There go the REALLY BIG pastel lights.

Here's what drives me nuts about these neanderthals that don't believe in clean energy.

They don't want regulations imposed on companies because it will cost companies billions in R&D and our fuel and electricity costs will go up.

They don't want us to do the R&D into what would satisfy regulations because it would cost us billions.

Companies won't just come out on their own and do R&D to lesson emissions and clean up their factories if they don't have to because it costs money.

So, either we put some money up front into this and solve the problem ourselves or we put forth standards and let the companies create the solutions and pass the costs onto us, or we just ignore science flat out and die in the next few hundred years.

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"In the US, the Department of Energy has asked for a 26.4% budget increase for CCS-related programmes (to US$623.6 million) while at the same time scaling back renewable energy and efficiency research by 27.1% (toUS$146.2 million). 29 Australia has three research centres
for fossil fuels, including one committed to CCS; there is not one for renewable energy technology.30 The Norwegian government recently committed 20 billion NOK (US$4 billion) for two CCS projects at the expense of investment in renewable technologies." These number don't signify a very committed approach to diversification...there's a difference between what's being proposed here in the forum, and what is actually happening with regards to energy investment...

"The concept of “capture ready” power stations allows new coal-fired power stations to be built today while providing no guarantee that emissions will be mitigated in the future. In lieu of delivering a concrete solution to fighting climate change, it banks on the promise of an
unproven technology and risks locking us into an energy future that fails to protect the climate."

In the UK, for example, a proposed new coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth, Kent is being sold as “capture ready.”Yet this doesn’t mean that the new plant will be able to capture and store carbon; it will just be ready to incorporate CCS should the technology ever become viable in the future; and no-one has any idea if and when this might be. In the meantime, and possibly for its entire lifetime, Kingsnorth (if built) will pump out around 8 million tonnes of CO2 per year, an amount equivalent to the total annual CO2 emissions of Ghana"

"The survey,conducted by GlobeScan, the World Conservation Union,IUCN and the World Bank, reveals substantial doubt about CCS. Only 34% of those polled were confident that retrofitting clean coal technology could reduce CO2 emissions over the next 25 years without unacceptable side effects, and only 36% in the ability of ‘clean coal technology’ to deliver low carbon energy with new power stations. In contrast, 74% expressed confidence in the ability of solar hot water to deliver, 62% for offshore wind farms, 60% for onshore wind farms, and 51% for combined heat and power plants."

"Assuming that commercial viability is reached, scenario studies indicate that by 2050 only 20-40% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions could be technically suitable for capture86. This includes 30-60% of emissions from the power sector.87 Therefore up to 70% of emissions from
electricity generation in 2050 may not even be technically suited to CCS. Furthermore, this figure does not account for the fact that power stations will often be far away from storage sites. In Australia, CCS would lead, at best, to a 9% emissions reduction in 2030 and a cumulative emissions reduction from 2005 to 2030 of only 2.4%.88 This is partly due to the lack of suitable storage locations. For example, in the Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong area of New South Wales and at Port Augusta in South Australia, which together produce about 39% of Australia’s current net CO2 emissions from electricity generation, there are no identified storage sites within 500 km of the coal-fired power stations.89 In comparison, a modest improvement in energy efficiency could – at zero or even negative cost decrease emissions in 2030 by about the same amount,and cumulative emissions by twice as much.90"

"CCS not only cuts energy efficiency but also increases resource consumption. A study by Rubin et al. (2005),quantified the impacts of capture systems on plant resource consumption and emission rates. For a 500MWe PC unit fitted with carbon capture, a 24% energy penalty was estimated to have resulted in an increase of
approximately 25% for fuel, limestone (for the flue gas desulphurisation system) and ammonia (for nitrogen oxide control) inputs (see Table 3).95 A US DOE analysis on the freshwater requirements for carbon capture found that in
2030, deploying CCS in PC plants with scrubbers and IGCC plants would increase water consumption in all scenarios examined by 90% (anywhere from 2.2 to 4.3 billion gallons of water per day).96 In a report for the German Department for the Environment, the Fraunhofer-Institute estimates that wide-scale adoption of CCS could
erase the efficiency gains of the last 50 years and increase resource consumption by one third.97"

"Achieving the substantial CO2 emissions reductions required to avoid catastrophic climate change would require broad deployment of CCS in a relatively short period of time. Global emissions from coal are currently 2.5 Gt of carbon per year. Sequestering just 1 Gt of carbon (3.6 Gt of CO2) would require the injection of approximately 50 million barrels of supercritical CO2 per day from about six hundred 1000 MWe coal plants.110 The IEA estimates that the magnitude of CO2 emissions that need to be captured and stored by 2050 is in the order of 6000 projects each injecting a million tonnes of CO2 a year into the ground.111 The vast infrastructure required to capture and transport CO2 from diverse and widely distributed point sources would also need to be built."

"In the US alone, reducing CO2 emissions from the
electricity sector could require 200 projects, each with injection rates ten times bigger than Sleipner.112 The US DOE estimates the country has enough technical capacity to store CO2 for tens to hundreds of years.113 However, a recent Congressional Research Services report shows that on the ground realities complicate the picture substantially. The report examines several scenarios for pipeline development in a seven-state region. The model scenario considered CO2 emissions from the 11 largest CO2 sources, all coal-fired power stations.114
In the report, the first storage option considered is Rose Run sandstone, a deep saline formation, very close to the CO2 sources. Though its proximity is ideal, the site has many problems including limited storage capacity, low permeability and questionable integrity (i.e. high risk of leakage).115 The second storage option examined includes a combination of coal beds and depleted oil and gas fields in the area. Further away than Rose Run, these sites would have limited utility. The coal beds lack sufficient storage capacity and the practicality of storing CO2 in coal seams is virtually untested. The oil and gas fields also lack sufficient capacity, and leakage is a concern mostly due to the numerous boreholes drilled to extract fossil fuels from them in the first place.116 The third storage option is the Mt. Simon formation, appealing because it is both larger and less fractured than the Rose Run location. Distance, however, is a limiting factor; Mt. Simon would require the construction of pipelines with an average length of 374km.117When scaling up CCS from demonstration phases, such scenarios are likely to be repeated many times over."

"Given how much better the same
money could have been spent on
other climate and energy
development projects, the head of
the Norwegian Institute for Energy
Research (IFE), called the decision to
rush development of the Kårstø plant
“close to immoral.5”

"The higher power demands of plants using carbon capture require higher coal and other fossil fuel use. Thus the major localised environmental problems associated with extraction and transport of fossil fuels including habitat destruction, damage to rivers and waterways (from subsidence due to longwall mining),and air pollution will also increase."

There's plenty more...90% more water demands for CCS, and the recent projections that by 2015 we need to prevent emission increases in order to avoid irreversible changes...sorry, but CCS will not accomplish this, and it only feeds the rhetoric of the coal industry and their claims that we need more coal, legitimizing their attempts to build more plants that exponentially increase our emissions...oh, and the part about increased air pollution is also slightly alarming.

funny comment I found somewhere else

"Yup, the technology is here, it's viable, and it's 100% secure and free.

If we want to sequester CO2 emissions underground, all we need to do is to leave the coal underground. Do you see the genius? It's already sequestered! Let's just not unsequester it! Mountain top removal is ugly and expensive anyways, this is free!

Yay common sense! Yay leaving coal underground!"

"but windmills on every mountain ridge and across every landscapes are pretty blightish IMO. Solar panels and some of the toxins used in their production such as copper and arsenic, aren't too exciting either."...right, but no mountain-tops and mercury in your lungs is probably a fair compromise. This is just self-perpetuating non-sense.

and windmills on mountain ridges in Nebraska?

no in Illinois, just dug up wastelands, in the east mountain-top removal that is dumped into streams and valleys, in the south just some coal ash sludge that inundates an area every once in a while, and out west strip mines...so it's pretty equal on that front.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/2/15/151252/412
-Not the Yale study, but provides similar figures...also mentions a scientific american study that sets a target date at 2050. Google as well has their own proposition for 2030. Yale does have a site that highlights many reasons for not directing resources to CCS...I posted something else earlier but it didn't show up. I'll continue to post links but I've been at this for too long today.

"By eliminating or dismissing a domestic resource out of hand because of a bad history with the environment is admitting defeat and I think pursueing innovations like FutureGen is the definition of resolve."--sounds like the definition of naivite to me.

Eh, clean coal sucks anyway. I say kill it.