Coal and carbon; energy security and climate change
Posted May 6, 2010 at 8:02 am 
Filed in: With so much attention focused on the oil spill in the Gulf, let’s take heart from a key interagency task force meeting today in Washington that’s focused on a different energy and environmental issue: how to deploy carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to allow America and the world to use our abundant supplies of coal for electricity without further contributing to an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
You can watch the ”Public Meeting of the Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture & Storage” here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ceq/initiatives/ccs/meetings. The meeting’s importance was highlighted by the fact that Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu and White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Deputy Director Gary Guzy kicked off the meeting (CEQ Chair Nancy Sutley being otherwise occupied at the aforementioned spill).
Secretary Chu made the crucial point that in the fight against global climate change, there is nearly nothing more important than getting CCS right. (The “nearly” refers to the fact that on a global basis, preventing deforestation and engaging in reforestation may be the single most important near term action.) Chu highlighted the billions of dollars currently being invested in CCS R&D and small scale deployment today, as well as the cutting edge research of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). One interesting project ARPA-E is funding looks at the enzyme in our bodies that permits metabolization of CO2, pursuing whether an enzyme that works in our lungs can be genetically engineered to work in a hostile flu gas environment.
The key issue this interagency task force, led by DOE and the US Environmental Protection Agency, must confront is how to remove barriers to CCS deployment. While they’ll be looking at the state of technology for the three main CCS phases — capture, transport and storage — the group will also be discussing regulatory and legal issues, as well as deployment drivers and incentives.
At heart, as the Secretary noted, a key challenge is reducing the cost of CCS. Today, it’s clearly too expensive to commercialize at competitive power rates. Without clear legal liability and other regulatory guidance, even if projects were somehow economic, they wouldn’t be financable. Some call for an Apollo type approach to the problem: government own the liability and print money to fund the R&D. There doesn’t appear to be the political support for such an approach, and at the end of the day, the challenge is quite different.
The Apollo challenge was clearly governmental – get the US on the moon. The CCS challenge is a mix of private benefits and public goods: how to provide safe, reliable and affordable electricity from coal while decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. The task force has its work cut out for it.
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