Renew On Line (UK) 56

Extracts from NATTA's journal
Renew, issue 156 July-Aug 2005

5. Carbon storage ‘within a decade’

Dr Jon Gibbins, on behalf of 10 other academic members of the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Consortium, wrote to the Financial Times in March claiming that, far from carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies for fossil fuels being a long way off, 'commercial coal and gas power plants that operate at high efficiency and capture 80-90% of the CO2  produced and store it deep underground could be deployed extensively in the next decade’. 

They suggested that this would provide ‘flexible generating capacity to complement fluctuating output from renewable sources and could also be fuelled partly by biomass where available’. They added ‘extra electricity cost compared to fossil power without capture would arguably be acceptable provided there are some reasonable prospects of a benefit’. 

They went on  ‘Carbon capture and storage options are probably critical here to accommodate China and India, which are relying on indigenous coal reserves to fuel their development. CCS may form an essential part of a portfolio of carbon abatement techniques for these key developing economies, particularly if the large numbers of new coal plants being built are designed so that CO2  capture can be added later’. 

They concluded ‘Globally, CCS offers a “bridging” option to help limit CO2  emissions to environmentally acceptable levels while we make the socially and economically challenging transition from our current near-total dependence on fossil fuels to the long-term future when these will be unavailable’. 

www.ft.com/carbon

*  Carbon trading prices under the new EU Emission Trading System reached £6.23 a tonne during the cold snap in the EU earlier this year. So maybe the large cost of CCS can be faced?

For a useful POST briefing on CCS see: www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/POSTpn238.pdf

And for the governments new £40m Carbon Abatement Technology Strategy see www.dti.gov.uk