Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
saline aquifers, and put a price on carbon at least equal to
the cost of sequestering it. Money talks in all societies and
we might do well to listen; more on this in
Chapter
.
.
Summary and Conclusion
Coal is the mainstay of world electricity production and is
not going away soon. Indeed, coal use is growing. While
the United States is not adding coal-based generation
capacity, China and India are adding plants rapidly (over
the next four years
in China and
in India), and
even Europe is considering new ones.
We will have those emissions with us for a long time
unless there is some powerful incentive to phase them out.
The best incentive is to make other options more attract-
ive than continued reliance on coal. That can be done in
several ways, one of which requires that emissions be
made to bear some sort of cost. Based on the analyses in
the IPCC Special Report and the MIT report I concluded
that CCS costs about
per ton of CO
.Wedo
not have to know if CCS works to add a fee to CO
emissions and let the emitters work out how to reduce
their costs by increasing the ef
to
$
$
ciency of their power
plants, developing CCS systems, or turning to other
sources of electricity that would no longer need subsidies
to be more economically attractive than coal.
In the spirit of no silver bullets, CCS is worth an
industrial-scale experiment aimed at storage in the deep
saline aquifers. They have the capacity to store a large
amount of CO
and therefore CCS has the potential to
solve part of our problem. The test should be a combined
private
-
government funded program. FutureGen, begun
