The Practical Impossibility of Large-Scale Carbon Capture and Storage
By Steve Goreham -- May 2, 2023
“CCS has been slow to take off due to the cost of capture and the limited salability of carbon dioxide as a product. Thirty-nine CCS facilities capture CO2 around the world today, totaling 45 million tons per year, or about one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of industrial emissions produced globally.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would set stringent limits on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from US power plants. Utilities would be required to retrofit existing plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology or to switch to hydrogen fuel. Others call for the use of CCS to decarbonize heavy industry. But the cost of capture and the amount of CO2 that proponents say needs to be captured crush any ideas about feasibility.
Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing carbon dioxide from an industrial plant before it enters the atmosphere, transporting it, and storing it for centuries to millennia. Capture may be accomplished by filtering it from combustion exhaust streams. Pipelines are proposed to transport the captured CO2. Underground reservoirs could be used for storage. For the last two decades, advocates have proposed CCS to reduce emissions from coal plants and steel, chemical, and other hard-to-decarbonize industries in order to fight human-caused climate change.
https://www.masterresource.org/carbon-capture-and-storage-ccs/practical-impossibility-large-scale-ccs/
