CO2 storage no 'silver bullet'
2006-06-20 10:27
Trondheim - Energy firms are stepping up projects to bury greenhouse gases but storage will not be a silver bullet to stop global warming, an International Energy Agency (IEA) expert said on Monday.
Capturing and pumping heat-trapping carbon dioxide
underground costs too much to make sense for most industries at
about $35-$55 a tonne, Kelly Thambimuthu, chairperson of the IEA's greenhouse gas technologies research programme, said.
"It's expensive...this can be one solution among many to
global warming (but) it's not going to be a silver bullet," he
said during a carbon dioxide conference in Trondheim, Norway.
The IEA is an energy adviser to 26 rich nations.
Still, a handful of companies are getting involved in
burying carbon, mostly in cases where it makes economic sense to
filter and clean natural gas before sale from wells that
naturally include high levels of carbon dioxide.
Three existing schemes - by Statoil in Norway, EnCana in
Canada and BP in Algeria - currently bury three million tonnes
a year, he said. High carbon taxes, for instance, make Statoil
filter gas at its Sleipner field.
Other planned energy schemes, by Chevron in Australia,
Statoil and Royal Dutch Shell in Norway and by BP in Scotland
and California would bury a further 12.5 million tonnes of
carbon dioxide a year.
The figures are a pinprick in world emissions of greenhouse
gases from human activities - mostly from power plants,
factories and cars - of above 25 billion tonnes. A 500 megawatt
coal-fired power plant emits about three million tonnes a year.
Some experts say that burying carbon dioxide could prove an
easy way to offset global warming. And the gas can in some cases
be pumped underground into a subsea oil reservoir, for instance,
to keep up the pressure and force oil to the surface.
Kick start
"If you look at the grand scheme of things...(the planned
carbon storage projects) are going to kick start things,
they're going to tell us a lot about carbon dioxide storage,"
Thambimuthu said.
"But the real test in emissions reductions has to be in
power generation and...the transport sector. Those are the big
hitters," he said.
Companies needing to buy permits to pollute on Europe's
carbon trading market, set up last year to discourage industrial
emissions, now have to pay about €15 per tonne.
Thambimuthu said this was not enough to encourage investment in
storage.
"You need to have a threshold of at least about $30 a tonne
or higher," he said.
He said that governments could cut carbon dioxide
allocations to industries to push prices higher if they were
serious about fighting climate change. Or they could give tax
breaks or other incentives.
The scientific panel that advises the United Nations says
that global warming caused by human activity could spur more
droughts, heat waves, disease, erosion and drive up sea levels
by almost a metre by 2100, swamping many coastal regions.