Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/10/2014
AUSTIN, Texas—While significant progress has been made in last decade in the carbon capture and storage industry, more must be done to ensure the technology’s readiness to act as a major contributor to climate mitigation efforts in the future, Julio Friedmann, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Clean Coal in the Office of Fossil Energy at the Department of Energy, said during a keynote address at the International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Technologies, held here this week. "This has been a good decade, we’ve had, since 2004 a lot of activity and a lot of progress and that’s all good. The reason why is because in complex policy decisions like this, the technology actually leads the policy. The technology leads the deployment,” Friedmann said.
Friedmann noted that several small-scale projects that have been completed or are on-going in the industry will help build a knowledge base for the CCS innovations of the future. "These kinds of projects are actually the key unit of innovation. This is where we learn what we need to learn technically, economically and also how we finance these things. We codify regulations around projects like this,” he said, adding, “This edifice of knowledge built brick by brick really matters in terms of how the regulations move forward, how we draft policy, how pedestrians think about this technology and these sorts of things.”
Faster Development Needed for Larger-Scale Projects
However, Friedmann said, to further the development of CCS, large-scale demonstration projects must be developed at a faster pace. “In order to get to demonstrations we need large pilots first, we need to spend a substantial amount of money, investing in projects that will demonstrate these technologies at a larger scale, I’d say the 20 – 50 [megawatt] scale, a factor of 20 – 50 larger, in order to understand the pathway to commercialization,” he said.
There has been progress made on this front in the U.S., he noted, mentioning Southern Company’s Kemper County Energy Facility in Mississippi, due to come on-line late next year; the FutureGen 2.0 project in Illinois which is being funded in large part by federal stimulus funding; and the Archer Daniels Midland Illinois Industrial CCS project, which was recently awarded a Class VI Underground Injection Control permit for the injection of CO2. “That said, we’re not doing enough. We are no way doing enough,” he said. “We don’t have time for a victory lap. This is where we are today, although we’ve made tremendous progress not just in CCS but efficiency and solar and wind, renewables of all kind, land use, we have made terrific progress, but that progress has not really shown up in the atmosphere so much, we just need to do more,” Friedmann said.
Coal Isn’t Going Anywhere
Friedmann stressed the importance of CCS in a world that produces a large portion of its energy from fossil fuels. As it appears that that energy mix won’t change significantly any time soon, Friedmann said, it is important that CCS be developed to the point of commercial viability. “We’re using more coal than we used to, we’re using more gas than we used to, we’re using more oil than we used to, and we’re producing a lot more of all of these things at lower costs. This is going to be with us for a very long time, we are not approaching the end of coal, we are not approaching the end of fossil energy, quite the opposite,” he said. “It’s a required technology if you want to make deep emissions cuts. It must be part of the solution and part of the reason that’s the case is that it will be the lowest cost option in some market, not everywhere, but in some market CCS will be the lowest cost option.”
