Facing The Heat

Cost of climate change remedy

Cost overruns and legal and safety uncertainties could stall a new technology seen vital in the fight against climate change, and which works by burying underground the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. On Monday Canadian power company SaskPower withdrew its plans for a “clean coal” plant, the third such cancellation in six months on cost grounds. Working like oil production in reverse, carbon capture and storage (CCS) involves pumping the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into empty oil wells and other cavities, after trapping the gas from the waste emissions of coal-fired power plants. But no commercial-scale power plant uses the technology yet.

“Carbon capture and storage is very far from being a done deal,” said European Commission CCS expert Derek Taylor. “The barriers…are huge. Without much greater political will and much more public funding it won’t happen,” he said. Advocates say that CCS is a key energy option, because of huge reserves of cheap coal worldwide which developing nations are expected to burn regardless of global warming worries. Its potential is dramatic. The International Energy Agency, which advises 26 developed nations on energy, will publish next month new figures which suggest that empty oil wells and other spaces underground could store some 500 years’ worth of manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

But the technology is estimated to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of a power plant, and it also reduces their energy efficiency. Such costs mean it could be years before developing countries adopt the technology, and meanwhile new coal plants proliferate, causing China’s carbon emissions to soar. SaskPower’s cost estimates for a clean coal plant more than doubled to $3.39 billion. The company may reconsider the technology in 2009, said spokesman Larry Christie on Monday.

In June energy groups Statoil and Shell dropped plans for a project under the seabed between Britain and Norway, saying it was too expensive, and BP shelved similar plans in May, saying it couldn’t afford to keep an empty oilfield open while it awaited public support.

Legal barriers are another brake on actual burial of CO2 in Europe. Later this year Brussels will propose tweaks to existing water and waste rules, with 2010 slated as the earliest likely date for those changes to come into force. “Industry might feel it’s a gamble, they’re going to have a nagging doubt until the law’s in place,” said the EC’s Taylor.

And then there are safety fears. In sufficient quantities CO2 suffocates people, simply by crowding out an adequate supply of oxygen. A small worry is that if it escaped from underground or from a pipeline, the heavy, odourless gas may collect in a deep valley pocket, for example. “People could walk into this cloud of CO2, not realise it, and be asphyxiated by it,” said Julia Race, an expert in pipeline engineering at Britain’s Newcastle University. “A number of issues, technical and others, urgently need addressing,” she said.

Industry participants are hopeful the problems will be ironed out, but are mindful of the safety fears faced by another potential climate change fix which involves burying a more noxious substance underground: nuclear power.
(Reuters)