Learning to live with fossil fuels

The international Global Energy Technology Strategy Program predicts that, with increasing economic activity, energy demands could more than triple over the course of this century. Even with energy diversification, efficiencies and emission reductions, the world’s abundant fossil-fuel resources will remain the largest source of energy throughout this century and into the next.

More than 8,100 facilities worldwide already release more than 26 gigatons — that’s 26 billion metric tons — of carbon dioxide each year. Even more fossil-fuel capacity will come on ine over the next two decades to replace aging and less-efficient units and to meet growing electricity demands. Without dramatic technology and policy changes to curtail emissions, greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to rise to unprecedented levels.
So we have increasing fossil-fuel use but no large-scale solutions in place to address the inevitable impacts. It will take a Herculean effort to derail this potential train wreck, but it can be done. We need a “bridge” solution: an intense, accelerated, worldwide effort to manage the carbon cycle, dramatically reducing greenhouse gases from fossil fuels now while alternative sources catch up.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has outlined a broad portfolio of technological and human solutions to climate change. One of the most promising approaches is capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and storing it underground.

Carbon capture and storage systems offer the potential for continuing to use the Earth’s ample fossil-fuel resources while keeping the carbon-dioxide output from reaching the atmosphere. Under this approach, carbon dioxide is captured from power plants and other industrial sources, transported to reservoirs deep underground and monitored over the long term.

The best sites are geological storage formations that lie thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface, are far away from drinking-water sources, contain coarse-grained rock with pores where carbon dioxide can be stored, and are topped by impermeable caprocks that keep trapped carbon from escaping over time.

Properly sited, engineered and managed geological reservoirs could retain more than 99 percent of stored carbon dioxide for more than 1,000 years, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

Because of scientific and economic uncertainties, commercial deployment is in its infancy. More than 99 percent of the world’s existing electric-power-generation operations have not yet adopted carbon capture and storage systems, nor have the vast majority of new power plants that are being built or on the drawing board.

Seattle Times