Breakthrough

Greenpeace just released a new report that it claims "proves once and for all that 'clean coal' is nothing more than a slogan aimed at greenwashing the image of an irremediably dirty energy source." From their press release:

Greenpeace's new report systematically debunks all of the coal industry's claims about CCS, demonstrating that we have no time to waste on this dubious technology if we are to avert the most drastic effects of global warming.

"Carbon capture and storage is a scam. It is the ultimate coal industry pipe dream," said the report's author, Emily Rochon, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace International. "Governments and businesses need to reduce their emissions--not search for excuses to keep burning coal."

But Greenpeace misrepresents a strong scientific consensus about CCS. Every international body that has looked into CCS - including the IPCC - has concluded that it will be essential to climate stabilization, according to a literature review (PDF) done by the Clean Air Task Force (CATF).

The Greenpeace study calls underground storage of carbon dioxide "risky," and a video put out by Rainforest Action Network (available via Grist) warns that, "If the CO2 deposits ever escaped - ever, for any reason, in the entire rest of the history of the world - it would be the worst environmental catastrophe we have ever seen."

But according to the IPCC Special Report on CCS, the benefits of CCS far outweigh the minuscule risks of leakage:

Observations from engineered and natural analogues as well as models suggest that the fraction retained in appropriately selected and managed geological reservoirs is very likely to exceed 99% over 100 years and is likely to exceed 99% over 1,000 years. For well-selected, designed and managed geological storage sites, the vast majority of the CO2 will gradually be immobilized by various trapping mechanisms and, in that case, could be retained for up to millions of years. Because of these mechanisms, storage could become more secure over longer timeframes.

The fact is that the majority of serious studies on the matter have concluded that rapid deployment of CCS must be a central tenet of any sound global energy policy. The only study in the CATF literature review that wavered somewhat from this conclusion was far from the mainstream. From the review:

[The study] does not deny CCS's potential importance, but assumes efficiency increases and biomass deployment that differ substantially from most other researchers' estimates of practical potential and appears not to reflect substantial uncertainties surrounding the net CO2 effects of large scale biomass development.

The Greenpeace study concludes that "the world already has the solutions to the climate crisis." But as a number of studies (including a piece co-authored by Breakthrough Senior Fellow Roger Pielke, Jr. in the journal Nature last month) suggest that the climate crisis is at least twice as large as the world has come to believe. Due to rapid development in places like China (which recently announced its energy use was 15 percent higher in 2006 than it had projected for 2010), it appears that the world as a whole is recarbonizing. Previous analyses that assumed decarbonization -- including the famous Princeton "stabilization wedges" -- predicted that we would need seven "wedges," each corresponding to one gigaton of carbon reduction per year worldwide through 2050. Recent research suggests we'll actually need two or three times that number of wedges. Joe Romm, with whom we've had our share of disagreement in the past, argues that we need a full wedge just from CCS.

If that's the case, it seems unlikely that we'll be able to address the climate crisis if we're limited to only existing technologies. We share Greenpeace's sense of urgency about the need to immediately deploy existing technologies like wind power, but we're going to need all that and more. As the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers - the challenge is too great to ignore technologies like CCS.