Tomas Martin

The Long Case for Solar Energy

As an analyst in the renewable field, I've been to a few events by carbon capture professionals in recent weeks and have come away distinctly unimpressed. Even their best case scenarios don't have plants of any meaningful size until 2015 at the earliest - and they still haven't decided which method they plan to use! There are three main ways to capture carbon from coal - remove all the nitrogen prior to burning so that most of the gas after burning is CO2(the oxy-fuel method), scrub normal gas emissions using chemicals (the post-combustion method) and to convert carbon to mostly CO2 and H2 before bruning (pre-combustion method).

Technology takes time to develop and CCS is at least ten years behind solar, in my opinion. We have so far only seen small lab demonstrations of the technology and this stage of development is where the most delays occur. By the time a few hundred MW of test CCS are installed in the middle of the next decade, solar, wind, geothermal and even marine renewables may be too established and have come down so much in price that CCS is no longer a finanically attractive option. I think a lot of dirty coal plants capable of upgrading to CCS will be built and eventually converted but in terms of actually CCS-enabled plants, I'd guess we are 8-10 years away from even early commercial installations, equivalent to where wind was in the early nineties and solar was at the turn of this century.