New Study Says Commercial Carbon Capture Unlikely by 2020
The recent news that the demand for coal is climbing rapidly around the world has left many of us deeply unsettled. And a new study from Australian energy consultancy ACIL Talisman doesn’t make things sound any more cheery.
The company believes that clean coal technologies such as carbon capture and storage are unlikely to be commercially available before 2020 unless major technological breakthroughs occur in the very near future.
However, the firm predicts that both geothermal and concentrated solar will be in widespread commercial use by the 2020 target date. But none of these technologies can squelch the CO2 coming from the 40% increase in coal consumption expected by 2030.
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While the ACIL Talisman study only focuses on Australia, their predictions most likely hold true for the rest of the world as well. In 2006, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development reported that commercial carbon capture and storage is not expected for 20 years.
While these reports are bleak, they are not hopeless. So many major discoveries have occurred recently in other cleantech sectors that the idea of a major breakthrough in carbon capture and storage is not entirely a pipe dream. And of course, there are many other greenhouse gases that also deserve our attention—some of them more harmful than CO2.
I believe that we are closer than 12 years away from effective commercial carbon capture technologies. There is a lot of money to be made in this field. Rather than a closed-loop system we have a leak that is releasing energy and resources into thin air.
Now this is funny. Carbon scrubbers are not practical yet, let the energy prices keep going up and then when power stations can sell it for 100 bucks a megawatt then whatever you want to add on to the facility is still practical.
Oh and in your photochop, just an FYI emissions don’t come from cooling towers. Just condensate. The smokestacks are in the background (tall skinny thingies) and that’s where the CO comes from, not the big cooling tower in the foreground. The image is photochopped to make it look like soot comes out.
Just an FYI though, CO isn’t the problem. It’s the sulfur dioxide output that really screws stuff up. Many plants are not required to remove as much as they can in the scrubbing process, just what they are permitted to. The plant I work at in fact we have to shut some of the scrubber equipment down because we are “overscrubbing”. Meaning that if we remove %100 of the particulates and the SO2 then our permits will change and we’ll be required to scrub at that level, and we won’t always be able to if we get dirty coal and whatnot.
If the author of the blog wants to get in touch with me on an anonymous basis I’d have quite a bit of juicy stuff to share.
@Ardoreal
I don’t think the image is photoshopped to make it look like “soot” is coming out of the cooling tower. In general, cooling towers look like they are pumping pollutant in the air, when in reality it’s just water vapor (steam).
Yeah, just too much PROFIT to be made, it’ll get swpt under the rug!
RD
http://www.anotools.cq.bz
[...] New Study Says Commercial Carbon Capture Unlikely by 2020 Australian study predicts that clean coal technologies such as carbon capture and storage are unlikely to be commercially available before 2020. New Study Says Commercial Carbon Capture Unlikely by 2020 : CleanTechnica [...]
@ater
I was referring to the shadows being prominent in the picture. It shows the shade of the clouds very dark as well as the cooling tower with a blackened top. That and we’re talking about a coal fired system here.
In related news, experts expect a rise in the amount of photoshopped pictures of coal plants.
[...] read more | digg story [...]
[...] projects, but we will be waiting a long time to see widespread commercial use of the technology— probably until 2020. And questions about the long-term safety of CCS linger. For example, what happens to a [...]
[...] A study from Australian energy consultancy ACIL Talisman states that CCS will not be available in the short-term to generate electricity with low carbon emissions and that technology breakthroughs are still needed to make this technology feasible. The study does however find that concentrated solar, geothermal, and wind energy already are or will be in commercial use by 2020. [...]