Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has the potential to cut global Co2 emissions dramatically. We’re talking huge cuts. It has been estimated that a plant implementing CCS can cut emissions by 80-90 percent compared with a plant that doesn’t use CCS. Sounds great, right? Well, there are some some problems.

Cost is the number one challenge that CCS faces. “Applying it would significantly increase the cost of electricity beyond what society is likely willing to pay,” said Sarah Forbes,  a World Resources Institute Senior Associate. Another challenge is that no fully integrated demonstrations have taken place. The pieces have been tested individually, but the entire puzzle is yet to be seen.

Forbes describes CCS and its current challenges in more detail:

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At a power plant at Lacq, energy company Total has upgraded an existing gas-fired boiler with CCS technology – a crucial step towards reducing carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants worldwide.

With renewable energy sources a long way from covering the world’s increasing demand for energy, many experts believe that developing reliable technology to allow countries to burn fossil fuels without releasing dangerous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

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Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will get a chance to prove itself next week at the 1,600 MW Schwarze Pumpe coal-fired power plant in Germany. The CCS demonstration will capture up to 100,000 tons of CO2 each year and bury it 3,000 m under a nearby gas field.

The scheme uses oxyfuel technology, which relies on burning coal in pure oxygen and CO2 instead of normal air. This results in a byproduct of almost pure CO2 that is bottled and pumped underground.

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The recent news that the demand for coal is climbing rapidly around the world has left many of us deeply unsettled. And a new study from Australian energy consultancy ACIL Talisman doesn’t make things sound any more cheery.

The company believes that clean coal technologies such as carbon capture and storage are unlikely to be commercially available before 2020 unless major technological breakthroughs occur in the very near future.

However, the firm predicts that both geothermal and concentrated solar will be in widespread commercial use by the 2020 target date. But none of these technologies can squelch the CO2 coming from the 40% increase in coal consumption expected by 2030.

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That’s how I felt, anyway, after getting off the phone following a conference call between Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) and environmental bloggers today. Kerry demonstrates a full and deep understanding of the challenges posed by global warming, but also makes it clear — without actually having to say it — how slowly and painstakingly the legislative process moves to address those challenges.

Kerry expressed confidence in the prospects of the current Lieberman-Warner proposal for a cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. He indicated cautious optimism that the next administration will enable law-makers to enact even stronger measures aimed at curbing climate change. He placed a lot of hope on the abilities of science, technology and business to develop solutions to challenges such as developing carbon capture and storage so we can burn coal cleanly.

Kerry also noted he and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D, CA) will be taking a delegation to Bali next month — for talks to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — "to make sure the U.S. is properly represented. We’re not going to let the stonewalling of this administration dominate." And he urged us to put steady, ongoing pressure on other legislators, especially moderates and those in states likely to feel the greatest impact of climate change, to make the right decisions.

It’s encouraging we’re taking steps toward addressing climate change. It’s also good to see we’re taking more and more of those steps each day, and speeding up our stride little by little. But still I’m left with a lingering concern that, despite all the well-informed and properly motivated leaders like Kerry, the gears of government are grinding too slowly to make meaningful action possible in the immediate future.

Kerry is more optimistic, and I hope he proves my fears unfounded.

"I think basically we’re on the brink of a very exciting era," he said. "We’re going to get some of these projects (such as carbon capture and storage) rolling. There are some very exciting concepts out there."

Despite agreement from almost all sides that CCS must be made commercial if the world can ever hope to meet its carbon-reduction targets, a full-scale system remains years away, largely because of the costs involved in its development. As a result, many leading power companies have been reluctant to fund CCS individually, arguing that governments should also shoulder some of the financial risks.

The UK government wants to fund a single demonstration plant using post-combustion capture technology and is running a competition to decide which new power station will get the go-ahead. Within the next few weeks, ministers are expected to announce proposals on how to fund further CCS projects in the UK beyond the competition.

But the British government’s procrastination has forced many CCS projects planned in the past decade to be abandoned or moved abroad. These include BP’s plans to build a carbon capture plant at Peterhead and Centrica’s Eston Grange project.

Haszledine also criticised the lack of research effort in the UK, saying just over £6m has been spent on CCS research in the UK in the past decade compared with $2bn to date in Canada, and annual spends of around £40m in Norway and several hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia. New CCS demonstration projects are due to start operating later this year in the United States and Australia.

At Lacq, Total has fitted one of the plant’s 30MW gas-fired boilers with oxyfuel technology, where the fossil fuel is burned in an atmosphere enriched with oxygen. The resulting exhaust gas is then composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide and water vapour, which can be easily separated and stored.

“Total needs to master this new technology,” said Luc de Marliave, climate change coordinator at the energy company. “Oxycombustion had never been tested at this scale in such an integrated CCS scheme.”

Philippe Paelinck of Alstom, the engineeering company that designed and built the CCS equipment at Lacq, said the experiment was an important milestone. “We first proved the feasibility of retrofitting an installation to carbon capture and storage, but also this will be the first demonstration in Europe of CCS with [existing] integrated CO2 pipeline transportation and storage.”

De Marliave said Total chose to test oxyfuel because it could potentially save costs in future. “Our calculations showed that, with oxycombustion in that type of application, you could reduce the cost of capture – which is a large part of the cost of the CCS chain – around two-thirds of the cost roughly. For just capture, existing post combustion technologies would cost you something like 70 euros per tonne of CO2. Oxycombustion could reduce this to 35 euros per tonne.”

Despite that, he said Total was still open to the investigating the other types of CCS technology, both pre- and post- combustion. “We are not set on one technology. We selected oxycombusiton for the pilot but it doesn’t mean that we are not very much interested in post-combustion as well.”

Plans for government-funded CCS demonstration plants across Europe have been moving slowly. The EU wants 12 demonstration plants in operation next decade and has reserved 300m carbon credits from the next stage of the European emissions trading scheme to help fund the technology.

In January, the European Commission proposed earmarking €1.25bn to kickstart carbon capture and storage (CCS) at 11 coal-fired plants across Europe, including four in Britain: the Kingsnorth plant in Kent, Longannet in Fife, Tilbury in Essex and Hatfield in Yorkshire would share €250m under the two-year scheme.

* Written by Alok Jha of the Guardian and published at EcoWorldly via the Guardian Environment Network.

Image credit: pfala via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.