From Guest-Blogger Nick: Is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) the Best Way to Cut Carbon Emissions?

Most environmentally-oriented people know that the waste carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by combustion are the major factor heating up our planet’s atmosphere. A significant proportion of those emissions come from power stations burning coal or natural gas.  It has been proposed that all new power stations and older ones where feasible should be fitted with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) systems, where waste carbon is scrubbed from the exhaust and pumped somewhere to be stored, possibly under the North Sea in old oil fields.

 Government funding capture and storage systems

The government has opened up a £1billion competition for companies to demonstrate CCS at an industrial scale, rather than in the laboratory or small-scale prototypes.  The two winners are based in Peterhead, Scotland and Yorkshire, and will be attempting to capture 90% of carbon emissions from power plants.

 So what are the drawbacks?

This all sounds appealing, but there are some serious drawbacks to CCS.  Firstly, these processes use energy, “there is no such thing as a free lunch” – aka the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  They undoubtedly will add to the financial costs of energy generation.  They have not been proven yet, at a large scale, and nobody knows if you can story carbon dioxide forever in some kind of repository. If it leaks back into the atmosphere in a few years, CCS will be a failure.

 Introducing Carbon capture and utilisation

The other option, which has not received much attention, is Carbon Capture and Utilisation or CCU.  It has been described as “Recycling for Carbon”, in other words reusing the CO2, which is after all, a useful chemical, in other processes, in the same way as we recycle paper, plastics, metals. CO2 can be used to make plastics, chemicals, and even fuels such as diesel and petrol.  Germany, with its major chemical industry, has leapt on this potential new source of revenue, the German government investing €118M in a project with Bayer to research the use of carbon dioxide as a raw material.  However in Britain, although we have some of the most advanced laboratories exploring this subject, for example in the University of Sheffield, we have been slower at moving to industrial products. The UK will risk missing a significant opportunity to benefit from the commercialisation of this technology if it delays action.  If renewable energy was used to power the conversion then it would be a “beneficial circle” taking carbon out of the atmosphere.

In conclusion, there is another technology for capturing carbon and storing it, which might, instead of being a waste of money and energy, be actually both energy and financially positive for the UK.