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By
Allen Gibson, RenewableEnergyStocks.com
September 2004
One of the keys to reducing
greenhouse gas emissions, if the 7th annual Greenhouse Gas
Technology conference held this week in Vancouver is any indication, will be
the simple expedient of pumping Carbon Dioxide back into the ground!
Carbon
Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology
undergoing massive RD&D activities world-wide. In
Europe
,
Asia
, and
North America
, scientists are busy working out how to safely and
economically inject massive amounts of CO2 into underground and underwater
geological reservoirs.
“The main priority for CO2
storage is to establish its credibility and acceptance as being safe and
reliable in the long-term,” according to www.co2sink.org.
“The fact that natural CO2 reservoirs exist over geological time-scales
supports this.” And, they say, there is enough storage potential to sock
away a couple of hundred years worth of human emissions. If so, the process
can’t start soon enough, according to the Conference’s keynote speaker:
“
Kyoto
is not enough. Unless government policy revisions are
made, the future does not look good,” says Marianne Haug, the Director of
the Office of Energy Efficiency, Technology, and R&D for the
International Energy Agency (IEA).
She says CCS is but one of the
technologies that will be needed to address our steadily increasing output of
greenhouse gases. And while she calls CCS “one of the most promising
technologies for a cleaner future for our children,” she notes that what is
needed is a “quantum jump” in greenhouse gas reduction. Something
comparable to eliminating five thousand 1-gigawatt electricity plants! To that
end, all of the alternative energies, including solar, wind, and nuclear, will
be required.
The IEA’s yearly “Energy
Outlook” suggests that energy consumption globally will increase by 1.7% per
annum through 2030. And while that is a slower growth rate than the past
couple of decades, we are still looking at a 32% increase in CO2 emissions by
the end of this decade!
And the major culprits are
electric generating plants, which produce more greenhouse gases than any other
source. Which is hardly surprising when you consider that many of them are
coal-fired. Those emissions are increasingly controversial, with several
states recently launching lawsuits against generating companies over
emissions. According to C. Lowell Miller of the
Department of Energy, almost 60% of
US
energy production comes from coal, and concerns over the
security of energy supply mean that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
Mr. Miller is the Director of
the DOE’s Office of Hydrogen and Clean Coal Fuels. He notes that the
US
has more coal than any other country on earth, and “When
the DOE looks at what its energy resources are within the continental
United States
, from a security point of view, that much energy cannot be
ignored. Which equates to a lot of pressure on our office to go ahead and
develop the technologies to utilize the coal, while at the same time achieving
all of these environmental objectives.”
The urgency, he says, is
increasing.
Electricity, not coal, central to global energy growth.
On a global scale, however,
coal is not the big player in the world’s expanding energy infrastructure.
The IEA predicts that $16 Trillion
dollars will need to be invested to supply the world’s energy demand over
the next quarter century. More than half of that investment will be to upgrade
existing infrastructure, and one of the big surprises of their latest studies,
according to Ms. Haug, is that the majority of the investment will be in the
electricity sector, particularly upgrading distribution and transmission
grids.
“The challenge,” she
notes, “is how to finance electricity in developing countries, particularly
India
and
Africa
.” Because the age of government direct investment in
generation is largely over, she says, and so it is market forces that must
shape the future.
And while $16 Trillion may
seem huge, she notes that it is only 1% of global GDP. Which indicates that
raising money for CO2 reduction investments should be possible. “If CO2
mitigation was valued at $50/ton, we could reduce it by 8 gigatons by 2030.”
The urgency to do something
about greenhouse gases is growing, both in government’s and industry’s
point of view.
The DOE’s Miller states,
“All of the industrial community that now is involved with energy products
is attempting to address the issue of what the future may bring with the
supply of oil and natural gas. All of them are finding their own corporate way
to get involved, realizing that their economic future may depend on it.”
He notes that in the past
couple of years, governments, academia, and industry have moved rapidly, and
on an unprecedented scale, to coordinate efforts on reducing greenhouse
emissions. Several new ministerial-level groups have been formed, with the
express purpose of investigating and supporting the deployment of new
technologies to assist in the effort. And it has become clear to the DOE that
moving the much-touted ‘Hydrogen Economy’ forward requires close
association with new technologies such as CCS.
The DOE’s aim is to
accelerate the commercialisation of this technology, to help meet the US’s
CCS program goal of stabilising CO2 levels. Working towards that is a
consortium of 140 organizations, 33 states, 2 Canadian provinces and 2 Indian
Nations. Another program is spending a billion dollars to develop a
zero-emission coal-fired generating plant within ten years. A key component of
such a plant will be Carbon Storage.
One way or another, it seems
that the idea of pumping CO2 back into underground reservoirs, where the
carbon fuel came from in the first place, is going to happen. And sooner
rather than later.
One of the major hurdles to
overcome, the scientists at the Greenhouse Gas conference agree, will be to
convince the general public that such storage will be safe and sustainable in
the long term. And on that issue there may be as much work to be done as
it’s taking to develop the technology.
Allen
R. Gibson
Allen R.
Gibson has over twenty-five years of experience in media and corporate
communications. He has been a reporter, television producer, and
marketing communications consultant for public companies in both the US and
Canada.
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