Thursday 24 November 2016

Boundary Dam CCS 2016 / An economic perspective on CCS

 Last week, I stated that the Boundary Dam CCS project captured 400,000 tonnes of CO2 in the year to September 2015, less than half its target of 1 million tonnes of CO2.

 In the last few weeks Saskpower released their figures for 2016. These figures shows a stark increase in the CO2 captured to 800,000 tonnes, a vast improvement.


 Personally, I still think the finances surrounding the project are unethical and morally questionable. The project does however highlight the viability of CO2 capture technologies.


Economics & CCS


 This paper by Koehlbl, B., et al. is due to be published on December 1st. The study models the impacts of a CCS dominated economy versus a status quo economy in the Netherlands. GDP and import dependency are effectively the same in the two scenarios, but unemployment is found to be slightly higher in a CCS economy.


 Looking at studies such as this and examples like the Boundary Dam CCS project, the economics of CCS really don't strike me as being viable. Figure 2 in my last blog epitomises this - why bother with CCS when you can go renewable?

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