Carbon capture and storage

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is somewhat controversial, for two reasons, I think - one reasonable and one less so. The technology basically involves capturing emitted carbon from power plants and pumping it into geological reservoirs where it'll hopefully sit for... a while.

The reasonable reason to be skeptical about CCS is that we don't really know how well this will work. Will the carbon stay underground? Will it start leaking out? If so, how fast? Who knows?

My personal opinion is that that second, somewhat less reasonable reason, is that major supporters of climate action feel CCS is cheating. They view it as a dodge, a way to go on using bad coal to make power when the right thing to do is to commit to true renewables. As such, CCS is morally wrong. There is something to this in a sense. In the long term, what we need is to transition our energy systems, not find stopgaps that support the existing system.

However, that doesn't matter, because the thing is, coal's not going away. The equation goes like this:

1) Coal is bad. No, seriously, really bad.

2) But having no electricity is even more bad.

3) Energy needs in places like China are growing so quickly that even going gangbusters on true renewables won't eliminate the need to also build a bunch of new coal plants. China (and eventually others) will need to build both if it wants to meet its future electricity needs.

3) Therefore, if we don't find a way to make coal less bad, we're all screwed.

Without CCS, we lose. It doesn't matter whether we like the technology and the principle behind it or not. James Fallows wrote a fairly high profile article on this recently, but he merely popularized it; I've heard this story kicking around for at least a couple of years.

It's somewhat depressing, then, that I've seen two articles within the last couple of weeks on failures in major CCS projects. The Australian Zerogen project is apparently being abandoned, and the UK Powerfuel project went into administration through lack of funds.

On the plus side, there's one American project that still appears to be on track. And Fallows sees lots going on (and moving fast) with clean coal in China. So, as with renewables, perhaps we can hope for a convenient deus ex China.