Thursday, May 31, 2012

Carbon capture and storage technology against climate change?


Carbon emissions continue to grow because our entire industry still heavily relies on fossil fuels. Transition to renewable energy still mostly looks like a distant dream and this is the main reason why there is so much talk and ongoing research involving different carbon capture and storage technologies.

Capturing carbon and then subsequently sequestering it underground would contribute to less greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, therefore reducing the global climate change impact.

The bad news is that there are still no commercially viable power plants equipped to capture carbon dioxide on a large scale, a few small-scale and pilot plants do exist, but they are yet to become commercially utilized.

The currently available carbon capture and storage technologies don't come cheap because they are highly energy intensive and science is still on a lookout for material(s) that would enable lower energy intensity and decrease total costs.

Highly polluting coal power plants are still dominant in large part of the world and are together with our cars major carbon emitters. There has been lot of talk about „clean coal technologies“but coal still remains anything but clean energy source.

The transition to renewable energy still looks like the best option to stave off the worst consequences of climate change. However, given the current rate of transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy it looks like there won't be enough time left for us to use renewable energy sources as our main weapon against global warming and climate change.

Because of this shortage of time carbon capture and storage looks like the only logical way to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently in order to prevent worst climate change scenario.

The ongoing research should primarily focus on the energy costs of carbon capture because this is the main factor that will determine the commerciality of these new technologies.

The governments should play their part too in offering incentives and tax benefits to power plants that implement carbon capture and storage technologies.

We need to speed things up because climate change won't give us too much time do something about it.

2 comments:

  1. READ beyond the “they say” headlines.
    The vast majority of scientists agree climate change is "real" but the vast majority of scientists do not have any REAL consensus that it is truly a deadly crisis for all. NONE! How can It be any kind of consensus of a deadly threat when thousands of lab coats have thousands of different lab coat opinions on the “effects”, not causes of climate change? They all study effects of a worst case scenario of an assumed to be real crisis.

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  2. @mememine69. Regardless of whether or not global warming is real (which it is), there are many bigger concerns that are even more detrimental to our planet than that, like the impeding concern for new efficient renewable energy sources that replace fossil fuels. Solar, biomass, wind, hyrdo, etc won't suffice and aren't a godsend to our problems as many undereducated and ill informed people believe; yourself probably included. The employment of these energies produce major problems of their own. There is always an negative exchange for any benefit new sources of energy provide, and as or right now there is no viable solution that will work. Also, population control, economy increase, etc all perpetuate these problems.

    Perhaps you should take your own advice and read a little more before you consider these problems to be of little concern.

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