The “Economist” looks at the difficult future of carbon capture and storage technology. The folks at the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a PR front group for the coal industry, are working hard to get us to believe that coal can be clean. Their funders want us to believe it so badly that they have supplied tens of millions of dollars to run commercials on network television during the news hours, the Super Bowl, and presidential debates; ACCCE has launch an aggressive online advertising campaign on news websites, Gmail sidebars and through Google Adworks that all lead you to their website AmericasPower.org. The website’s latest tag lines borrow from the Obama campaign saying (I’m paraphrasing) “‘Yes We Can’ capture carbon from coal plants”.
I used to not understand what they meant by ‘clean coal’. It certainly doesn’t exist so what do they even mean? I thought their whole goal was just to put the words ‘clean’ and ‘coal’ together in the media so many times that people just associated the two automatically. I still think this is a large part of their strategy however, more and more, I’ve noticed that the noxious phrase that I loathe to repeat is being tied specifically to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).
While there are many reasons to believe CCS at best 15 or so years away and at worst a complete false solution, a lot of the criticism of the experimental technology originally came from environmental groups but now is coming from economists and the economy itself. In the March 5th, 2009 edition of the Economist takes a good look at the issue saying:
Unfortunately for the coal industry’s PR front group all they really have to push is alliteration, unfortunately for us they have tens of millions to do it. Fortunately for us, we have reality on our side, whereas they live in a fantasy world as their VP Joe Lucas pointed out so delicately. The Economist article “Trouble In Store” delves into facts about the finances of carbon capture (emphasis mine):
The problem with CCS is the cost. The chemical steps in the capture consume energy, as do the compression and transport of the carbon dioxide. That will use up a quarter or more of the output of a power station fitted with CCS, according to most estimates…Estimates of the total cost vary widely. America’s government, which had vowed to build a prototype plant called FutureGen in partnership with several big resources firms, scrapped the project last year after the projected cost rose to $1.8 billion…Analysts assume that the price of emissions will rise, as governments impose tighter restrictions, and that the price of CCS will fall, as engineers learn how to do it more cheaply…But these estimates entail some generous assumptions.
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