Big cuts in the cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be achieved only through “a substantial rollout” of the technology, according to a report by Mott Macdonald for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc).
More than half of the potential for cutting the cost of CCS comes from economies of scale in transport and storage, it said. Those savings would require each transport hub to have 2GW of CCS-fitted coal plant or 5GW of CCS-fitted gas generation. Substantial cost reductions at the capture stage were likely to emerge from “learning by doing”, but that would come only through a global rollout of “several GW a year”.
This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 18 May 2012.
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