Can CCS save West Virginia Coal?
There is good reason to be skeptical about carbon-capture and sequestration as a savior for West Virginia coal. First of all, it is an unproven technology with serious technological hurdles (emphasis mine): 1. Cost: Coal plants with CCS are very expensive today. The total extra cost for this process, including geological storage in sealed underground sites, is currently quite high, $30 to $80 a ton of carbon dioxide, according to the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy, “Carbon Sequestration R&D Overview.” And that is on top of the cost of new coal plants, which have become very expensive. In the future, it seems rather unlikely that CCS would be a low-cost solution. [snip] Energy efficiency along with lots of low-carbon generation sources beat that easily now or will very soon. 2. Timing: The world does not even have a single large-scale (300+ MW) coal plant with CCS anywhere in the world. [snip] As Howard Herzog of MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment said in Fe
