Cleaning up it’s act?

The Schwarze pump power station in Northern Germany will soon making a little piece of industrial history. This mini power plant is a pilot project for carbon capture and storage (CCS), the first coal-fired plant in the world ready to capture and store its own CO2 emissions.

This is how it works:

A cloud of pure oxygen will be breathed into the boiler. The flame will be lit. Then a cloud of powdered lignite will be injected. The outcome will be heat, water vapour, impurities, nine tonnes of CO2 an hour, and a landmark in clean technology.

Because the CO2 will then be separated, squashed to one 500th of its original volume and squeezed into a cylinder ready to be transported to a gas field and forced 1,000m below the surface into porous rock where it should stay until long after mankind has stopped worrying about climate change.

Big questions however hang still need to be answered regarding the technology overall, but particularly over where the CO2 will be stored and who will pay the high costs of building and running the CCS plants. Greenpeace is among the environmental groups expressing reservations.

“Our concern is that this technology is used to justify the construction of more coal power plants,” says Tobias Munchmeyer. “It’s too expensive, it will come too late and it will divert money from the real solutions, renewable energies and energy efficiency.”

The EU wants to see 10-12 full-scale power plants demonstrating CO2 capture within the next few years. But although a number of other firms will soon join the race with pilot projects, no full-scale CCS coal plant has yet been commissioned. The British government has promised a decision in October on how it will fund a full-scale CCS in the UK.

“We need CCS urgently because the world is building a whole new generation of coal power plants and unless we find out whether this technology operates at scale and we can make these plants zero-carbon in the future, those will be a liability,” says Nick Mabey of the think-tank e3g.

Whether the politicians and the citizens of “western” countries are prepared to use this technology which will inevitably mean paying a higher price for it remains to be seen,  we in the west do have a habit of abandoning our “principles” such as our commitment to reducing Co2 when we realise that the price of such a commitment is higher fuel bills.

The real test of CCS, though, is not in Europe. It’s in developing countries such as China who are building power stations, firstly to share this technology and secondly whether countries like China will accept this technology and the associated costs that go with it.