Carbon sequestration frustration Burying carbon dioxide from coal-fired plants could increase other pollutants

To read the entire article from Science News please click here.....

Another reason why CCS does not make sense.......... it exists to keep Big Coal burning.

By Patrick Barry

Web edition : Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Text Size

As pollution bad guys go, carbon dioxide may be the media darling, but trying to capture it and lock it away could allow other repeat offenders to go free.

Power plant emissions that cause acid rain, water pollution and destruction of the ozone layer may actually be made worse by capturing the CO₂ and pumping it deep underground, a new study reported online and in an upcoming International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control suggests.

This increase of other emissions is largely because collecting and burying CO₂ — a process called carbon sequestration — requires additional energy, new equipment and new chemical reactions at the plants. And using current technology, meeting all of these requirements releases extra pollutants.

“Other studies mostly just look at one aspect, the carbon capture,” says study coauthor Joris Koornneef, an environmental scientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “This is a first step in trying to quantify the [environmental] trade-offs.”

Captured CO₂ must be compressed to about 100 times atmospheric pressure (which takes energy), transported to a suitable underground reservoir (which takes energy) and pumped into the ground (which takes energy). A coal-fired power plant that sequesters its CO₂ must burn about 30 percent more coal than conventional plants to cover these energy needs. And that extra coal must first be mined (which has environmental effects) and transported to the plant (which takes fuel) — the list goes on and on.

Even with this extra burden, a CO₂-burying plant emits between 71 and 78 percent less CO₂ than a normal coal-fired plant for each unit of usable electricity produced, Koornneef and his colleagues report. But when the researchers factored in all the “cradle to grave” pollution of a CO₂-burying plant, emissions of acid rain-causing gases like nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides were up to 40 percent greater than the total cradle-to-grave emissions of a modern plant that doesn’t capture its CO₂. Continue