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Dear Josh,
The Australian financial Review reports that you intend to allow the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to finance carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology applied to coal-fired power stations – so-called ‘clean coal’. The problem with this notion is that the CEFC was created to only finance clean energy projects, and clean-coal technology is only clean when compared to a conventional coal-fired power station; however, it’s not actually clean; it just ineffectually hides the greenhouse gas pollution that it creates. As the CEFC was created to only finance clean energy projects, it must not be used to finance CCS.
There are a few fundamental problems with CCS:
When CCS is used a greater quantity of coal (approximately 30% more) is required to produce the same amount of electricity, because the CCS process is energy intensive. This means that the amount of carbon dioxide produced is greater, the cost of electricity is greater, the amount of a finite resource (coal) used is greater, the pollution associated with mining and transporting the coal (including greenhouse gas pollution) is greater, and the environmental and social consequences of mining the coal are greater.
The usual proposal for sequestering the captured carbon dioxide is to store it in geological formations deep under the ground. Building large, expensive CCS infrastructure with a long break-even period will commit us to using coal for a very long time, and yet it’s obvious that there is only a finite supply of suitable geological formations. It’s unlikely that there are sufficient suitable geological formations to store the many years-worth of carbon dioxide that we will produce if we continue to rely on fossil fuels to meet our always-growing energy requirements.
But the big problem with CCS is the security of the underground storage.
Dr Richard Aldous, the CEO of CO2CRC, notes in The Conversation that “carbon dioxide storage sites are continuously assessed and monitored to ensure leakage does not occur.” which indicates that he accepts that storage sites are not 100% secure. He also notes that the storage sites must trap the carbon dioxide for “thousands or millions of years”. “Millions of years” must be a nominal term that really indicates “forever” because, unlike nuclear waste, this vast quantity of carbon dioxide will never become safe, and must monitored for leaks forever.
We will be utterly reliant on the inherent integrity of underground storage of carbon dioxide. As the carbon dioxide will always be a threat to our climate we must be sure that it will remain sequestered forever. There will never be a time when a leak is without dangerous consequences – not in decades, hundreds of years, or even millions of years. It will always present a risk with a large consequence, a risk that will never reduce. While the likelihood of a leak is low, risk analysis tells us that, as the consequence of a leak is catastrophic, and the time frame is infinite, the risk is extreme.
One of the issues with nuclear-generated power is that we must manage the resulting nuclear waste for thousands of years; however, sequestered carbon dioxide is much worse: the management is more complex, and we must manage it forever. Using CCS assumes that our society will be stable enough to do this forever, which is a ridiculous assumption. Managing these deposits is a burden that we have no right to place on future generations and is a risk that we have no right to take for all life on Earth.
If we are to use underground sequestration genuinely and honestly, not only must we continually monitor it to detect any leaks from the storage, we must also develop reliable procedures for sealing those leaks when they occur. A substantial leak will be immediately dangerous as it will suffocate any animals, including humans, that it engulfs, and in the longer term it will cause climate change. To proceed with CCS without developing these processes and procedures would be as irresponsible as drilling for oil in deep water without having effective procedures to seal off a leaking oil well immediately.
CCS is not a real solution to the climate-change consequences of our energy usage – it actually increases the amount of carbon dioxide we will produce and then attempts to hide it in a risky manner. We must not continue to invest in coal-fired electricity generation of any sort, as this commits us to the consequences of using coal for at least several decades, not just the climate consequences, but the broad range of negative impacts that result from the use of coal. We need to stop using coal for energy and put our resources into real solutions to our energy needs – those solutions are renewable energy, energy conservation, and a steady-state (no-growth) economy that will limit the amount of energy that we need.
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