IPCC on carbon storage: two cheers.

• Author: Prugh, Tom
• Position: Carbon capture and storage - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

An emerging technology for helping to address climate change is carbon capture and storage (CCS), in which the heat-trapping carbon in fossil fuels is stripped out, either before or after combustion, and then injected into a reservoir. CCS is controversial for several reasons, but proponents argue that fossil fuels will retain a significant share of the global energy budget for some time under any transition scenario and that CCS would mitigate their climate effects.

Now the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released an assessment of the technical and economic potential of CCS, and the results are mixed. In general, the IPCC concludes that by 2050 CCS could sequester 20-40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions from large point sources (such as power plants and factories), and that it could enable the reduction of carbon emissions from vehicles as well if they were driven by hydrogen or electricity made from CCS-treated fossil fuels.

On the other hand, the report estimates that use of CCS would raise electricity costs by 1 to 5 cents per kilowatthour, depending on the fuel, location, and other variables, even with new generating plants that incorporated CCS technology from the start. Retrofitting...