It’s Too Late for Expensive Carbon Capture Technology to Help the Climate

New York Times - Allison Kole*

Despite decades of effort, carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power plants has yet to come close to offsetting the damage caused by coal and has created new hazards of its own. The term “clean coal” has always seemed like an oxymoron, and so it is no wonder that carbon capture, a technology touted by industry, has done little to clean up coal.

We cannot afford further investment in a pipe dream that distracts us from developing real solutions and technologies for climate change.

Yet policymakers, prodded by the coal industry, continue to invest money and precious time to try to develop carbon capture for coal-fired plants. The Department of Energy began developing carbon capture in 1997, and since 2008, Congress has allocated $7 billion for carbon capture programs. Still, no commercial-scale carbon capture power plant has gone online in the United States, and the long list of abandoned projects in the United States and abroad grows.
Carbon capture is an expensive technology requiring expansive new infrastructure. This includes potentially thousands of miles of pipeline for transporting captured carbon dioxide and maintenance and monitoring of storage sites to prevent leakage. Assuming such obstacles can be overcome, it is likely too late for carbon capture to be scaled up as needed to be an effective tool for combating climate change. To achieve meaningful carbon dioxide reductions, approximately 100 carbon capture projects must be online by 2020 and 3,000 by 2050. No carbon capture project has been able to capture the quantities of carbon dioxide promised.
Also, carbon capture investment is not a smart strategy for reducing carbon emissions. To recoup costs, some carbon capture power plant operators plan to sell carbon dioxide to oil companies to help them extract more oil. Also, because carbon capture reduces a coal plant’s efficiency, using carbon capture actually requires the use of more coal to produce the same amount of energy than a plant without carbon capture.
Putting costs, infrastructure issues and efficiency problems aside, the use of carbon capture to reduce carbon emissions ignores the harmful effects of coal on the environment and communities. Regardless of any reduction in carbon achieved, plants with carbon capture still release harmful air pollutants and produce polluting coal ash ponds. With or without carbon capture, the burning, storage and extraction of coal disproportionately affects poor communities and communities of color.
We cannot afford further investment in the carbon capture pipe dream that distracts the nation from developing real solutions and adaptive technologies for climate change. Our energy and environmental future should not be dictated by the narrow vision of the fading coal industry.

*Allison Kole is a senior legal fellow with the Climate Investigations Center.

Links

• Can Citizens Sue Over Climate Change?
• What's Holding Back Renewable Energy?
• Clean Coal, or a Dirty Shame?
• Technically Feasible, and It Can Be Financially Feasible