Abby L. Harvey
GHG Daily
2/4/2016
Much of the developing world lives in energy poverty, and governments are likely to use fossil energy if it can help solve that challenge, a senior DOE official said Wednesday. For this reason it is imperative that carbon capture and storage technology advance, Melanie Kenderdine, director of the DOE’s Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis, said at an event hosted by The Atlantic Council.
“We really need carbon capture and sequestration to address some of the equity issues … because people in the rest of the world want electricity and have coal and are going to use it, and it behooves us to make that more efficient and cleaner,” she said.
However, carbon capture and storage is not without problems, Kenderdine explained, noting, for example, the large amounts of water required to run a CCS plant due more intense cooling and make-up requirements. “Carbon capture technology uses 40 percent more water consumption in general than without carbon capture,” she said. “It varies by generation technology. Pulverized coal is not surprisingly the highest.”
While the continued, and in some places increased, use of fossil energy to some seems to contradict international pledges to address climate change, it must be understood that climate change is not the only energy-related concern for most countries, David Eyton, BP’s head of technology, said during the event.
“[Climate change] is a very important thing, but in Europe there’s a strong energy security flavor, just for example, and so the governments want energy to be sustainable, they want it to be affordable, and they want it to be secure. They’re trying to balance at least those three different forces and the reality is that there is no quick or easy solution to that right now, and the existing fossil fuel system provides a lot of it,” Eyton said.
For the world to move away from fossil energy, new technologies must be developed that fill the needs that fossil energy addresses so well. “Technology would accelerate that [low-carbon] future. So I think our job, as energy players, whichever your source is, is to try and do what we do as well as we possibly can, as efficiently as we possibly can, so that along the way there is the minimum possible detriment,” Eyton said.
