There was a big drive towards carbon capture and storage or CCS ten years ago but it slowed to a crawl. It is very expensive and it is experimental. Many people are suspicious of the storage deep in the earth or in the deep ocean.
This is carbon capture
This is storage or sequestering:
Here's what some very knowledgable people said about CCS in 2008 for the
Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental consulting site. Five people give their opinion, a politician, an environmental leader, a SunCo CCS spokesperson, Sierra Club spokesperson, a strong advocate of CCS,
Basically they all agree that without carbon capture we cannot continue to use coal. But it is really untested on a large scale and no one can guarantee the absolute safety of the storage deep in the earth or in the deep ocean.
The UN is for CCS in April 2014
A U.N. climate report says we’ll overshoot greenhouse gas targets, and will need new technologies to make up for it.
The second is an approach called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. This involves growing trees and other biomass, burning it to generate electricity, and then capturing the carbon dioxide this releases and storing it underground. In theory, this could reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. But the scale of this approach could be limited in practice; it may be hard to generate large amounts of electricity using trees without causing major deforestation. And carbon capture and sequestration technology has not been proven at a large scale (see “What Carbon Capture Can’t Do” and “Capturing and Storing Carbon Dioxide in One Easy Step”).
Burning biomass for energy has its problems. There are almost a dozen plants in British Columbia alone. They not only burn wood waste they burn other things and that is a big problem. There is a biomass plant burning in Port Angeles, WA across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, 24/7 and on some days we can see the pollution from Victoria BC, two kilometres away.
Science News on CCS in August 22, 2014.
Carbon Capture and Storage finally approaching debut
So far, CO2 storage in the United States has been tried only on an experimental basis. In March, the EPA issued its first-ever draft permit for the type of well needed for long-term CO2 storage. The so-called class VI permit went to FutureGen, the group planning the CCS project in Illinois that is slated to open in 2017. The plan is to store the carbon in a saline aquifer 48 kilometers from the power plant and more than 1,200 meters belowground. FutureGen worked closely with the EPA to lay out careful plans to inject, seal and monitor the 1.1 million metric tons of CO2 it plans to sequester each year. “Our objective is to prove that there are off-the-shelf technologies,” says FutureGen’s lead geologist Tyler Gilmore, who hopes the project will be a model for CCS.
CCS is well out of the gate. Now, Humphreys says, it just needs to cross the finish line.
It's here! The first CCS $1.4 Bn plant opens in Saskatchewan, October 2, 2014.
SaskPower unveils world’s first carbon capture coal plant
Cenovus has for years been using CO2 piped up from North Dakota to boost production at its aging oil field, and scientists from around the world have studied that project to determine whether the gas would indeed remain sequestered. Now, SaskPower is pioneering the use of a solvent-based capture process at an operating coal plant in order to demonstrate its effectiveness. The Boundary Dam plant is expected to capture one million tonnes of CO2 annually – the equivalent of emissions from 250,000 cars.
They do not reveal where Cenovus will put the captured carbon in the press release. It's on Sask Power's website.
Boundary Dam Carbon Capture Protject
The captured CO2 will be transported by pipeline to nearby oil fields in southern Saskatchewan where it will be used for enhanced oil recovery. CO2 not used for enhanced oil recovery will be stored in the Aquistore Project.
[It will be transported by pipeline to] an injection point located on SaskPower property approximately 2 kilometres west of the Boundary Dam Power Station. The CO2 will be injected 3.4 kilometres underground into the Deadwood Sandstone Formation which is below the Williston Basin, a sedimentary basin that is made up of many layers porous and non-porous rocks.
That's the short story on Carbon Capture and Storage. SaskPower, a provincially owned power company has made a $1.4 Bn bet that it will work and that it will significantly reduce green house gases.
What do you think?