Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
installations” (House of Commons 2001). Marine renewable energy has great promise
but, unlike wind, sun, and biomass, it is still a long way from commercial viability. The
environmental impacts of ocean energy are difficult to quantify since very little research
has been conducted to date.
6.11 Taking Carbon out of the Equation
The goals of the Kyoto Protocol have not been reached; far from reducing carbon dioxide
emissions by 5.2 per cent from the 22.7-billion-tonne level in 1990, we managed to
increase them to 33 billion tonnes by 2010. Moreover, there is no end in sight, as current
projectionsindicatethat,fortheforeseeablefuture,fossilfuelswillcontinuetobeburnedin
quantities incompatible with reducing or even stabilizing GHG concentrations (see
Section
That is not to say that nothing has changed in the way we use fossil fuels. In the last
twenty years, major technological advances have been made in reducing air pollution. The
most important of these are the catalytic converters fitted to car exhausts and the scrubbers
and filters added to the smokestacks of power plants. It is likely that future advances will
there is no way to filter out the carbon dioxide emitted from the burning of fossil fuels. The
only possible way to reduce emissions without reducing the use of combustion fuels would
be to capture the carbon dioxide as it is released and store it deep underground to prevent it
entering the atmosphere.
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Capturing the carbon, at least from power plants, would not be difficult. The major
problem arises with transport and storage. This is not a problem of technology (for decades
oil companies have been injecting carbon dioxide into oil fields to push the remaining oil
to the surface) but of cost and logistics. Unlike nuclear waste, which is highly concentrated
and could be stored in a few underground locations, carbon capture and storage (CCS)
would require vast underground spaces. Even if such locations were readily available,
long-termpredictionsaboutundergroundstoragesecurityareuncertain,andcarbondioxide
might, one day, leak into the atmosphere. Injecting millions of tons of carbon dioxide per
year into the ground also poses potential risks to soil and groundwater. Capturing and
storing carbon would also be very costly in energy terms and could lead to a doubling of
plant costs, in which case the current cost advantage of fossil fuels over renewables would
To date, there are only a few pilot-scale CCS facilities in operation. Indeed, at the
seventh Carbon Capture & Sequestration conference in 2008, Greenpeace launched a
