Obama ready to begin carbon capture project
The Obama administration may be ready to make good a promise it made during the campaign to breathe new life into the nation’s first carbon-capture project.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an approach to mitigating the contribution of fossil fuel emissions to global warming, based on capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from large point sources such as fossil fuel power plants. The carbon dioxide can then be permanently stored away from the atmosphere.
The United States has abundant supplies of coal, as do many other parts of the world. Coal is an otherwise excellent fuel that has an unfortunate propensity for dumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is often regarded as an economical fuel for use in producing electric power, were it not for its gigantic carbon footprint.
The job of carbon capture has already started and has been set off in style with $3.4 billion from the stimulus plan. The Department Of Energy is expected to announce soon whether it will use $1 billion of that money to bring the FutureGen project back to life, according to a Kansas City Star article. FutureGen is a proposed coal-fired power plant in rural Illinois that could become be the first in the world to capture its carbon dioxide emissions and bury them deep underground, where they will not cause any harm to the atmosphere.
There has been a lot of buzz about carbon capture among universities and technology companies around the world. There have been pilot projects but, as yet, no full-scale test bed has been built. Experts say the technology is expensive and that projects like FutureGen are necessary to determine the best technology to use and how to lower the ultimate cost of the technology so that electricity production costs can be held down.
There seems to be consensus among industry groups, governments and researchers in many countries, and the Obama administration that carbon capture is one of the most promising ways to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and thus slow the effects of global warming. It would seem that the future of coal in the United States is tied to this technology, and that the time for carbon capture has finally arrived.
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