CCS Promoters Shift Focus from Fossils to Industrial Uses
Carbon capture and storage advocates may be abandoning the fossil fuel industry as the most promising place to develop their technologies, judging by a report earlier this month on the Energy Post.
“We told the wrong story” about abatement of coal emissions as the most promising applications for CCS, admitted Dr. Graeme Sweeney, chair of the EU’s Zero Emissions Platform (ZEP) for Carbon Capture and Storage. “Other alternatives exist for clean power, like renewables. We put too much emphasis on energy,” and now “we have to start over and talk about industrial applications.”
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Digges points to the “number of influential publications [that] have been declaring if not the death, then at least the terminal illness” of CCS in light of the long-term carbon reduction commitments in the Paris Agreement. “Its advocates have been getting a bit of a cold shoulder since Paris, as matters of politics, expense, jobs, and perceived encouragement of old, dirty energy sources collided.”
But “if Paris revealed anything about how essential CCS is to the mix of technologies that must spring up to mitigate climate change, it was the schism between using CCS in power production and using it to mop up the CO2 emissions produced by industry and manufacturing,” he adds. One of Digges’ colleagues at the Norwegian NGO Bellona, Sirin Engen, suggested a divide between all-renewable advocates in Paris and longtime CCS promoters.
“There’s a perception that CCS is somehow a way to greenwash coal use or contribute to oil recovery,” he said. “But its strongest potential at the moment is for industry.” The article describes an experimental installation at an energy-from-waste facility in Oslo that “aims to capture and store carbon emissions from Klemestrud’s industrial scale waste recovery facility, burning the 356 kilograms of garbage produced by each of Oslo’s 600,000 residents annually.”