Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
5/8/2015
PITTSBURGH, Pa.—The Department of Energy’s new Under Secretary for Science, Franklin Orr, stressed here last week the need for additional carbon capture, utilization and storage projects in the United States. . “We’ve actually been working on this for a while. … I think there’s really no question in all of our minds that we can capture CO2. We can put it into the subsurface, [and] store it more or less indefinably in well-chosen sites with well-engineered and well-operated projects. We can do that,” Orr said in remarks at the 14th Annual Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Conference. “We now need to demonstrate that we can do it at scale and then we need to deliver the scale that it will take to do that.”
Demonstration projects serve several important roles, Orr said, such as driving down technology costs and further proving the feasibility of the technology, potentially fostering increased support from the private sector. Until that time, however, government support is needed to see the technology through to maturity. “If you look across the spectrum of work that’s been supported by the Department of Energy, we’ve been actually working in some sense for a very long time and the real issue here is that we have to work on reductions in cost,” Orr said, explaining that a main focus of this effort will need to be on CO2 capture as it is by far the greatest cost in the CCS/CCUS process. “The underground injection of course is not free, but it’s a lower cost.”
Further, Orr explained, technology in its first generation is generally a hard sell for private investment, thus it is up to the government to provide support to these first-of-their-kind projects in an effort to lower the perceived risk for potential for future investors. “We need to be able demonstrate those technologies, partly it’s demonstrating that they work, but partly it’s demonstrating to the financial markets that the risk of these projects is manageable and that they don’t have to be the very first one that does what they’ll do as a risky project,” Orr said.