Live carbon capture and storage Q&A
22 October 2015
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology extracts the waste carbon dioxide from power plants before storing it deep below the earth’s surface. Supporters claim that CCS can capture 90% of the CO2 produced from burning coal and gas, while the IPCC has highlighted the considerable potential of CCS for mitigating greenhouse gas levels over the coming century.
But CCS certainly isn’t the finished article. Only a handful of CCS systems of commercial scale are currently in operation globally, and numerous projects have been scrapped in the last few years. Opponents argue that CCS is too costly, encourages fossil fuel burning, and diverts money away from other avenues of carbon mitigation. Some have also raised concerns over the reliability of the carbon stores: what happens if they leak
On the Thursday 22nd October, our expert panel (Dr Niall MacDowell, Dr Clair Gough, Professor Colin Snape, and Mrs Michelle Bentham) answered public questions about carbon capture and storage. Read what they came up with here: http://bit.ly/ccsQandA
If you have any questions for our energy panel you can send them via Twitter, @senseaboutsci using #energypanel, email us at energy@senseaboutscience.org or use our online form.
Image by Vattenfall (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Source: Sense About Science
