CCS: investment in futility?

Transporting CO2 can only be undertaken efficiently by piping it from the power plant to identified suitable underground storage sites. Since few existing power plants are located anywhere near these sites it will be necessary to construct pipelines to them and thereafter maintain them and monitor for leaks.

Carbon dioxide in the presence of water is corrosive so pipes will have to be made from materials which resist this action, adding to the cost of CCS technology. Moreover, the technology developed will have to be capable of being retrofitted to existing power stations, further adding to costs.

The GCCSI may well be able to develop the technology but can it do so in a way which makes its use affordable? Will the cost of using CCS increase the cost of electricity generated from fossil fuels so much that it needs to be subsidised in order to remain competitive with electricity produced from renewable sources? Why would any country reliant on electricity generated from coal use CCS technology rather than switch to cheaper pollution free electricity - or simply continue polluting?

It should be expected that during the next 10 years battery technology will vastly improve the ability to store electricity. This will promote the use of photovoltaic cells (PVC’s) by domestic and small business premises, reducing national demand for fossil fuel generated electricity. Although an expanding economy will increase overall demand for energy, in Australia more of it will come from renewable sources, particularly geothermal and solar.

Geothermal heat will be more extensively used to replace coal in the next decade because, being emission free, it does not need to use CCS technology or pay for emission licences. It can therefore generate base load power and supply it more cheaply than that sourced from fossil fuels - see Geodynamics 2007 Annual Report, page 16.

The cost of solar power will fall in the next decade relative to the cost of using fossil fuels. Development of heat and electricity storage technologies will enable solar thermal power stations to supply electricity on an almost continuous basis by 2020. Some improvement in the efficiency of PVC’s can also be expected, lowering the cost of power produced by power stations using PVC-heliostat technologies.

Renewable energy technology is not going to stand still while GCCSI tries to grapple with capture of CO2 emissions from increasingly expensive electricity produced from fossil fuels. Countries which are endowed with accessible geothermal deposits, such as Australia, will develop them in order to generate cheaper pollution free electricity. They must and will do so to maintain a competitive commercial edge over other countries.

Most countries, particularly those now dependent on the use of imported fossil fuels to produce their energy needs, will opt for solar energy as soon as technology demonstrates that this is the more cost-effective way of reducing CO2 emissions - and dependence on costly imports. Pressure to move away from fossil fuels will come from the rising cost of coal accompanying global economic recovery, peak oil price escalation, the increasingly severe consequences of climate change and the threat this poses to human habitat.

Questions to be asked are: why invest more than $2 billion in CCS when it can do little more than prolong the uneconomic use of fossil fuels? Why allocate scarce resources to development of technology which increases the price of energy to uncompetitive levels? Why not allocate greater resources to speed-up development of more efficient renewable energy production?

Knowing that CO2 emissions must be stopped, isn’t investment in CCS technology an investment in futility? Eight CCS commercial applications to be in place by 2020 is a pointless target which will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions in a meaningful way. On the other hand use of free and far more widely available sunshine could achieve so much more.