Solar Energy Show

Copyright 2021, The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon This week we’re talking about carbon capture and storage, or CCS (sorry, these TLAs are not my fault). Here’s why carbon capture and storage is a hot topic. If we could only capture the CO2 that is emitted when we burn fossil fuels, we could keep burning fossil fuels forever. Hooray - especially if you’re in any business related to fossil fuels, which is a pretty big chunk of our economy. Taking it one step further, if we could capture the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere, we could potentially reverse the earth’s global warming trend. CCS is a fairly straightforward technology, and has been in use for about a hundred years. Billions of investment dollars have been going into scaling up various CCS processes for decades. CCS works best at the source of emissions, such as electric power plants and industrial processes (making steel and cement). When I look at CCS from a thermodynamic, economic and technological maturity standpoint, it is a dead end. Here