CARLA GOTTGENS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Inside the offices of
MIT’s Energy Initiative,
a campus-wide program with
the ambitious goal of helping
to “transform the global energy
system,” Howard J. Herzog, a
senior research engineer, pulled
out a fresh yellow legal pad and
began sketching a line graph. He
was responding to a straightforward question: In a world so
addicted to fossil fuels, and yet
so threatened by the planetwarming carbon dioxide they
produce, why has one seemingly
elegant and elementary solution
— blocking that CO₂ from entering the atmosphere in the first
place — proved so elusive?
It’s a question Herzog has grappled with for some 25 years. The
essential know-how for collecting
carbon dioxide out of industrial
exhaust streams dates back at
least to the 1930s, after all. Yet,
despite billions in government
subsidies and a widely held view
among many energy experts that
climate change can’t truly be addressed without it, carbon cap-
ture and storage technology, or CCS
as it is known, has struggled mightily
to get off the ground.
Herzog, who has headed MIT’s
Carbon Capture and Sequestration
Technologies Program since 1989,
says that’s a policy failure, not a
technological one. On his legal pad,
he draws a vertical axis, which he
says represents the cost of emitting
carbon dioxide into the air. Extending
along his horizontal axis are increasing volumes of the gas that might
be captured instead. As he drags his
pencil on a curve upward and outward from the axes’ origin, the plight
of carbon capture and storage — and
really, the plight of any clean-energy
innovation — is laid bare: The more
CO₂ you want to capture, Herzog explains, the higher the market price of
emitting the gas has to be.
“At the moment,” Herzog says,
“the cost of emitting carbon, for all
practical purposes, is zero.”
The economic implications of that
are straightforward: Government
subsidies and other small-bore in-