One Reply to CCS Critics
The Conversation Website
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Getting Carbon Capture Right Will Be Hard But It Does Not Make It Optional
The UK government has given the go-ahead to carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) schemes worth £22 billion (US$28.6 billion). Critics are insisting that this technology – which involves capturing carbon as it is emitted or taking it back out of the atmosphere, then pumping it into rocks deep underground – is unsafe, unproven and unaffordable. Defenders are responding with painstaking rebuttals.
The questions we should be asking are: will enough “green hydrogen” – produced from water using renewable electricity – be available to power all the industries that will need it, given all the other new demands on the electricity grid? Will we still need gas as a back-up to deal with the vagaries of the weather in a renewable-dominated grid? Can we get by entirely on recycled steel, and eliminate the use of conventional cement in construction (steel and cement are notoriously hard to produce without generating CO₂)?
If the answer to any of these questions, anywhere in the world, turns out to be “no” – or even “not by 2050” – then we need CCS.
Read Article Here
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