Carbon Capture and Storage: A Corporate Boondoggle That Shortchanges Environment, Consumers, Says New Greenpeace Report

The technology seeks to capture carbon dioxide from power plants and store it underground. But, despite being unproven and expensive, coal and power companies are advertising the scheme as a solution to global warming in order to justify building new coal-fired power plants, the single largest contributor to global warming. The Greenpeace report, “False Hope: Why Carbon Capture and Storage Won’t Save the Climate,” calls on governments to invest in safe, clean and proven energy technologies like wind and solar to find a long-term solution to the climate crisis.

"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. “Governments and businesses need to reduce their emissions—not search for excuses to keep burning coal.”

Fraught with uncertainties about its effectiveness and cost, CCS technology is not expected to be commercially available until 2030, while the world’s leading climate experts have said global greenhouse gas emissions must peak no later than 2015 and be cut by at least half by 2050 to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. Thus, even if the technology proved viable, it wouldn’t be available until long after the window for meaningful action to halt global warming has closed. Even if CCS reaches commercial viability, coal-fired power plant capacity is expanding so rapidly that as much as 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from power generation in 2050 may not be technically suited to CCS.

The Greenpeace report also reveals the technology to be woefully inadequate on numerous other counts. First, the concept has not been successfully tested at a scale necessary for application to full size power plants. Second, designers have failed to integrate the carbon ‘capture’ and  ‘storage’ elements of the proposed technology, the central element of its success. Third, the technology uses between 10 to 40 percent of the power plant’s energy capacity. Wide scale adoption of CCS is expected to erase the efficiency gains of the past 50 years, and increase resource consumption by one third. For example, for every four CCS-equipped coal-fired power plants, a fifth would have to be added to make up for the new energy demands. Fourth, CCS could double the operating cost of power plants and lead to electricity price hikes estimated between 21 and 91 percent. Fifth, storing carbon dioxide underground carries significant risks. Long-term leakage rates as low as one percent could erase any benefit to the climate. Finally, the potential environmental impacts from carbon sequestration underground on land or at sea open a host of new liability issues.

Enthusiasm for CCS emerged after coal advocates could no longer deny the problem of global warming. Energy interests are pressuring governments to throw vast sums of public money at CCS. In the United States, legislation introduced on Capitol Hill (Climate Security Act, S. 2191) would allocate over a half trillion or more in U.S. dollars to a dedicated fund for CCS. The European Commission recently published hasty and ill-considered proposals for a draft Directive – an European Union law – on the geological storage of carbon dioxide. The Commission is under pressure from power and energy lobbies to provide financial incentives for CCS. Australian federal and state governments are devoting well over $1 billion to CCS and “clean coal” projects and Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources has created a $125 million fund to develop CCS.

Greenpeace is also opposed to the building of so-called “capture ready” power plants – conventional power stations that pump out millions of tons of carbon dioxide that power companies may or may not choose to invest in “capturing” at some time in the future.

“There is an immediate window for the U.S. to address the most urgent effects of global warming and CCS is a dangerous distraction from real solutions,” said Kate Smolski, legislative coordinator for Greenpeace USA. “To add insult to injury, Congress is attempting to further increase its subsidies to the coal industry by throwing additional taxpayer dollars at this risky technology.” Every dollar spent on CCS is a dollar not available for clean and proven technologies such as wind and solar.”

In contrast, Greenpeace believes that greatly improving energy efficiency and relying on renewable energy can halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Global renewable energy resources are sufficient to meet six times the world’s current energy demand. More than 85 non-governmental organizations have joined Greenpeace in demanding that CCS not be used as an excuse for building new coal-fired power plants.

For further information, please contact:

Jane Kochersperger, Media Officer, Greenpeace USA. Tel: + 1 202 680 3798

Andrew Kerr, Communication Project Manager, Greenpeace International. Tel: +31 6 4616 2020