Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

This is my shout out to everyone back in SANC have fun with your T-shirt making today but here’s my early Christmas present for you, a piece on CCS. I found it very interesting how most of the panelist who presented were pretty doubtful of CCS even though most of them are devoted to the field in one way or another. As I was lucky enough to get a chance to meet up with Jennie Stephens, one of the presenters and a professor at Clark University, and talk with her a bit on SANC’s stance with CCS.

CCS in Industrialized Nations- It was interesting to find that much of the promotion of CCS is very recent stemming largely from 2005 when it was included as a possible mitigation strategy in the IPCC report. However they agreed with much of the research we had done in SANC that there is almost no evidence of CCS currently working as a mitigation strategy. They also mentioned some of the various technologies CCS can emcompass but really only the first one is being widely pursued:
-CCS with large combustions centers (AKA coal plants)
-CCS used with hydrogen fuel cells to create a cleaner transportation sector
-BECCS or using CCS along with biofuels to create negative carbon emissions
-direct draw-down of CO2 from the atmosphere

Positions on CCS
1) Enthusiasts- Argue we need to pursue all mitigation technologies
2) Reluctants- Believe there really isn’t anyway to avoid CCS so we might as well do it
3) Critics- Argue CCS is a dangerous distraction keeping us away from a clean energy future (guess where I fall)

CCS and the Public- CCS is a unique case because it has been widely promoted and claims are made before any of the proof that it works has been demonstrated. There also is a large gap between the international CCS community and public discourse. This is a major problem because CCS involves large investment (most likely need some funding from the public sector) and community acceptance of CCS technology. The only way to correct this is to provide more transparency on CCS projects and not hide any negative results, so that the public can fully understand the issue.

Economics of CCS- CCS is a heavy technology involving much capital investments in large-scale projects. The presenters also argued that the price of carbon is more important in driving CCS technology development because the high the price of carbon gets the quicker technology will be pursued. CCS simply is a very risk investment because we don’t know how effective the technology will become or more important how quickly it will develop. They proposed that some countries have already put much blind faith in CCS and will likely invest much public funding to support this because they believe it to be a necessary step even though we have no evidence of that. (ie the US)

CCS and Fossil Fuel Lock-In- One of the most critical aspects of CCS is that it is strongly coupled with fossil fuels and one of the main ways to keep the fossil fuel economy alive. Not to bash on our old New Haven inventors but in many ways I would say CCS is equivalent to cotton gin's relationship to slavery. One way to decouple CCS from fossil fuels is BECCS or CCS with biofuels but as mentioned in previous posts biofuels have their own issues.

-one of my favorite quotes from the presentation was, “CCS shouldn’t be included into our carbon mitigation strategies because we are likely to look back 50 years from now and regret all the time wasted on CCS development”.

Talk with Jen Stephens- She had made the argument that CCS research needed to be more transparent to gain any public trust. When I talked with her afterwards she stressed how many NGOs were having a difficult time creating a stance on CCS. Overall she agreed that CCS is being framed in many national policies as an essential transition energy but you simply cannot ignore the huge amount of research and capital that will need to be paid for in part by the public sector when we already know that alternative energy is much more desirable for carbon mitigation.