CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) is an increasingly hot topic in the energy and environment realm, and with good reason. The numbers (from the Dept. of Energy’s latest Annual Energy Review) behind our situation here in the US are as grim as they are indisputable:

• We generate 50% of our electricity with coal.
• That portion of our power comes from about 1,500 plants, none of which performs CCS.
• Those coal-fired plants emit 1.944 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, almost exactly one third of the US’s total CO2 emissions, and 82% of our emissions just from generating electricity.
• The evidence is overwhelming that we will have to reduce greatly our CO2 emissions to do our part in preventing a climate catastrophe. The most widely quoted number is an 80% reduction below 1990 levels by 2050.

Notice the interplay of numbers above–even if we could somehow, magically, eliminate 100% of our CO2 emissions from residential, commercial, and industrial energy consumption, plus that from transportation and all non-coal electricity generation, and we put in place a 100% moratorium on non-CCS coal plants, we’d still be stuck at a reduction of “only” 67% of today’s CO2 emissions.

In other words: We have to rely on a combination of retrofitting CCS onto existing plants (which were never designed or sited with such a scheme in mind) and replacing them much cleaner alternatives.

Replacing a significant portion of those plants will be extremely expensive, to say the least, so it looks like CCS is a major part of the solution–or is it? As the Worldwatch Institute points out, U.S. Environmental Groups Divided on “Clean Coal”:

Groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Environmental Defense Fund are already lobbying on behalf of CCS. Others, such as the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund, are more cautious about promoting CCS. They insist that affordable and proven technologies, such as energy efficiency and wind or solar energy, should be more fully implemented before CCS is considered. Greenpeace specifically opposes the technology.

A divided environmental community is reflective of a still unproven technology. Although CCS is almost certainly technically feasible, both the timing and the cost are highly uncertain. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology report released last year, The Future of Coal, concluded that the U.S. CCS program is not on track to achieve large-scale commercial operation for at least a decade.

Carbon liability concerns have led major investors and the U.S. government to rein in financing for coal-fired power plants. As a result, the coal industry has embraced CCS as essential to its survival. Some environmentalists say CCS is critical to creating a political deal that would dissuade power companies from blocking new climate legislation. “Congress should require planned new coal plants in the United States to employ CCS without further delay,” NRDC said in a statement last year.

…

“We need to make sure that the technology to capture and store carbon is feasible and in place,” said Bruce Nilles, The Sierra Club’s national coal campaign director. “While we are evaluating the role coal should play in our energy future, we should continue to move forward with the clean, affordable energy solutions that are available today, like wind and solar power.”

Greenpeace has taken a hard-line approach against CCS. “We are opposed to CCS technology,” said Kate Smolski, Greenpeace USA global warming campaigner. “The No. 1 reason is it’s a way the dirty polluting coal industry can prop itself up. It’s an unproven technology. And it takes resources away from solutions that we can use right now.”

The main concern with CCS is whether carbon stored inside empty aquifers would leak and pollute groundwater reserves. “If people think this is the solution, think again. A lot of research is needed,” said Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at last week’s “Summit on America’s Energy Future,” sponsored by the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering.

Any more bickering, and one would think these people are Democrats running for president. But I digress.

I’ve made no secret of my deep skepticism of CCS technology as anything more than a very localized, small scale (relative to the overall problem) solution. We can’t even figure out how to store and manage solid nuclear waste after years of trying, and now we want to take on storing billions of tons of CO2 gas underground every year, and then monitoring it and remaining prepared to plug leaks(!?) permanently?

At what point do we admit that attempting to use CCS technology to bail us out of part of this colossal mess we’ve created is nothing more than another ludicrous geoengineering boondoggle? When do we recognize that we sold ourselves a bill of goods, and now the real bill is coming due?

There’s an old observation that there are three kinds of “free”: Free as in speech (unencumbered by law), free as in beer (zero monetary cost) and free as in lunch (the most expensive form of self-delusion). Until now, we’ve treated all those CO2 emissions as a free lunch. No one paid for them and no one was asked to, so there was no economic back-pressure from a pricing mechanism to restrain our building of coal plants and motor vehicles that collectively emit such mind blowing amounts of that particularly long-lived greenhouse gas.

But philosophy and hand wringing aside, what do we do? We live in the real world with those 1,500 coal-fired plants cranking out not just electrons but CO2 and mercury and other pollutants, plus who knows how many more being built in China and other countries every week, and hundreds of millions of vehicles being driven billions of miles per day.

The situation is so desperate that we can’t afford to turn our back on CCS as a potential, albeit small, portion of the overall solution. We need an effective, tough, cap and trade system, plus various technology- and application-specific incentives (e.g. a feebate system to get people to buy much more fuel efficient vehicles, a long-term renewal of the production tax credits for solar and wind power, etc.), likely funded in part from the CO2 permit auction proceeds. And we need to find out, as quickly as possible, if we can make CCS work on a widespread basis and under what conditions and at what costs.

What a mess. Our future is rife with potential for disaster; through ignorance and greed we’ve put ourselves into a truly nasty situation and the only way out requires us to be efficient and smart and just a little bit lucky. Such is the price of a free lunch.