Everyone Agrees, Carbon Capture & Storage Ain't Easy

With the recent demise of the FutureGen project, and the feds and banks alike distancing themselves from the future risk of carbon intensive coal, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has been having a hard time lately. A panel discussion at Friday’s Berkeley Energy Symposium asked flatly “Carbon Capture & Sequestration: A Viable Alternative?” The short answer was “sort of.”

But the panelists all agreed that CCS will be necessary as we transition to renewable energy. Curt Oldenburg, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, put it simply: “The cost [of CCS] must be compared to the cost of doing nothing. That is to say living with the consequences of global climate change.” However, each panelist offered far more obstacles to CCS’s development and deployment than the opportunities.

Dale Simbeck, VP of technolgoy of SFA Pacific, thinks the U.S. will be far behind many other countries because of existing liability and mineral rights laws that were designed without CCS in mind. Until there is significant legal reform Simbeck says CCS, beyond enhanced oil recovery (EOR), “is just hopeless.”

However, when it comes to technology, Simbeck says, the U.S. is a world leader. With 25 years of experience, the U.S. is currently sequestering some 35 million tons a year, mostly through EOR projects, Simbeck estimates.

Blue Source VP Roger Williams was optimistic but not overeager about American CCS. Getting a pure stream of CO2 from a coal plant is extremely difficult and Williams says that Blue Source is looking to other facilities, like ethanol plants and fertilizer manufacturers, as sources of more pure anthropogenic CO2.

Avoiding the chemical complications of carbon capture, Blue Source is focusing on transport and sequestration. Williams articulated his company’s plans for a “carbon highway” – a grid of pipes connecting CO2 sources with sequestration sites. Blue Source has developed, constructed, or operated at least five anthropogenic CO2 pipelines in the U.S., Williams claims.

Blue Source’s newest endeavor has been the formation of Blue Strategies, a group composed mainly of geologists focused on profiling and mapping potential carbon sinks. Mapping these resources, Williams says, is critical in connecting large emitters to large, viable sequestration sites.

Curiously, none of the panel mentioned the failed CCS gem FutureGen. In questions after the panel discussion, Simbeck said he hopes to see a variety of federally funded CCS pilots in the fallout of FutureGen. However, he stressed that the government shouldn’t mandate the technology, saying the market should chose from a variety of technologies. Williams lamented FutureGen’s demise saying that large-scale projects are needed to test the economies of scale that Blue Source hopes will become viable and power its business model.

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