COURTESY OF IEAGHG/GHGT10
THE CARBON QUANDARY
centives may provide some marginal nudging, but it remains far,
far cheaper to keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
than to develop, test and nurture
the sort of gargantuan captureand-storage systems that might
put a real dent in the global
warming problem.
Yet, according to many energy
experts, the costs of not developing technologies like CCS will
continue to rise as the climate
clock keeps ticking. Solar and
wind power, they say, simply
cannot be deployed quickly and
widely enough to tackle climate
change on their own. That leaves
just two other possibilities, Herzog suggests: A rapid expansion
of nuclear power, which has a low
carbon footprint, but a dubious
reputation, or rapid deployment
of industrial-scale CCS.
The Paris-based International
Energy Agency has estimated
that in the absence of CCS,
the cost of addressing climate
change may be as much as 70
percent higher by mid-century.
And the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, the transnational body charged with assessing the scientific, technical and
socioeconomic dimensions of the
HUFFINGTON
09.15.13
global warming problem and its
potential solutions, considers
CCS an essential part of any effort to de-carbonize the planet’s
economies over the next century.
Not everyone buys these metrics, and many climate and
clean-energy advocates routinely
dismiss or downplay the potential role of CCS. They consider it
hopelessly expensive, dangerously
untested, and, under the rubric of
“clean coal,” little more than an
empty slogan embraced by an industry angling to preserve its grip
on power production — or by lawmakers keen to appear friendly to
Howard
J. Herzog
has been
the head of
MIT's Carbon
Capture and
Sequestration
Technologies
Program since
1989.