http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121023/carbon-capture-and-storage-technology-wont-stop-climate-change
[links in on-line article]
Clean Coal Is a Pipe Dream. There's Only One Way to Stop Global Warming.
February 10, 2015
By Rebecca Leber
No matter what kind of action the U.S. or rest of the world takes on
climate change, we’ll continue to burn coal for decades. And we face
more than 2 degrees Celsius of warming (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and the
risk of unstoppable sea level rise, unless 80 percent of the world's
coal reserves remain in the ground. One of the ideas for mitigating
climate change, then, is removing carbon pollution from the air and
burying it deep underground. It’s called carbon capture and storage
(CCS), and the technology still has a long way to go before it's
feasible. CarbFix, a $10 million project in Iceland, is working on a
solution to one of the major challenges of this approach: How to make
sure the carbon stays in the ground.
According to a New York Times article Tuesday, CarbFix injects the gas
into water (25 tons of liquid per ton of gas) and pumps it into basalt,
a reactive rock that makes up 90 percent of Iceland's underground. Using
basalt speeds up a natural chemical reaction, which turns the carbon
into a harmless solid—a rock. But under natural circumstances, the
process can take centuries. Before that can happen, carbon would bubble
up to the surface, and leak into the atmosphere. CarbFix, though, is
studying how to speed up this process so it occurs in a matter of years.
What's unique about CarbFix's process is how it combines the gas with
water, an extra step that makes storage both more effective and more
expensive. Other forms of carbon storage condense carbon into a
liquid-type substance without water, leaving it more likely to escape to
the surface.
Proponents of the technology say that just like scrubbers "clean" coal
to lower sulfur and nitrogen emissions from power plants, carbon capture
can cut down on carbon emissions.
But even if CCS science develops, it likely won’t reach the kind of
scale—billions of tons of stored carbon—that's necessary to fight
climate change. The technology faces two major obstacles: Economic cost
and political indifference. It is extraordinarily expensive to capture
and store carbon. It not only requires power plants to install equipment
for capturing and transporting the carbon, but also necessitates huge
water reserves. Coal companies have no incentive to invest in the
technology on their own, when it’s inexpensive to let carbon escape into
the air. That’s why there are only a handful of large projects around
the world. The Times says CarbFix's method costs $17 per ton of carbon
dioxide, which is "about twice the cost of transporting and injecting
the gas alone."
Of course, regulation and the right policies can compel companies to do
this, too. For example, an aggressive tax on carbon—essentially fining
companies for polluting—would help to make CCS more appealing. The Obama
administration’s proposed regulations on power plants also require
future plants to invest in CCS technology to capture between 30 and 50
percent of their carbon emissions.
But investing in renewables and energy efficiency makes more sense than
mandating an unproven technology that doesn't solve long-term warming.
According to a report Tuesday from the National Research Council and
National Academy of Sciences, "most carbon dioxide removal strategies
have limited technical capacity, and absent some unforeseen
technological innovation, large-scale deployment would cost as much or
more than replacing fossil fuels with low carbon-emission energy
sources." When it comes to mitigating climate change, the report said,
"There is no substitute for dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas
emissions."
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