Editorial: Carbon Capture & Sequestration: Just More of the Same
03/17/2009
By Bart King
"Out of sight, out of mind" is the time-honored method of dealing with waste. It includes open dumps on the outskirts of villages and massive urban landfills like New York City's Fresh Kills, which is the largest man-made structure on earth, surpassing in volume even the Great Wall of China. This attitude is responsible not only for the cigarette flicked out the car window and garbage dumped in the ocean, but also for crackpot schemes to blast trash into outer space and bury radioactive materials for thousands of years.
But waste doesn't stay out of sight. It returns front-and-center as contaminated ground water; diseases like dysentery and cancer; or a seagull with a plastic six-pack ring looped around its neck. Global population growth continues to intensify the problem, creating more waste and fewer places to hide it. And unless humanity begins learning to live without waste, we will eventually be up to our ears in trash.
Global warming could be the wake-up call we need to change our ways. Some of us are still in groggy denial, but world leaders are rising to the idea that man-made greenhouse gases, which have been conveniently disappearing from tailpipes and smokestacks into the atmosphere for decades, are beginning to cause visible and disastrous effects.
However, many of these leaders seem bound and determined to try the same old trick--gather up the waste and hide it away. I'm talking about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Depending on whom you talk to, CCS is either the solution to our climate change worries or a dangerous waste of time and money.
CCS has yet to be employed on a commercial scale, but governments and corporations around the world are beginning to experiment with different technologies that can trap the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide before it escapes the smokestacks of power plants and refineries. Then the gas is to be pumped deep underground for indefinite storage.
The federal stimulus bill passed by the U.S. Congress last month includes $3.4 billion for CCS, and major power companies like Duke Energy, Southern Company and American Electric Power have shovel-ready projects in North Carolina, Mississippi and West Virginia respectively. The Department of Energy is also considering reviving FutureGen, a commercial-scale demonstration project in Illinois that was cancelled last year by the Bush administration due to inflating costs. Overseas, Germany and China already have operating demonstration projects, and others are planned in Norway, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
The criticisms of CCS are numerous and legitimate: it is incredibly expensive; it reduces the energy output of power plants; it is potentially unsafe; it is an excuse to continue mining and burning dirty fossil fuels; funds would be better spent on clean energy; and if it does work, it cannot be employed quickly enough.
But perhaps the biggest problem with CCS is that it represents a continuation of old, irresponsible habits. By continuing to sweep the dirt from our fossil-fueled lives under the rug, we postpone making necessary changes that will allow us to continue living on earth, even as the global population swells by an estimated 2.25 billion people over the next 30 years. The planet has limited capacity to absorb our messes, and some would argue that we have already surpassed that capacity. Regardless, we must find a way to lighten our tread upon the earth very soon, and if global climate change isn't motivation enough, I fear nothing will be.
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Bart King is News Editor of SustainableBusiness.com. This column is available for syndication.
Contact bart@sustainablebusiness.com.