Carbon capture/storage in Ontario? Big $$$$
My Clean Break column today takes a look at whether carbon capture and storage is possible in Ontario, and if so, whether it would make sense to pursue. The reason I took this topic on is because there’s a lot of talk of CCS being some kind of silver bullet when it comes to global warming, and I wanted to shed some light on whether this is a slam dunk beyond places like the oil sands. And, well, it’s not.
The issue hasn’t been studied much in Ontario, but one major study conducted by a research team at the University of Waterloo in 2002 found that it would be possible to capture CO2 emissions from the Nanticoke Generating Station, the largest coal-fired plant in North America, and then pump the greenhouse gas 129 kilometres to the middle of Lake Erie, where it would be sequestered in liquid form more than 800 metres below the surface. The researchers found there was enough storage space, and the geology was accommodating enough, for between 15 and 50 years of storage at a cost of $7 to $15 per tonne of CO2.
It’s an expensive proposition, if you consider that this doesn’t include the cost of carbon capture, which at this point is more expensive than the storage. Yeah, carbon trading could prove a business case somewhere down the line, but not anytime soon. This issue hasn’t had much attention since this research was conducted because the Ontario government plans to close all coal plants by 2014. If we truly wanted to wean ourselves from nuclear, then we may consider down the road building coal plants based on integrated gasification combined cycle technology, which allows for more easy carbon capture and “clean coal” energy.
This, however, doesn’t appear on the horizon. Besides, best to exhaust all possible combinations of renewables, energy efficiency, conservation and co-gen before we head down that controversial road.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
