Road to recovery

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), the process of recovering CO2 from large-scale emitters and burying it deep beneath the ground, is increasingly seen as mankind’s best hope of averting runaway climate change.

However, according to a new report from the government’s Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL), concerns over the safe transport of CO2 need to be addressed if the technology is to fulfil its potential.

Advocates of CCS say that decoupling fossil-fuel use from CO2 emissions will enable mankind to continue to use oil, gas and coal without triggering runaway climate change. However, writing recently in The Engineer, Imperial College’s Prof Jon Gibbins, one of the UK’s foremost CCS experts, warned that, in order to get to this situation, the technology needs to be developed and deployed far more rapidly than is currently the case. Today, all of the world’s CCS plants are, effectively, demonstration schemes. Vattenfall’s 30MW plant at Schwarze Pump in Germany was the first to begin operating in 2008 and several other pilot projects are at varying stages of development. Here in the UK, a proposed 900MW CCS plant in Hatfield, Yorkshire, recently won EC backing, while the government has pledged that no new coal-fired power plants will be built without CCS technology fitted.