CCS – JUST TOO EXPENSIVE

Cost Is Chief Barrier to ‘Clean Coal’
Kate Galbraith, March 9, 2009 (NY Times)

"At a forum in New York last week on carbon capture and sequestration — or C.C.S. — experts largely agreed that the technology was already available, but that the main obstacle was cost…

"Oil companies have been sequestering carbon dioxide in oil fields for several decades, in areas such as the Permian Basin in west Texas. The carbon dioxide, injected into the ground…helped to produce just over 10 percent of the barrels produced in the United States, and…more than 100 such projects across the country…produce oil with carbon dioxide."

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"The most expensive part of the carbon capture and storage process is not the storage, but the capturing…given certain technological assumptions, “Carbon prices must reach $100/tC [metric ton of carbon] in order for C.C.S. technologies to start being adopted by the power industry on a significant [five percent market penetration] scale…”

"By way of reference, at the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the only governmental group to put a price on carbon dioxide in this country, carbon dioxide emissions were sold for $3.38 a ton in December…"

Dirty is clean. Now you know the science. From CoalIsDirty via YouTube.

"The government is signaling that it may move forward in aiding the development of “clean coal” projects, as sequestration is known. Energy Secretary Steven Chu suggested recently that the FutureGen project — a demonstration plant for carbon capture and storage that was scuttled by the Bush administration due to high costs — could be revived.

"And the Environmental Protection Agency continues to work on its draft rule on regulating carbon capture and storage under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Though the E.P.A.’s scope is narrow (these regulations do not include liability, for example), a rule may be in place by early 2011…Environmental groups at the forum emphasized that while they’d like to see progress made on carbon sequestration, their general wish is to reduce and eventually eliminate dependence on coal."