Report Lauds Benefits of Capturing Carbon Dioxide at Source
Posted on: Thursday, 29 September 2005, 12:00 CDT
By Andrew C. Revkin
Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide generated by power plants and factories could play an important role in limiting global warming caused by humans, says an international climate research group associated with the United Nations.
The group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says in a report that doing so could cut the cost of stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere as much as 30 percent, compared with other options, like switching to cleaner technologies.
Altogether, sequestering carbon dioxide could eventually account for slightly more than half of what is needed to prevent dangerous concentrations in the atmosphere, says the report, which was released Monday and is online at www.ipcc.ch.
But the report cautions that while the method is cheaper than others, it would significantly raise the cost of electricity for many years. For that reason, several authors and UN officials said, it is unlikely that the technique would be adopted voluntarily by industries in wealthy countries.
"First, there has to be a policy in place to provide the incentive" to adopt such technologies, said Bert Metz, a Dutch environmental official who was the lead author of the report.
Carbon dioxide is the main heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe emission linked by scientists to a prolonged global warming trend.
The report says the most promising methods for capturing and storing the gas are those already in use in Canada, Norway and Algeria, where some industries inject it into wells.
But many power plants are not located over rock layers, which can serve as a long-term repository for the gas. In such instances, the carbon dioxide would have to be piped or transported, raising the cost.
The report also said there were many unanswered questions about how much gas might be stored.
"A lot of people, including myself, would like to think you can do everything with renewables and energy efficiency, with photovoltaic panels and wind turbines and more sensible urban planning and so on," said one author, Kenneth Caldeira, a staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology at Stanford University.
"The reality of it is," Caldeira added, "that the energy in fossil fuels is too attractive and cheap right now to give them up completely."
Source: International Herald Tribune
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