On Monday, Greenpeace released a new report called "False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate." Here are the conclusions, as summarized by Ken Ward Jr.:
• Adequate technology is not expected to be commercially available until 2030, while leading climate experts say carbon dioxide emissions need to level off by 2015 to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.
• Coal-fired plant capacity is expanding so rapidly that as much as 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation in 2050 may not be technically suited for carbon capture and storage.
• Carbon capture and storage has not been tested at a scale needed for full-sized power plants, and designers of newly proposed plants have failed to integrate the “capture” equipment needed.
• The technology uses between 10 percent and 40 percent of the power plant’s energy capacity, meaning that wide-scale adoption would wipe out the efficiency gains of the past 50 years and increase resource consumption by one-third.
• Carbon capture and storage technology could double the operating cost of power plants and lead to electricity price hikes of between 21 percent and 91 percent.
The executive summary is here; full report here (both PDFs).
