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Richard Stallman's Political Notes

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Feasibility of carbon capture

jeudi 25 juin 2015 à 14:00

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been implemented in a commercial power station. The practice is therefore feasible. Now what?

With solar and wind power, plus more electricity storage, we can eliminate fossil fuel electric generation. That would take time, and lots of money, but so would applying CCS. Which one can we do faster and cheaper? I don't have a calculation, but I think it is the renewable path. If so, developing CCS for attachment to fossil fuel power plants is a distraction from replacing those plants.

Fossil fuels have other drawbacks: extracting them spreads pollution and occasionally causes disasters, and burning them creates other pollutants besides CO2.

The form of CCS that could be more significant is the one that pulls CO2 out of the air. With money, that method could be applied in hot dry places to extract the CO2 made by burning fossil fuels for reasons other than electric generation.

That would be cheaper than suffering the CO2 to remain in the air.