5 CCS Plants In US, EU Canceled To Date In 2011; Most Surviving Sites Associted W. Oil, Gas Drilling

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Whatever happened to clean coal? A global push to develop technology for capturing and burying carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants is faltering as governments and business bicker over who should pay R&D costs, and hopes recede that a global carbon market will pay for future operations. Public opposition is also growing.

The latest victim is a British scheme at Longannet, Europe's third-largest coal-fired power station. British ministers last week abandoned the scheme - which won a government funding competition initiated four years ago - because it would have cost too much. The government would not increase its £1 billion offer to pay the additional £562 million which industry collaborators Scottish Power and Shell wanted as contingency. The government says its money was still on offer for any alternative scheme.

The UK's abandonment of the Longannet project reflects a growing global trend. At an industry meeting on carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Beijing, China, last month, the Global CCS Institute, which monitors the nascent industry, said that five projects had been called off in the US and Europe in the past year. Most surviving schemes are associated with fossil-fuel drilling sites – not power plants – and have as their main purpose using CO2 to flush oil and gas out of old wells, the institute said, rather than curbing CO2 emissions. Only two CCS plants are currently under construction at power stations: one in Mississippi and one in Canada.

In Beijing, Steven Chu, Barack Obama's green-minded energy secretary, warned: "We are losing time. It is very important that we get moving." The US government's own FutureGen clean-coal pilot project stalled when George W. Bush's administration pulled the plug and ordered a rethink in 2008. Under Obama, a test well is now being drilled into salt rocks beneath Illinois, but the first carbon won't be buried until 2016 at the earliest.

EDIT

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20761-uks-carboncapture-failure-is-part-of-a-global-trend.html