Thanks for the numbers regarding funding for nukes and renewables. Encouraging to me. As appealing as wind and solar are, it gets dark pretty reliably each day, and the wind doesn’t always blow when you want it to. A nuke can be kept on boil 24/7.
I would suspect that we know nuke is expensive, because we have a significant body of experience with commercial nukes. We don’t have a large body of experience with “clean coal”, or “carbon capture”. It is a possibility those attempts to keep the coal industry alive will turn out much like DoD contracts these days: massive delays and massive cost overruns, as we work our way up the learning curve. Keeping the coal industry alive has bi-partisan support. I remember the “community activist” extolling the virtues of “clean coal” 15 years ago.
The other issue to address is the for-profit utility company’s tendency to take shortcuts wrt training and maintenance. They have not exactly covered themselves with glory over the last 50 years, but, somehow, the nuke technology gets the blame, rather than Shiny management. Anyone think they can trust for-profit management to keep “carbon capture” systems in working order?
We don’t know that. It is like saying fusion power is cheaper than existing fission power plants. We don’t know how fusion compares economically, because there aren’t any fusion power plants in operation yet. We don’t know what the actual, real costs are going to be. Same goes for CCS.
In the few current CCS examples that exist, the CO2 is usually sent to oil and gas fields for enhanced fossil fuel recovery. That’s right. The CO2 is pumped underground for the purpose of extracting even more fossil fuels out of the ground! How does that get us to net zero? We don’t know the real costs of sequestering a billion tonnes of CO2 every year. The US electric power industry currently produces 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. Suppose a power plant isn’t located near a oil or gas producing area? What then? Build a pipeline? At what cost?
There is one power plant just over the border with Canada that is supposed to capture 90% of its CO2 emissions. The actual, real world percentage is more like 57%.
From the link… A signature carbon capture and storage project in Saskatchewan continues to miss emissions reduction goals, raising questions about the cost-effectiveness of the technology, says a report.
“We don’t think carbon capture works as well as industry and promoters claim,” said David Schlissel, an analyst who wrote the report for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an international non-profit agency.
“We don’t think it’s a good use of money to keep coal-fired power plants running.”
And… When all the plant’s emissions are factored in, including flue gas that is simply vented, the average capture rate is 57 per cent, he said.
A 2022 report delivered to an international conference on carbon capture backs up the findings.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
You may be interested to know the CO2 from the Boundary Dam plant is sent to the Weyburn oil field in Saskatchawan for Enhanced Oil Recovery uses. That doesn’t sound very green to me.
Utilities have known about these requirements for years.
The utilities that object can just shutdown their coal fired power plants and not operate them past 2039. New nat gas power plants are easier to deal with CO2 emissions. Only 20 states objected to the requirements while the others agreed with the requirements.
I’m confused. CCS is just like fusion. It doesn’t exist, so we don’t know what the real costs will be…yet in your next paragraph you say we have working examples of CCS in operation. So how come we can’t estimate the costs? Were all the financial records destroyed?
My apologies for trying to fit too much information into a small writing space. I will try to elaborate in more detail.
First of all, I was referring to power plants. Most facilities using CCS are not power plants, but things like natural gas processing plants and ethanol production plants. I’m no expert, but I believe the technology needed for a power plant is somewhat different.
Secondly, of the power plant examples that do exist in North America, I already referred to one in Canada that is not working as originally expected. The only other power plant I am familiar with is the Petra Nova facility in Texas. The Petra Nova CCS was shut down in 2020 due to economics, but evidently restarted operations last year. It should be noted that Petra Nova is not a full-scale operation, as it only captures part of the CO2 in a slip-stream operation. Of the CO2 that is captured, it is sent to the oil fields for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR).
If CCS is to ever be economical and reduce net CO2 emissions, then it needs to capture a high percentage of CO2 from the entire power plant (not a slip-stream). Also, the CCS needs to pump the gas underground for no other purpose than to permanently dispose of it. I am not aware of any power plant anywhere that does that. Using the gas for EOR changes the whole economics, because the CO2 then has a value in aiding the recovery of fossil fuels. But, as I have already stated, EOR isn’t very climate friendly.
If there are some better examples of disposal-only CCS from a power plant in Europe or perhaps Asia, I would be happy to learn about it.