Comment & Debate
Greenpeace International, an environmental non-profit organization, stated the following in a May 2008 report authored by Emily Rochon et al., titled “False Hope: Why Carbon Capture and Storage Won’t Save the Climate,” available at www.greenpeace.org: “Capturing and storing carbon uses lots of energy, anywhere from 10-40% of a power station’s capacity. An energy penalty of just 20% would require the construction of an extra power station for every four built. These reductions in efficiency will require more coal to be mined, transported, and burned, for a power station to produce the same amount of energy as it did without CCS.”
Mark Disendorf, PhD, Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales, stated the following in his 2006 article “Can Geosequestration Save the Coal Industry?” published in Transforming Power: Energy as a Social Project: “Capturing CO2 from existing power stations requires the use of expensive equipment and large quantities of energy, thus reducing overall power station efficiency.”
Robert Bryce. “A bad bet on Carbon.” New York Times. May 12, 2010: “Let’s take the first problem. Capturing carbon dioxide from the flue gas of a coal-fired electric generation plant is an energy-intensive process. Analysts estimate that capturing the carbon dioxide cuts the output of a typical plant by as much as 28 percent. Given that the global energy sector is already straining to meet booming demand for electricity, it’s hard to believe that the United States, or any other country that relies on coal-fired generation, will agree to reduce the output of its coal-fired plants by almost a third in order to attempt carbon capture and sequestration.”