Making Carbon Capture and Storage Work

President Obama faces an old challenge of creating a national energy policy. That policy will be designed with multiple objectives in mind. After a year of record oil prices that added to U.S. economic troubles, some want an energy policy that will maintain lower energy prices. With nearly 150,000 troops still in Iraq and tensions raised with Russia over the Georgian invasion, some want an energy policy that will reduce American dependence on fossil fuel imports from these and other geopolitically sensitive regions. And with atmospheric carbon dioxide now more than 385 parts per million and rising, some want an energy policy that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter focuses on how the United States can accomplish the third objective, reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. I argue that demonstration and deployment of technologies to capture carbon dioxide from large stationary sources, storing the waste CO2 in geological formations, is likely to be an essential component of any carbon reduction strategy, both for the United States and for the world, and is also consistent with economic and security concerns. It also reviews the major technical challenges involved with widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage, and discusses policies that would lead to the specific goal of capturing and storing the CO2 from all large stationary sources by the middle of this century. Several excellent reviews of carbon capture and storage have appeared in recent years, in particular the MIT report on The Future of Coal and the IPCC