The United States needs to ramp up investment and policy support for carbon capture and storage technology, according to Jay Faison, founder and CEO of the ClearPath Foundation, an organization with a mission to accelerate conservative clean energy solutions. “A constructive and conservative vision, which the DOE supports, would harness all of our nation’s energy resources, fossil fuels included. But like solar a decade ago, the most advanced forms of CCS still have a way to go before becoming commercially ready. Imagine where CCS could be if it received the same levels of dedicated support as renewables,” Faison wrote in an editorial published Thursday in The Hill.
In defending CCS as a clean energy option, Faison noted the support of influential international climate change experts. “The oft-touted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that a global climate solution would be 140 percent more expensive without CCS,” the editorial notes.
CCS can also play a role in addressing energy poverty, Faison wrote. More than 1 billion people currently live without access to electricity. Many of those them live in developing countries such as India, which in an effort to eradicate energy poverty has become the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, behind China and the United States.
“If the world moved the current average global efficiency rate of coal-fueled power plants from 33 to 40 percent through greater use of high-efficiency technologies, we would achieve the equivalent environmental benefit, every year, of reducing India’s carbon dioxide emissions to zero. The eventual deployment of CCS technologies on those advanced plants would only further the environmental benefits while building on existing, reliable, infrastructure,” Faison explained.
