Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
tion of all UK power plants, plus development of North Sea oil and gas
network, all over again”. In the US the Department of Energy has mapped
out possible CCS storage sites across the country, and concluded that the
majority of major carbon emitters, such as coal power plants or heavy
industry, have suitable storage within fifty miles.
Nevertheless, the US, which already has a network of some 3500 miles
of CO
2
pipelines (mainly for oil recovery), would have to multiply this
network a hundred times if CCS were fully implemented. The eventual
CO
2
pipe network would be “the equivalent of today's entire US natural
gas network”, according to one US expert.
The world has never before had to deal with the environmental prob-
lems of storing CO
2
underground. Some critics of CCS have cited the Lake
Nyos disaster of 1986. Lake Nyos is a lake in the flank of a volcano in the
African state of Cameroon, under which a large body of CO
2
built up.
Suddenly, on 21 August 1986, the lake emitted a cloud of CO
2
which effec-
tively suffocated some 1700 people and killed several thousand livestock.
The tragedy was probably very specific to this volcanic site. Nonetheless,
local objections are increasing, particularly in Germany, from people
worried about having CO
2
buried underneath them, giving rise to a new
variant of NIMBYism: NUMBYism (not
under
my backyard).
CCS is manifestly not the highway to a permanent low-carbon economy.
We could not go on forever burying CO
2
underground - because we would
run out of convenient and safe storage - in the way that we could go on
generating electricity with the power of the wind or the sun. (And, long-
term, renewables would be cheaper and more efficient.) But CCS does
offer the best short- and medium-term hope for dealing with emissions
from coal power stations and other big industrial sources of CO
2
.
Governments in North America, Europe and China are making a start.
The Obama administration set aside $2.4bn for CCS test-projects in its
green energy stimulus package, and the European Union has earmarked
about the same sum for CCS in immediate funding, passing legislation
that would eventually give CCS operators some emissions permits they
could sell. Individual EU governments are doing more.
The UK has now committed itself to funding four test projects and has
also gone further than EU legislation to require that no new coal power
plants can go ahead without applying CCS to a substantial part of their
output; and that all coal plants will have to retrofit CCS within five years
of CCS being “independently judged to be technically and economically
proven”.
