You maybe also judge that this technology may be never available at a widespread level, all comments are welcome.
By definition, CCS is bound to have a very limited world wide impact. The main reason is the lack of available storage space near the production source. Most of the CO2 is produced by coal combustion. In practice this means, that for each train load of coal, three trains of CO2 must be capture and stored elsewhere.
I am aware that the energetic costs of CO2 transport and storage are quite high and reduce the efficiency of the whole system to a 67-78% rate of CO2 captured (comparing to the >90% usually reported -only at power central level-). However, the economic costs of transport and storage are very small in comparison with the capture costs. In my opinion, CCS development should be discussed in wider terms, e.g. ¿are we going ever -soon- to price carbon?. And also, if the energy supply constraints worsen in the future, EROI will become a fundamental variable of the systems.
I doesn't think that CCS will reach a worl level development...
first of all, the capture and storage of carbon doesn't have commercial outlets (yet..maybe later if we can make use of the carbon), so from en economical point of view it depend entirely on the trading of carbon emission (and those are really cheap for the moment, that doesn't motive company to invest in this direction in R&D)
From a pratical point of view, actually the capture system is only "effective" on high source of carbon (like big industrial factory or coal plant), this are limiting the utility of CCS and the amount of point where it can be usefully used...
In addition, the storage of the captured carbon is still on prototype phase, we didn't a sight on the long term issue of the storage (like the acidification of the environment, the infiltration on the rocks, etc)
and to conclude, we shouldn't forget than building gear, storage facilities and to move the captured CO2 used energy, ressources ....and produce CO2...
so from my point of view it will be more efficient to focus on reducing the emission than trying to capture some of iT..
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Geoscience
- Atmospheric Sciences
- Climate Science
- Climate Change