I wonder what "we" know. American Electric Power CEO Mike Morris said his company could prove that CCS fitted to a full scale coal fired plant will be "clearly cheaper than new nuclear, clearly cheaper than sun and wind". He was speaking to Public Radio International's Living on Earth radio show on July 22 2011. Audio and transcript here <http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=11-P13-00029&segmentID=1>.
He mentioned shale gas combined cycle units as the only ones that could produce power more cheaply. But those plants would emit more CO2. His interviewer mentioned that AEPs "operators have demonstrated" their Mountaineer pilot plant "can remove 90 percent of the plant's CO2 emissions". Morris was confident and ready to build at full scale. * Except for one thing*. *His regulator would not allow him to recover one dime of the cost *of removing CO2 from the exhaust because there is no requirement to produce low CO2 power mandated by government. "We were strong proponents of Waxman-Markey in the House, but we just couldn't get it over the finish line". "Society - American society - needs to decide that's the way they want to go". He summed up the cost factor this way: "there is the impact of running this machine, which we were always targeting at 10 to 15 percent, what's called a parasitic impact, meaning you lose about 10 or 15 percent of the kilowatt hours you could put on the system by running the machines that capture and store the carbon. If that power plant makes energy at five cents, it might make it at seven cents with this technology". His plan was for his company to also profit selling the technology to other companies: "the whole concept of being able to duplicate this technology and install it elsewhere is part of what we're doing. Once its demonstrated, others will come flying to the technology and that's my point. It is not inexpensive. *But it is doable*". What Morris says American Electric Power has done is right in line with what the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage <http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srccs/srccs_wholereport.pdf>explained was possible back in 2005. On Sunday, October 5, 2014 9:57:55 AM UTC-7, Greg Rau wrote: > > What happens if full scale demonstrations of CCS simply confirm what we > know so far - that CCS is too expensive in most applications > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
