Carbon capture and storage a ‘scam’ says international report

30,000 Australians echoed the report’s sentiments by signing a petition to Treasurer Wayne Swan calling for their taxes to be invested in renewables rather than fossil fuels. Greenpeace this morning (Monday 5 May) filled a giant Perspex wind turbine with thousands of signed postcards and delivered it to Treasury in Canberra (2).

“We know we need to urgently cut greenhouse emissions and we know we don’t have much time to do it in,” said Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s head of campaigns Stephen Campbell. “It is beyond dispute that CCS cannot play a role in cutting emissions within this timeframe so why is the federal government ploughing money into CCS at the expense of the technologies that work right now? Public funding should go into further developing and rolling out solar, wind and other renewable energy technologies, not this distraction that allows ‘pollution-as-usual’.”

The unproven technology for capturing the global warming gas carbon dioxide from power station smokestacks and then dumping it underground is still on the drawing board. However, the concept is being exploited by coal and power companies to justify building new coal-fired power plants, the single largest contributors to climate change, says the report.

"Carbon capture and storage is a scam. It is the ultimate coal industry pipe dream,” said the report’s author, Emily Rochon, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace International. “It is insanity verging on criminal negligence to pass over clean energy and pin hopes on an unproven technology. Governments and businesses need to reduce their emissions not search for excuses for continuing to burn coal.”

Fraught with uncertainties over practicality and cost, CCS technology is not expected to be commercially available before 2030. If CCS ever becomes a mature technology, it will be too late to play a role in combating climate change over the crucial next few years, or even decades. The consensus among climate experts is that global greenhouse gas emissions must be reducing after 2015.

Futile investments in CCS are starving existing renewable energy technologies of much-needed funds. In Australia, 28 times more public money is currently spent on encouraging fossil fuel use than is invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The Rudd government is set to hand a further $500 million to a ‘clean coal’ fund in its first budget.

The Greenpeace report shows that CCS falls short on numerous counts. Carbon capture technology has not been made to work on anything approaching the scale needed for a full-scale power plant. And no one has yet successfully combined the ‘capture’ with the ‘storage’ elements of the concept. The increased energy requirements of CCS would effectively wipe out the power plant efficiency gains of the last 50 years. For every four CCS-equipped coal-fired power plants, a fifth would be needed to make up the energy shortfall. CCS could also double plant costs and lead to electricity price hikes estimated between 21 and 91 per cent. Storing CO2 underground also carries significant risks. Long-term leakage rates as low as one per cent could cancel out any climate benefit. The potential environmental impacts also open up entirely new issues of liability.

Even if CCS reaches commercial viability, coal-fired power plant capacity is expanding so rapidly that as much as 70 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions from power generation in 2050 may not be technically suited to CCS.

In contrast, Greenpeace’s Energy Revolution scenario (3) shows that greatly improving energy efficiency and relying on renewable energy could halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the timeframe for preventing the worst impacts of climate change. Global renewable energy resources are sufficient to meet the world’s energy needs six times over.

Greenpeace Australia Pacific and 30,000 Australians are calling for a public enquiry into subsidies to fossil fuel industries. Next week’s budget will be a test for the federal government to end the Howard tradition of subsidising fossil fuels by redirecting them to the renewable energy and energy efficiency measures that can deliver immediate emission reductions.