Power On - Clean Coal

Jon Hughes and Mark Anslow

1st November, 2007

Clean Coal Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the technology of stripping carbon dioxide from the exhaust gases of fossil fuels and then burying it as a liquid underground.

The technology is seductive. Coal is the most abundant fossil energy source on earth, reserves are reasonably well distributed throughout the world, and carbon has already been successfully buried at three locations worldwide.

The most well known is the Sleipner gas rig in the North Sea, operated by oil giant Statoil. The natural gas which the rig was built to extract was found to have a CO2 level which is too high to pump into people’s homes. Statoil used to strip out this excess CO2 and pump it straight into the atmosphere, but then found that it could save hundreds of thousands of euros in carbon taxes by capturing the CO2 and pumping it down into a saltwater aquifer deep under the North Sea.

Another project in the US takes CO2 produced by a coal gasification plant in North Dakota (built to produce synthetic natural gas from coal) and pipes it up to Weyburn in Canada, where it is used to force extra oil out of an ailing well. A third site, Salah in Algeria, uses the same principles as the Sleipner project for natural gas refining.

These three projects have one thing in common: none of them are generating electricity. The technology which is needed to either strip CO2 from the toxic, complex...

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