Every credible plan to save humanity from global warming reserves a key role for a green energy technology called carbon capture and storage (CCS).
However, there is a problem: No one has figured out a viable way to pay for it.
Usually just called CCS, the technology can take carbon dioxide — the dominant greenhouse gas — from major pollution sources like power plants or steel mills and pump it deep underground, out of harm’s way.
Photo: Reuters
CCS is crucial to many scenarios — including from the UN’s climate science panel — for keeping global warming under 2oC, considered the redline for catastrophic climate impacts.
However, despite decades of testing, only a handful of the projects are actually in service.
One of the main reasons, experts say, is a very hefty price tag that has kept nervous investors at bay.
“There are 22 large-scale [CCS] operations in the world,” said Isabelle Czernichowski-Lauriol, president emeritus of CO2GeoNet, a European research network.
“We need to have over 1,000,” she said. “There has been a delay in regards to what was expected, but it has mostly been due to the lack of an economic model.”
Catching, transporting and storing just a fraction of the world’s carbon emissions would require the construction of a massive new industry.
CCS works by compressing gaseous carbon dioxide into a liquid form and pumping it into the ground.
Scientist and analyst Vaclav Smil, a respected voice on environmental and energy matters, has calculated that a CCS infrastructure — to capture and store 20 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — would need a capacity 70 percent larger than the petroleum flow handled by the global crude oil industry.
The scale of effort needed for any substantial reduction of emissions and the operating costs “combine to guarantee very slow progress,” he wrote.
At the moment, Canada’s Boundary Dam power station in Saskatchewan is the world’s only commercial-scale coal-fired power plant that uses carbon capture to keep its emissions out of the air.
It is designed to grab 90 percent of the plant’s carbon dioxide gases — the equivalent of the pollution from 250,000 cars — which are then sold and pumped to nearby facilities for use in squeezing oil out of the ground.
Sale of the gas provides extra revenue for the station, which cost C$1.5 billion (US$1.12 billion) to build. About one-sixth came from government subsidies.
“Cost is one of the main barriers to CCS,” London School of Economics and Political Science policy analyst Samuela Bassi said. “Building these plants is expensive.”
Adding carbon capture technology to coal-fired power plants pushes up their cost by between 40 and 80 percent, and by up to 50 percent for natural gas-burning stations.
One reason carbon capture is so expensive is the technology is relatively new as a climate change solution — about a decade old — and some of the projects are one-of-a-kind.
A developing technology without a proven, viable business model is also seen as risky by investors, driving up the cost of borrowing money, analysts said.
Further handicapping CCS, a lot of government subsidies — and regulatory support — are going to competing technologies such as wind and solar.
“For CCS, you don’t yet have this type of system in place, except in the UK,” Bassi said. “But in the rest of the world you don’t have that kind of economic support.”
Analysts say the cost of CCS-equipped power plants will come down significantly as more projects get built and the technology is refined.
However, just two carbon capture-equipped, industrial-scale power plants — both in the US — are due to come online next year, and there are a dearth of big projects on the drawing board.
There are 22 large-scale CCS projects that are either in operation or are slated to be up and running by 2017.
Another 23 big projects currently in various stages of development are “maybes,” according to a spokesman for the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, an industry group.
That total number of industrial-scale projects — 45 — is an 18 percent decrease over the 55 listed in the institute’s report for last year.
EU targets have called for the equivalent of 11 large-scale, CCS-equipped power plants by 2030, which would cost up to 35 billion euros (US$40 billion), according to the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
So far 1.3 billion euros in public funds have been, or are being, spent on developing these projects.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
US CONSCULTANT: The US Department of Commerce’s Ursula Burns is a rarely seen US government consultant to be put forward to sit on the board, nominated as an independent director Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday nominated 10 candidates for its new board of directors, including Ursula Burns from the US Department of Commerce. It is rare that TSMC has nominated a US government consultant to sit on its board. Burns was nominated as one of seven independent directors. She is vice chair of the department’s Advisory Council on Supply Chain Competitiveness. Burns is to stand for election at TSMC’s annual shareholders’ meeting on June 4 along with the rest of the candidates. TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) was not on the list after in December last