Day 2: The Sequel (More on the CCS side event)

Warning: If you're not interested in the politics of pumping carbon dioxide underground, this entry will be very boring.

Politicians and scientists are both notorious for being bad at naming things. When you mesh them together in a conference like this, you get monstrous titles. Yesterday, I attended a side event called Carbon Capture and Storage Achievements and Opportunities for Developing Country Involvement. Say that ten times fast.

CCS (carbon capture and storage) covers a broad range of technologies designed to capture carbon emissions from the energy sector. They've only recently started moving to industrial applications--my extremely basic understanding is that the industrial sector is a whole different can of worms, and that it's more difficult to filter pure carbon from those worms.

The most common form of CCS takes carbon from oil refineries and injects it into existing formations, like useless reservoirs or seams of unmineable rock. Again, I have a pretty limited understanding of the hardware involved; I know that there are systems in place to capture carbon emitted during or after the combustion process. That carbon is pumped into temporary storage tanks, driven to drills or piped offshore, and injected underground.

Mike Marks, the CEO of SaskPower (the primary electricity provider for Saskatchewan) presented his CCS success story. SaskPower's favorite child is the Boundary Dam coal plant--it produces a net value of 120 megawatts, after accounting for the parasitic electricity needed to pipe away its emissions. It was the first CCS system to be attached to an existing coal plant, and it's a big win (if you want to keep making a profit using coal power).

I found it interesting that Marks was quick to justify his application of CCS. He didn't let the project stand on its inherent benefits--he explained his motivations. The Canadian government had applied new restrictions on carbon emissions and essentially give SaskPower an ultimatum: make coal power clean, or drop coal entirely. He implied that, had the government not intervened, business would have continued as usual. I'm thankful that the Canadian government was willing to impose such severe limitations on a private company. Looking at you, United States.

Other panelists included Tim Dixon, who's involved with R&D for the IEA's greenhouse gas division; Philip Ringrose, an employee of Statoil in Norway; and Katherine Romanak, specializing in economic geology with the University of Texas. Ringrose and Dixon each spent half their presentations emphasizing the safety of current sequestration sites. Their PowerPoints were consumed with cross-section pictures of rock and seismic imaging. Ringrose in particular emphasized that Statoil has been pumping carbon dioxide under the North Sea for 19 years, and "nothing bad" ever happened. He forgot to mention a pretty big leakage scare in the Sleipner gas field around 2009.

But, as far as I know, he's right. Gas fields occur naturally underground (you may have heard of this; it's called "natural gas") and the IEAGHG has published whole papers refuting the possibility of leakage. It's a rough life for a CCS expert. Despite the research, people remain suspicious, and with good reason. A release of highly pressurized supercritical carbon dioxide would be a catastrophe. The study of CCS is an endless argument about the likelihood versus the impact of a given risk.

Ringrose was also careful to correct people who called CCS "permanent" storage. He insisted that it be called "long term" and then spent two minutes backpedaling--of course, for legal reasons, nothing could be an iron-clad guarantee. He'd ramble about naturally formed gas fields that have existed for millennia and describe all their space-age monitoring equipment.

The most glaring problem I have with geological CCS is that it really shouldn't be a permanent long term solution. It's a great placeholder while we transition to renewable energy, but we can't keep pasting new tech on our limited resources. Fossil fuels are like a house with a rotten foundation: you can reinforce that foundation all you want, but it's fundamentally unstable. It might be safer to move to a different house.