Carbon capture a step closer to absurdity
How viable is carbon capture and storage (CCS)? According to the CSIRO, CCS technology has moved a step closer. However, Julien Vincent has obtained the original draft report and associated documents which reveal a far more complex and troubling picture.
Back in March the CSIRO announced on their website that carbon capture technology had moved a step closer.
Apparently, a study of "post combustion capture", whereby carbon dioxide (CO2) is removed from the exhaust gas of a power station, had been technically proven at pilot scale. The report that this conclusion was based on was presented to the Government, but not made public.
Given that billions of dollars of Australian taxpayer's money has been allocated to carbon capture and storage for coal-fired electricity which, it's worth pointing out, still does not exist at a commercial scale, it is only fair that the public should see the fruits of this research into the technology.
Last week the CSIRO finally put the report on their website. However, I obtained through Australia's Freedom of Information laws a lot more documentation. The documents made the phrase "moving a step closer" really stretch the imagination. Here's what they revealed…
The first jaw dropper was the price tag. Installing this technology on just half of Australia's coal-fired power stations would cost $52 billion upfront and another $5 billion per year (PDF) in operating costs. This is excluding the additional cost of transporting, storing, and monitoring the CO2.
It seems as though the technology actually went backwards on the key benchmarks of cost and efficiency. Here's a table that compares figures from a 2008 CSIRO presentation looking at the cost of reducing CO2 emissions, generating power, and the efficiency of the technology with the results of this study.
|2008 Presentation||2012 Report|
|Cost to avoid carbon dioxide||$40-60 per tonne||$68-92 per tonne|
|Increase in cost of electricity||$30-50 per MWh||$54-63 per MWh|
|Loss in power generation efficiency||20-30%||29-30%|
But the most disturbing part of the report was how it treated the issue of the technology's own environmental emissions. This carbon capture process involves running a power station's exhaust gas through a liquid chemical solvent – usually an amine solution. The by-products created by this process include a number of pollutants, some of which are known to be carcinogenic.
But comparing the draft report to the final version, there were some significant differences in how this issue was discussed.
For example, a page of the draft report called "PCC [post-combustion capture] Environmental Impacts" was removed. Some of its text turned up in the final report under the more benignly titled "Solvent Management", while other sections of the text seem to have disappeared altogether. Here's an extract to illustrate what I'm talking about:
With results like these and the possibility of a new toxic threat created by this technology, it's no wonder the report was kept quiet so long.
This may just be one report and it may only look at one type of technology for capturing CO2, but over the past few years the more we learn about CCS, the less likely (and more expensive and dangerous) it appears.
Every attempt to build commercial scale coal-fired power stations with CCS has fallen over, with some significant examples including the US Mountaineer project, Logannet and Kingsnorth in the UK, Finncap in Finland and Australia's own ZeroGen
The CCS effort is still majority funded by the taxpayer. In Australia hundreds of millions of our tax dollars have poured into the Global CCS Institute and programs such as CCS Flagships, but the miniscule funding from industry by comparison speaks volumes about how seriously they believe in CCS. After all, this technology is supposed to make burning coal viable in a low-carbon future. Surely, if the industry were serious, they'd be pumping every spare dollar they had into trying to make CCS work?
In the effort to rapidly reduce carbon pollution we need all our options on the table. But that means making decisions about what are real options to deliver the emission reductions we need in the brief window of time we have to act. While renewable energy continues to grow exponentially around the world with many technologies already out-performing fossil fuels economically, CCS has spectacularly flopped with its promised arrival date slipping further and further over the horizon.
Despite CCS looking ever more like a dangerous distraction from real climate solutions, the danger is that the far away promise of CCS becoming available is allowed to capture our attention (and money). Reducing carbon pollution is going to require every moment of time, every ounce of effort and every dollar available put into solutions that will actually work.
Watch ABC Environment reporter Sarah Clarke's story on carbon capture here.