Carbon Capture & Storage
This is interesting:
Whilst I do see some scope for CCS as a transition tactic there are two really important factors that the coal industry doesn’t seem to be tackling:
1. The coal industry has been talking about CCS and Clean coal for over a quarter of a century and has done little about it. They will only do something about it if governments force them to do so and they have resisted all attempts at carbon taxes or suitably biting environmental protection legislation.
2. The GHG problem is a stock problem not a flow problem. I came across this concept in a book by an employee of Shell in which he pushed CCS as a major part of the solution. The down side of this is that 20% or 50% reductions in GHG emissions do nothing but delay catastrophe. In order to avert eventual disaster we need to achieve almost 100% reductions in GHG emissions which means that fossil fuels with CCS can only form a small part of the long term energy mix as the practical limitations of finding storage of all our CO2 emissions from the current or even greater usage of fossil fuels would be, in all likelihood, impossible to overcome. This is another reason why the NIMBY fixation on how much RE will get us to the 2020 targets is so stupid and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the problem.
As a kid in 1950 we had Pea-Souper fogs in London, result coal was made to go smoke free and it happened over a very short time. The pea supers vanished and all was well.
Now we want Clean Coal so why can’t we just say do it or we use No Coal. Its as simple as that with political leadership.