“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 172

So the pair regrouped. h ey quickly noticed two trends: natural gas
prices were collapsing and oil prices were on the rise. Cheap natural gas
made it relatively inexpensive to capture carbon dioxide from gas-i red
power plants. Expensive oil made it increasingly proi table to produce
crude. h e combination presented an opportunity: C12 could try to
capture carbon dioxide from gas-i red power plants and make money
by using it to produce oil. h is won't come close to solving the carbon
problem by itself—there aren't enough oil i elds to use up all of the
nation's carbon dioxide—but it might be enough to get some experi-
ence operating CCS systems and bring their costs down. In the mean-
time, House and Dawe i gure they'll get rich.
No one knows if their initiative will pan out. But it highlights some
essential things about the arguments that some make for CCS over
renewables. Carbon capture requires government action just as renew-
able energy does. Carbon capture also remains too expensive for mass
deployment, and it will require risky investments, whether from compa-
nies or governments, to bring costs down. CCS also comes with other
environmental challenges. Fueling it requires extensive production of
coal and gas, and storing carbon underground needs a massive network
of pipelines and storage sites. h ese are not exactly environmentalists'
favorite things. For some, CCS may still be a holy grail for carbon emis-
sions reductions, but for now it's an aspiration rather than a certainty.
h is is a big part of why another group focuses on a dif erent alter-
native: nuclear power. Unlike renewable energy, nuclear power isn't
intermit ent, turning on and of with the sun and the wind. Unlike
CCS, atomic energy isn't just an idea that engineers have on paper; it
has been a critical part of the U.S. energy system for decades, and it
currently generates around 20 percent of the country's electric power
(not to mention more 75 percent of the electricity in France). 70 And
unlike either renewable energy or CCS, its local environmental foot-
print is relatively small, at least according to some.
March 11, 2011, provided a powerful counterargument. h at day,
just before three o'clock in the at ernoon, a massive earthquake shook
Japan. Of shore, a tsunami gathered strength, and an hour at er the
earthquake hit, a i t y-foot-high wall of water struck the coast. h e
Fukushima nuclear power plant, comprising six atomic reactors, rapidly