Full Title: Federal Efforts to Reduce the Cost of Capturing and Storing Carbon Dioxide
Author(s): Congressional Budget Office
Publisher(s): Congressional Budget Office
Publication Date: June 1, 2012
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Electricity generation in the United States depends heavily on the use of coal: Coal-fired power plants pro- duce 40 percent to 45 percent of the nation’s electricity. At the same time, those facilities account for roughly a third of all U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), which together with other greenhouse gases has become increasingly concentrated in the atmosphere. Most cli- mate scientists believe that the buildup of those gases could have costly consequences.
One much-discussed option for reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions while preserving its ability to produce electricity at coal-fired power plants is to capture the CO2 that is emitted when the coal is burned, com- press it into a fluid, and then store it deep underground. That process is commonly called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Although the process is in use in some industries, no CCS-equipped coal-fired power plants have been built on a commercial scale because any elec- tricity generated by such plants would be much more expensive than electricity produced by conventional coal- burning plants. Utilities, rather than federal agencies, make most of the decisions about investments in the elec- tricity industry, and today they have little incentive to equip their facilities with CCS technology to lessen their CO2 emissions.