Carbon Storage Still a Decade Away, Expert Says

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MORGANTOWN — A $3.4 billion chunk of this month’s federal stimulus package boosts carbon capture and storage research, but the technology some hope will clean coal’s greenhouse gas emissions remains far in the future.

“Certainly the money is moving us in the right direction — it may provide a little more push to the accelerator,” said John Grasser, communications director at the federal Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy.

Still, “the time frame for widespread commercial availability of these technologies — so a utility, if they’re building a power plant, could incorporate this as off-the-shelf technology — we’re using the time frame of roughly 2020 to 2025,” Grasser said. “So we’re about 10 to 15 years away.”

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies now under study are expected to play an important role in West Virginia’s economic future.

CCS already is used in a different, smaller-scale application: Carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases emitted when coal and other fossil fuels are burned, is injected into an oil reservoir, pushing out and taking the place of the oil.

But the grand-scale capture of carbon dioxide and its deliberate, essentially permanent storage underground or in the ocean where it cannot warm the planet are still under study by the DOE.

If CCS turns out to be possible at a commercial scale, coal is expected to remain an economically viable fuel after the government places a cap on greenhouse gas emissions — a measure that is widely expected to pass and go into effect within several years.

Coal states like West Virginia may be able to continue to rely on coal for significant parts of their economies.

If commercial-scale CCS turns out to be a pipe dream — if the gases leak rather than remain sequestered underground, or if they stay underground but only in rare formations, or if the costs prove to be prohibitive — then those coal states will take a crippling economic hit when greenhouse gas emissions are limited.

Just about all of the $3.4 billion aimed at fossil energy research in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will go toward carbon sequestration, Grasser said.

Of that, $1 billion will go toward unspecified fossil energy research and development programs.

The remainder is more closely targeted to CCS: $1.52 billion for a new competitive solicitation for industrial carbon capture and energy efficiency improvement projects; $800 million for the DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative, an ongoing power plant demonstration program; $50 million for a competitive solicitation for geologic sequestration site characterization; $20 million for geologic sequestration training and research grants; and $10 million for program direction funding.

Put in its entirety toward CCS, the funding would increase federal support for CCS by 70 percent, to more $8 billion, according to Carbon Capture Journal.

Asked about the time gap between possible near-term establishment of a greenhouse gas emissions cap and longer-term development of CCS technologies, Grasser noted that cap proposals typically start gently and ratchet down over time.

The Boucher-Dingell climate change legislation that found significant support in 2008, for example, proposed a 6 percent reduction from 2005 emissions by 2020, with steeper reductions coming only after the 2020 CCS technology time frame.