GHG Daily
1/12/2016
The carbon capture and storage industry may never recover from its current slump if a “coordinated global portfolio” of projects is not developed, according to University of Cambridge researcher David Reiner. Reiner noted that the push for the rapid deployment of CCS that took place from 2005-09 has fallen off as the list of abandoned projects has grown.
“The lack of CCS projects that have emerged may say more about the seriousness with which nations have addressed climate change than about CCS technologies per se. Concerns about cost reduction dominate the industry and government views on how to proceed, but there has been precious little effort to revisit what constitutes an effective global portfolio in the face of greatly diminished individual national efforts,” Reiner wrote in an article published yesterday in the journal Nature Energy.
Reiner suggested that balance must be struck between developing projects by replicating proven technology — such as that used at SaskPower’s post-combustion Boundary Dam project in Saskatchewan, Canada — and developing projects aimed at increasing the diversity of the global CCS portfolio — such as efforts to develop an industrial CCS hub like that being planned by the Teesside Collective in the United Kingdom. Striking such a balance “will depend on finding ways to develop effective international coordination mechanisms and account for timing (and the inevitable delays and cancellations),” Reiner wrote.