Attached is a copy of the 190-page MIT Study on the Future of Coal, released Nov 1. It clearly endorses the principle of carbon capture and sequestration as a necessity, but points out in the bluntest possible terms the overwhelming scale of the undertaking and the pathetically inadequate efforts undertaken so far to achieve it. The statistics below, from a table at the beginning, offer compelling reasons to believe that it just aint gonna happen, at least not in a time frame that offers any prospect of meaningful mitigation of the effects of global warming.
Table in Exec. Summary at p. ix
Today fossil sources account for 80% of energy demand: Coal (25%), natural gas (21%), petroleum (34%), nuclear (6.5%), hydro (2.2%), and biomass and waste (11%). Only 0.4% of global energy demand is met by geothermal, solar and wind.1
50% of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal.2
There are the equivalent of more than five hundred, 500 megawatt, coal-fi red power plants in the United States with an average age of 35 years.2
China is currently constructing the equivalent of two, 500 megawatt, coal-fi red power plants per week and a capacity comparable to the entire UK power grid each year.3
One 500 megawatt coal-fired power plant produces approximately 3 million tons/year of carbon dioxide (CO2).3
The United States produces about 1.5 billion tons per year of CO2 from coal-burning power plants.
* If all of this CO2 is transported for sequestration, the quantity is equivalent to three times the weight and, under typical operating conditions, one-third of the annual volume of natural gas transported by the U.S. gas pipeline system.*
*If 60% of the CO2 produced from U.S. coal-based power generation were to be captured and compressed to a liquid for geologic sequestration, its volume would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.*
*At present the largest sequestration project is injecting one million tons/year of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Sleipner gas field into a saline aquifer under the North Sea.*3
Notes 1. IEA Key World Energy Statistics (2006) 2. EIA 2005 annual statistics (www.eia.doe.gov) 3. Derived from the MIT Coal Study