FUTURE Act to advance clean energy through Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage
- PDF / 154,968 Bytes
- 1 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 34 Downloads / 206 Views
FUTURE Act to advance clean energy through Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage By Felicia Lucci
A
nalysts recently proposed an ambitious roadmap to maintain global temperatures within 2°C of preindustrial levels. To reach this goal, greenhouse gas emissions would need to be reduced by half every decade until 2050 (Science, doi:10.1126/science.aah3443). However, with greenhouse gas emissions increasing by 2.2% annually from 2000 to 2010, how economically feasible is it to mitigate global warming? Experts and analysts, including the International Energy Agency and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) specify the development of Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) technology to address CO2 emissions will be necessary to efficiently and economically achieve the greenhouse gas emissions target laid out in the Paris Climate Agreement. Currently, the United States receives 65% of its electricity from fossil fuels, which emits 5171 million metric tons of CO2 annually. Although renewable energy is steadily growing and predicted to account for 28% of global electricity production by 2021, it is anticipated that global energy consumption will increase faster than renewable energy growth. In reality, coal and naturalgas-fired power plants will be part of the electricity mix for the foreseeable future due to its relative abundance and affordability. Without CCUS technology, according to IPCC, it will cost USD$3.5 trillion more to decarbonize the power sector by mid-century. In the near term, CCUS can address CO2 emissions from point sources, including coal and natural-gas-fired electricity plants and industrial processes such as cement, steel, and chemical manufacturing. Eventually, CCUS, coupled with additional technologies, will be needed to achieve negative CO2 emissions by actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The inclusion of CCUS technologies on power plants requires large investments in capital equipment and increases
the operating cost of power plants while reducing the overall generation. Due to the added expense of CCUS—outside of generating revenue through limited enhanced oil recovery opportunities—no incentives are currently in place in the United States for utilities and industries to capture CO2 emissions. Without carbon regulations, it is simply less expensive to release CO2 into the air than to capture it. When considering the necessity to develop CCUS technology to address CO2 emissions in both the short and long term, policies are needed to incentivize investment in CCUS technology. CCUS is the only technology capable of removing CO2 emissions from point sources at a capturing capability of up to 90%. CCUS is a simple concept where CO2 is extracted from the emission of a stationary source and then transported to be either stored in secure geological formations or utilized in enhanced oil recovery or other industrial processes. From a technological viewpoint, each step is theoretically feasible and based on industrial practices. For example, capturing CO2 using an amine s
Data Loading...
