Can carbon capture and storage deliver on its promise?
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Energy Sector Analysis
Expense, newness, and perceived risk have bred uncertainty, resulting in diminished interest from the private sector and major setbacks.
Can carbon capture and storage deliver on its promise? By Prachi Patel Feature Editor Partow Pakdel Henriksen
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he W.A. Parish generating station 27 miles southwest of Houston is Texas’ largest coal-fired power plant. It also has the reputation of being one of the dirtiest in the United States. But in January 2017, it took a big step toward becoming one of the cleanest. The plant’s new Petra Nova facility began piping carbon dioxide from the plant’s exhaust to an oil field, where the gas is being used to force out more oil, and in the process being permanently stored underground. Petra Nova is designed to trap 90% of the carbon emissions from a 240 MW generating-capacity coal unit, sequestering 1.4 million tons of the gas annually. It is the largest carbon-capture retrofit at a coal plant. And while using CO2 for oil recovery isn’t the best solution to climate change, proponents are calling the facility a beacon for large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) since it came in on time and within budget. CCS, despite its association with coal, covers technologies to capture CO2 from a range of power and industrial processes, such as steelmaking and oil refining, and to transport it for storage in underground geological formations. High cost has been the technology’s Achilles heel. Simply put, it costs more for utilities and industry to trap and store emissions than to dump them into the atmosphere. But cost calculations typically don’t consider the true cost of fossil fuels, which benefit from hidden subsidies and burden society with long-term health costs due to pollution and carbon emissions. Expense, newness, and perceived risk of CSS have bred uncertainty, resulting in diminished interest from the private sector and major setbacks. The global financial crisis compounded the issue, prompting the cancellation of large projects, such as FutureGen in the United States and Vattenfall in Germany. The latest to be shelved was the UK’s USD$1.25 billion CCS Commercialization Programme in 2015. But the International Energy Agency (IEA) calls CCS a “sleeping giant” that needs to be awakened. As global fossil fuel use continues to grow, carbon capture could be critical for keeping average global temperatures from rising above the 2°C target set by the Paris accord. Switching completely to renewables will simply take too long. “To decarbonize our system, we’ll need a mix of renewables, nuclear, and fossil fuels with CCS,” said Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative. “Diverse systems are the most robust and costeffective. Having CCS in the arsenal will be very important.”
Petra Nova is one of several projects that prove CCS works. Scientists are developing new materials and methods for capturing CO2 to cut cost. Large-scale deployment will help gain more experience and boost confidence; cost also goes down with every new plant buil
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