On this day (May 2nd) in 2012 the UK government announced a “Carbon Capture andStorage” Cost Reduction Taskforce which would
“to advise the government and industry on the steps needed to reduce the cost of CCS, so that it could compete with other low carbon technologies in the 2020s.” (see also this press release).
CCS has long been the get-out-of-jail-free card for industry (esp oil and gas) and a lot of time and money has been spent on it. But it still ain’t here. Maybe this time will be different…
Why this matters
We need to remember that these salvationary technologies have fallen over repeatedly, and ask ourselves “gee, maybe we could focus on, you know, just using hella lot less energy?”
What happened next
CCS fell over, got picked up and dusted off, and is again flavour of the month.
On 25th of February 2007, with the Australian – yes back to Australia – federal election, a matter of months away. newly-minted opposition leader Kevin Rudd and his shadow Environment Minister Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil are out there spruiking “A National Clean Coal Initiative.”
This the ALP needed because otherwise they couldn’t win Queensland, a major coal exporter. Clean coal had been a persistent theme or trend or meme – or bullshit, to use the Anglo-Saxon terminology – for 10 years. Nine years minus a day earlier, a clean coal CRC had been set up.
“Anon. 1998. Tests for green coal. Daily Telegraph, 26 February.
RESEARCH laboratories where scientists will work to make Australian coal the “cleanest” in the world, will be opened by Premier Bob Carr today. The Ian Stewart Wing of the chemical engineering laboratories at Newcastle University form part of the co-operative research centre for black coal utilisation. The centre, partially government funded, was established in 1995 to carry out world class research to maximise the value and performance of Australian black coal resources.”
The unions were in favour of clean coal, certain elite business, environmental NGOs like WWF were at least making the right noises. Because otherwise you can’t make the numbers add up. Apparently, you can’t unless you radically reduce emissions in the first place which is going to cause economic pain and dislocation and interrupt the “we can have our cake and eat it story” that politicians need to tell.
What happened next
Well, Rudd got elected. Garrett was a minister in his government before having to take the blame for pink bats. Garrett wrote a very good book about his time blue sky something and then returned to being the lead singer of Midnight Oil. I won’t repeat what Kevin Rudd got up to.
On this day, Jan 19, in 2015 “four of Europe’s biggest power utilities, represented in Brussels by Eurelectric, have decided to leave the European Commission’s CCS Technology Platform ZEP.“
The four were Germany’s RWE AG, France’s Electricite de France, Sweden’s Vattenfall AB and Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa.
The ZEP had been set up in the mid-2000s as “a coalition of companies, scientists and environmental groups seeking ways to capture and bury heat-trapping carbon emissions mainly from the exhausts of coal, oil and gas-fired power plants.”
“Of the move, Bellona Europa Director Jonas Helseth said: – In their poorly concealed attempts to attain capacity payments, Europe’s utilities have misused the trust of the European Commission and Europe’s CCS community. It’s shameless how Eurelectric proudly announces the formation of a new CCS taskforce and ‘calls on policymakers to push ahead’, while simultaneously pulling out of Europe’s largest and widest coalition working on CCS.”
What happened next
Is there any CCS?
Why this matters.
We keep assuming we can deploy these technologies at massive scale, rapidly, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s one of the ways we avoid looking at how much some of us are emitting. There is trouble ahead.
