No.
And, no. It's very clear: CCS plants are inferior to a combination of windpower and natural gas. They cost much more, and don't emit any less CO2.
See the following article in MIT Technology review: http://www.technologyreview.com/demo/533351/a-coal-plant-that-buries-its-greenhouse-gases/
The plant only captures 90% of the CO2, and produces only 80% of the output of a conventional coal plant for the same coal input. Coal plants produce twice as much CO2 as natural gas. The output reduction further decreases the CO2 emissions difference. A combination of 50% wind and 50% natural gas would produce the same amount of CO2.
We find out that a plant with a capacity of 160MW cost $1B to equip with CCS. That's $6 per watt. If we estimate a basic cost of $3 per watt for the coal plant, this plant will cost $12 per watt (adjusted for an average coal capacity factor of 75%). Windpower costs lesss than $6 per watt (adjusted for wind's average capacity factor of 33%). So, CCS coal costs twice as much as a windfarm with comparable kWh output. We could add 100% backup with natural gas generation to a windfarm, and have a far cheaper solution.
And, of course, there's far more potential for further reductions in CO2 emissions by reducing NG's share below 50%: levels of 20% are currently the optimal cost point, according to German research.
Finally, most of the CO2 isn't sequestered: it's sold for oil secondary recovery, which means that it 1) doesn't reduce emissions, and 2) generates revenue, rather than creating a cost for storage. Oil well EOR can only use a relatively small amount of CO2 - this is not scalable.
CCS is clearly a bad solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment