneconomical.
Storing carbon underground can have unintended consequences
The world has no experience in the long term storage of anything, let alone CO2. A 2006 United State Geological Survey (USGS) filed experiment showed there is every chance that carbon dioxide will behave in ways that are totally unexpected. The researchers were surprised when the buried C02 dissolved large amounts of the surrounding minerals responsible for keeping itย contained.
CCS is environmentally risky
Environmental risksย include:
- Reservoir leakage: the slow long-term release of C02 from storageย sites
- Sudden catastrophic leakage (remember when 1,700 were killed at Lake Nyos, Cameroon inย 1986?)
- Escape of C02 and associated substances into shallowย groundwater
The full report and the executive summary areย attached.
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