“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 171

expensive and requires lots of energy to run—but the end result is
fossil-fuel-i red energy without most of the climate penalty. It would
let the United States maintain the touted security and economic advan-
tages of coal and gas, minimize disruption to communities that depend
on them, and still tackle climate change. As House and Dawe have
explained in an open let er, “Modern society is powered with fossil
fuel because no alternative energy source rivals its energy density, its
cost ef ectiveness, or its reliability. ” 67 C12, therefore, will be “dedicated
to building the low-carbon fossil fuel industry so that humankind can
continue to use fossil fuels while preventing the resulting CO 2 from
entering the atmosphere.”
But even though renewable energy, at least in principle, might one
day survive on its own, there is zero chance that CCS will work at a
sui cient scale to take a big chunk out of U.S. emissions without per-
petual help from government. Even with the prospect of enhanced oil
recovery, most carbon dioxide produced by power plants is worthless,
and spending money to produce a valueless product is not something
successful businesses do.
House and Dawe learned that lesson quickly. When they launched
their company, named C12 at er the scientii c name for the carbon
atom, they had great hopes for federal climate legislation that would
have made it proi table for power plants to clean up their carbon pol-
lution. h eir plan was to buy up the best underground storage areas for
carbon dioxide and then sell them to operators who needed a place to
put their waste. h en the federal legislative process collapsed, and with
it so did their business model.
Even before the collapse of cap-and-trade, skepticism about CCS
abounded. Engineers could sketch out systems on paper that would
capture carbon dioxide and bury it for around eighty dollars a ton. 68 But
the numbers were shaky, because no full-scale power plant using CCS
had ever been built. Moreover, everyone agreed, the i rst plants to be
built would certainly cost far more. 69 h is posed a big problem: a typi-
cal coal-i red plant with CCS would inevitably cost north of a billion
dollars to build. h e only interested institution with enough cash and
enough appetite for risk to step up was the federal government—and
politics were conspiring to prevent it from get ing deeply involved.