THE CARBON QUANDARY
about 40 times that amount.
It’s these sorts of infrastructural hurdles, among other concerns,
that have prompted even some of
the most ardent advocates for aggressive carbon-reduction policies to remain skeptical of CCS.
In his 2009 book Our Choice, the
former U.S. vice president and
tireless climate advocate, Al Gore,
argued that, while the individual
components of CCS have been
proven in limited ways, bringing it
all together at a scale that would
be meaningful for curbing climate
change remains little more than a
pipe dream.
That sentiment was echoed in an
email message last month from Vaclav Smil, a professor at Canada’s
University of Manitoba and one of
the world’s most respected experts
on energy and resource policy.
“My feeling is that any commercial standalone CCS on a
large scale — dozens of units in
the U.S., the European Union and
China — is about as likely as the
third or fourth generation of new
superior nuclear plants we have
been promised since the mid1980s,” Smil writes, “or a massive
adoption of fuel cell cars we were
promised as recently as 2000.”
HUFFINGTON
09.15.13
FUTURE OUTLOOK
CCS would need to overcome significant headwinds on a variety of
other fronts. Despite the pro FW7FF