Carbon Storage: Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/vattenfall/">Vattenfall</a> (Creative Commons)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Renewable energy enthusiasts have been disappointed lately by President Obama’s embrace of nuclear energy at the expense of cleaner, renewable options like wind and solar. He has also long been a supporter of “clean” coal, an umbrella term for strategies to reduce coal pollution, which critics have said amount to little more than government-sponsored green-washing.

One clean coal technology that has taken off in recent months is carbon storage and sequestration (CSS), which essentially transforms carbon emissions into a liquid to be kept underground. And as David Biello reports, American Electric’s Mountaineer plant, the first to successfully store carbon under our feet, indicates that coal will remain a large part of our energy portfolio:

President Barack Obama seems to think so, even as he continues to push for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by more than 80 percent by mid-century. To meet that goal, Obama said during his State of the Union address in January, the U.S. must not only develop renewable sources of energy but must also invest in clean coal technologies. A week later, the Obama administration created an interagency task force to develop a federal strategy by August for carbon capture and storage (CCS), the underlying principle of so-called “clean coal.” The goal is to make carbon capture and storage widespread within a decade.

So far, Mountaineer only stores 2 percent of its emissions, but the plant itends to increase carbon storage potential to twenty percent with the help of $334 million in federal funds. And the Obama administration has set a goal to add storage capability to five new plants by 2016, including the FutureGen plant, which was abandoned in 2008 due to its $1.8 billion price tag.

The problem, reports Victoria Schlesinger for Mother Jones, is that many communities are saying “Not Under My Backyard” to carbon storage, fearing that the new technology could raise electric bills, and worse, leak dangerous chemicals into public spaces. Earth scientists have said that such dangers are highly unlikely, but carbon storage remains untested on a large scale. “It’s tricky to know what conduits exist underground” a lawyer for the Union of Concerned Scientists told Schlesinger. “Those could be a potential pathway for the CO2 or other minerals to leach out.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate