Relating CCS and Fukushima

In a recent article, The Nuclear Effect on Carbon Capture Plans, by Alessandra Migliaccio and Jeremy van Loon, the authors explore the idea that Fukushima could speed up the process of CCS.  They present the fact that "Germany halted 25 percent of its nuclear capacity and may close its oldest plants permanently after the Green party surged in Mar. 27 state elections. Switzerland shelved plans for new reactors, the U.K. said it may delay plans, and Italy is holding off on its newly launched nuclear program," as evidence that European countries may now try harder to accelerate the development of energy production that cuts down on carbon emissions.

Currently, the UK government allocates the most money towards funding projects on carbon capture and storage.  Its 10.5 billion dollars is more than the United States (5.1 billion) and Canada (4.9 billion) combined.  Though some funding is there, the pace of the projects has been slow, and even though 10.5 billion is a sizeable sum of money, cost is still a problem.  ''Capturing carbon is really expensive,'' says Age Kristensen, vice-president of technology at Statoil in Calgary. ''It's just not economic.'' Statoil is the world's largest CCS operator, with three projects in Europe and Africa. Its Salah (Algeria) project injects about one million tons of carbon dioxide a year below the Saharan desert, using solvents to separate carbon from natural gas.

Sauro Pasini, head of Enel's research and development department, says CCS testing seeks cheaper, more efficient ways to clean emissions and cut costs from about €90 per captured ton of CO2 to about €45 a ton or less, still far higher than the current €16 a ton for carbon permits trading in Europe.  CCS skeptics such as Carlo Stagnaro, a researcher at think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni, say the cost of CCS needs to be €20 or €30 for it to be economically viable. "Coal is the cheapest energy source ... and what do we do? We make it the most expensive by spending loads on cleaning it up. ... We could spend the money on other things, on safer nuclear," he says.

The article then goes on to state that coal demand is seen as rising as much as 20% by the year 2020.  That is one reason CCS might be worth continuing they speculate.  They state the bottom line of the article is that efforts to capture and store carbon emissions while costly, may gain momentum after the Fukushima disaster. 

While this may be true, they are acknowleding the extremely high cost.  They communicate only a speculation that frames the issue for the expansion of CCS.  Overall this article is hopeful with respect to CCS, but does not correlate any hard information one way or the other.