“Can carbon capture and storage (CCS) save the world?
Is this the silver bullet everyone’s been waiting for? Or just pie in the sky? Is capturing and storing carbon dioxide the technology breakthrough to cut greenhouse gas emissions without getting in the way of economic growth and industry’s “addiction” to fossil fuels? Or is it just a “greenwash” — a token gesture by some of the utilities responsible for so much of the world’s CO2 to try to persuade an increasingly green public that the great emitters are doing something to fight climate change?
Those are the questions that were hurled at Vattenfall executives on Tuesday when the Swedish-based utility opened the world’s first CCS plant in a small town south of Berlin called Schwarze Pumpe. The company believes it will be economically feasible before long to capture carbon, liquify it, and store it permanently on a large scale underground. This is only a small pilot plant producing enough power for a town of 20,000. But if it works, Vattenfall plans to build two conventional power plants 10 times larger in Germany and Denmark by 2015 and from 2020 they hope CCS will be a viable option for large-scale industrial use.”

“The world’s first complete demonstration of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will begin next week at a coal-fired power station in Germany. Built alongside the 1,600MW Schwarze Pumpe power plant in north Germany, the demonstration experiment will capture up to 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, compress it and bury it 3,000m below the surface of the depleted Altmark gas field, about 200km from the site.”

“A power plant in Mongstad would capture 2.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually from 2014, Norwegian oil and gas producer StatoilHydro said on Wednesday. The government has said that final Mongstad investment decisions were due in late 2008. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology may cut the contribution of coal and gas-fired power plants to global warming by trapping and burying the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), but it is untested on a commercial scale.”

“North Sea gas pipeline operator Gassco has awarded Swedish Marine Matteknikk AB a contract to survey 636 km of seabed for potential pipelines to carry carbon dioxide to offshore burial sites, it said on Wednesday.”

“A big challenge facing electric utilities seeking to burn coal cleanly is providing enough power to capture and bury the carbon dioxide produced, experts said Friday. The process called carbon capture and sequestration requires as much as 20 percent of the electricity a power plant generates.”