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from the my-solar-panels-are-covered-in-soot dept.
Ken_g6 writes:
Wired today reports on continued coal use around the world and efforts to promote carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Today coal produces more than 40 percent of the world's electricity, a foundation of modern life. And that percentage is going up: In the past decade, coal added more to the global energy supply than any other source. Nowhere is the pre-eminence of coal more apparent than in the planet's fastest-growing, most populous region: Asia, especially China.
Many energy and climate researchers believe that CCS is vital to avoiding a climate catastrophe. Because it could allow the globe to keep burning its most abundant fuel source while drastically reducing carbon dioxide and soot, it may be more important - though much less publicized - than any renewable-energy technology for decades to come. No less than Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist who was US secretary of energy until last year, has declared CCS essential. "I don't see how we go forward without it," he says.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs projects that solar power will be cost-competitive with other electricity sources in the US by 2033. So will we build more coal plants or tear them down?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mth on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:00AM
I've heard CCS offered as an argument why building a coal plant isn't so bad. However, CCS is listed as a future extension of the plant, not something to be built from day one. So until the day that CCS is actually implemented, the new coal plant will be sending a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Since CCS is still an immature technology, it is not clear yet how expensive it will be. Will the government have enough backbone to demand a planned CCS implementation to happen, or will they cave in when the energy company says it is too expensive?
One thing that we don't know is the effect of putting large amounts of CO2 into the ground. In the north of the Netherlands, a lot of natural gas was extracted and now small but frequent earthquakes are damaging houses there. Would pumping CO2 into the ground stabilize things or would it interact with the soil in a different way than methane and create an even more dangerous situation? Some effects won't be apparent until years later, so while it would be good to experiment with CCS, it may not be wise to deploy it on a very large scale until those experiments have been evaluated.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday March 27 2014, @12:15PM
The point of carbon sequestration was to create the myth that there is such a thing as "clean coal", so that nobody would pass laws or create programs that would interfere with the existing coal infrastructure.
Also, solar is already pretty economically viable: Paying the up-front cost to install solar panels on a house pays off in about 7 years on average. There are loan programs that make it so you can spread the up-front cost around, and also programs where you let the solar company put up the panels and batteries at their expense and then pay them for the electricity rather than your regular power company. Plus if you have another major power grid malfunction like we did in 2003, your solar panels are still working just fine.
Does it completely solve all energy problems? No. Is it useful and effective? Yes.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.