Power Engineering - Carbon capture and storage will succumb in 'valley of death' unless EU acts: IEA

1 July 2008 - The head of the International Energy Agency's Clean Coal Centre has said that carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will succumb in a 'valley of death' unless the European Commission offers more incentives and penalties for its utilization.

Dr. John Topper, managing director of the IEA's Clean Coal Centre, told delegates in his keynote address at the inaugural COAL-GEN Europe conference and exhibition in Warsaw, Poland, that the point where carbon prices rise to make CCS economic is 10-15 years from now. However, if the EU is serious about its climate change targets, it needs to offer incentives, he said.

"We are in a valley of death," said Dr. Topper. "A period of time where we are developing CCS, we are confident it's going to work, but we need to demonstrate it to get to a point where the technology is deployed. We have a gap in time and money and there are no clear incentives or penalties for doing it or not doing it.

"The cost of retrofitting a carbon capture unit to a 500 MW power plant is something in the region of €500-600m ($789m-$984m). The issue we have in the short to medium term is that the point when carbon prices make CCS economic may be 10-15 years away."

Dr. Topper said that the European Union's proposals for the full-scale commercial demonstration projects of CCS are inadequate and that it is simply relying on the goodwill of individual member states to take action. Furthermore, the Commission has not clearly defined either what 'carbon capture ready' means or how it would act on possible CO2 leakages from storage sites.

The head of the IEA's Clean Coal Centre, who has worked in the coal sector for over 30 years, said that the chances of serious leakage from CCS were infinitesimal, but although the likelihood of moderate leakages was far higher, he did not consider this a danger.

Dr Topper said: "I want to dispel the myth that storing CO2 is pumping a gas underground and keeping it in a cavity. If you compress CO2 and get it down below 0.8km it is no longer a gas but a supercritical fluid. It's not like nuclear waste that is dangerous for a long time.

"The longer it stays down there the safer it gets because it reacts with water in the aquifers, which makes for a denser solution that actually sinks further and slowly mineralises over time to mix with calcium carbonate or whatever the rock structure is. Therefore it becomes permanently locked."

The inaugural COAL-GEN Europe (from the organisers of POWER-GEN Europe, PennWell) is being held in Warsaw, Poland on 1-3 July.

Add RSS Feed