Exuberance over Carbon Capture and Storage Ignores Time Frame for Deployment

Hiding something in the ground is an impulse known to man and dog alike. So it’s no wonder that humans, having realized that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could warm the planet catastrophically, are looking to bury the greenhouse gas deep underground.

In the last few months, that impulse has become super-charged as a result of accelerating government support around the world for CCS – carbon capture and sequestration – a technology that promises to capture CO2 emissions, inject it deep into porous rock and store it there forever.

In the U.S., the potential of CCS has been seized on as a solution to reducing global warming emissions in pending federal legislation.

Coal supporters are using it as an argument against forcing polluters to start paying for power plant emissions now. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) put it bluntly to Congressional Quarterly: “We want to see coal-fired utilities held harmless until such time as the [carbon capture and sequestration] technology is deployed.”

But conversations with scientists and experts reveal that deploying this technology on a wide scale is still at least two decades away in the best of circumstances.

That means, despite the excitement, CCS can’t be relied on in the near term as a climate policy solution.

There are not only scientific hurdles which will take years of testing to overcome, but also the financial, regulatory and legal obstacles that swirl around massive building projects of this kind, not to mention the hundreds of miles of new pipelines that will be needed to transport the carbon dioxide.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration annual outlook released this week stated:

“Coal-fired plants with CCS equipment have not been fully commercialized, and it is unclear when they might be and what they would cost.” 

The International Energy Agency released a report last fall stating that by 2020, at least 20 full-scale CCS projects would need to be fully functioning in order to make the technology cost-effective and reliable enough to foster widespread adoption in the following years. The report noted that so many of the current CCS programs were making such slow progress that:

“If these demonstration projects do not materialize in the near future, it will be impossible for CCS to make a meaningful contribution to GHG mitigation efforts by 2030.”

Right now, there are only four large-scale carbon capture and sequestration projects in operation worldwide – Sleipner and SnØhvit, off Norway's shore, Weyburn Project, a joint effort by Canada and the U.S.; and In Salah in Algeria. U.S. experts in the field say the earliest CCS could begin to be deployed on an industry-wide scale would be between 2026 and 2030 – and that’s only assuming there are no technological or permitting delays and full funding is available immediately.

World governments are beginning to lavish money on the development of CCS technology. The comprehensive new climate legislation announced in the U.S. House on Tuesday would allocate $10 billion for CCS development – on top of the $3.4 billion set aside for CCS demonstration projects in the stimulus package. The European Union has pledged more than €1 billion over two years to help 12 coal-fired power plants develop the technology to store their CO2 under the North Sea in old oil and gas fields.