Alberta premier Ed Stelmach recently announced that the oil-rich region plans to invest $2 billion in Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS) as a way to reduce greenhouse emissions. The initiative also aims at reducing Alberta’s negative reputation as an oil producer. The plan is to reduce five million tonnes of emissions per year.
But is CSS an effective solution to curb emissions? According to Greenpeace, it is not. The organization’s recent report, entitled “False Hope: Why Carbon Capture and Storage Won’t Save the Climate,†claims that so-called ‘clean coal’ is “nothing more than a slogan aimed at greenwashing the image of an irremediably dirty energy source.”
The premise of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is that carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants can be captured before it enters the atmosphere and then stored underground in geological formations. The coal industry has been promoting the idea of “clean coal†through the usage of CCS technology as a solution for global warming despite the fact that its efficacy has yet to be proven on a large scale and even best-case scenarios don’t have CCS being in place for at least a couple decades.
Greenpeace makes a very important point here. Shouldn’t we be looking for clean energy sources instead of trying to clean up after dirty systems, without even a guarantee that it will work? It does sound like a dangerous waste of time.
