Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/19/2014
With coal set to remain a significant portion of the global energy mix well into the foreseeable future, carbon capture and storage can help solve both increasing energy demand and a need to reduce carbon emissions, experts said this week at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We need to find some kind of symbiotic relationship between these seemingly divergent requirements in our society for more and more abundant and lower cost electricity but also with attention to the need for environmental stewardship,” said Ben Yamagata, Executive Director of the Coal Utilization Research Council. “CO2 cannot be affectively addressed without carbon capture and sequestration.”
While it is not projected that new coal units will be built in the United States, the existing fleet is expected to be operational for decades to come and new plants are being built regularly around the world. “The world is making a huge commitment in this fixed infrastructure. We’re talking about 40 [percent] of the world’s electricity being generated from this type of fuel and I’m not counting in natural gas which is another big hunk,” said Bob Perciasepe, President of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “When you look at these fossil fuels, we’re probably in that 50 percent zone of the world’s electricity being generated from it for at least another several decades, which is getting us into the middle part of century, where we’re supposed to making some substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” Perciasepe said.
However, at its current stage of development, CCS is not ready to perform in the needed capacity, the panelists said. As the technology is still the early stage of maturity, with only one full-scale demonstration project currently operational on a coal plant, costs remain high. “The current status of carbon capture technology; it costs too much. We, at least, would argue that we haven’t integrated all of this. We’re getting there with Kemper and with Boundary Dam, but we haven’t integrated all of this technology,” Yamagata said, referring to the eventual large scale integration of all of the factors of CCS. While a large amount of knowledge exists about carbon capture, carbon storage and transport separately, the many facets of CCS have only just begun to be demonstrated on an integrated basis. “We know about it, but we haven’t integrated it into functioning commercial-size power systems. We’ll get there, but we’re not there yet,” Yamagata said.
Fighting Energy Poverty versus Fighting Climate Change
According to the International Energy Agency, over 1.3 billion people globally are without access to electricity. This presents a further conflict in the use of cheap high carbon fuel sources like coal, Perciasepe explained. “As a world, we’re trying to raise everybody’s standard of living and quality of life and in order to do that, there’s over a billion people on earth who do not have electricity. So, you have to think through, we have that other conflicting characteristic of our modern thinking in the world is that we want people to have a better quality of life. I think most of us would agree that … a quality of life in modern society includes having some electricity and so these conflicting or at least, let’s say mutually challenging, goals that we have as a planet to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions but at the same time try to grow the quality of life of all of our citizens on the planet is a very difficult contextual thing that we have to think about.”
