Twelve years after Sleipner: Moving CCS from hype to pipe

Policy incentives for carbon capture and storage technologies in Europe: A qualitative multi-criteria analysis

“…This situation corresponds to the 'technology valley of death', as described by Murphy and Edwards (2003). In fact, investment uncertainty, in combination with high investment needs for CCS plants represents a major barrier to any full-chain CCS investment (Groenenberg and de Coninck, 2008;Hawkins et al, 2009). Moreover, the availability of CCS as a retrofitting option makes investment in new coal plants less risky, thus reducing the investment threshold in the face of uncertainty (Fuss et al, 2009;Blyth and Yang, 2006).…”

“…Some even see CCS as a critical 'insurance' technology with the potential to scale up further, as other mitigation options could fail to deliver for technological, economic or political reasons (Hawkins et al, 2009). However, this argument can also be turned on its head, as CCS could also fail to deliver for all these reasons.…”

Evaluating the development of carbon capture and storage technologies in the United States

“…The rule suggests a new UIC injection well class IV for CO 2 storage wells and includes standards for site characterization, well construction and operation, monitoring and post-closure care. In addition to the national regulators, several states, including Illinois, Kansas and Washington, are actively pursuing CCS through implementing regulations for geological CO 2 storage [5,54]. Moreover, the ACES Act requires the EPA, in consultation with the heads of other relevant state and federal agencies, to submit to Congress a comprehensive strategy to address the key legal and regulatory barriers to the large-scale deployment of CCS.…”

“…Some smaller projects that can be identified in the periphery of the network are: the NatCarb project (bottom right), which includes all the major geological surveys in order to identify possible CO 2 sinks; the CO 2 storage test project at Strata's West Pearl Queen oil reservoir in New Mexico (top left); and the COAL-Seq consortium, which is lead by Advanced Resources International (top), and focuses on R&D of CO 2 storage in deep unmineable coal seams and various ECBM processes. 5 Even though we apply equal time spans for the division of the data and the amount of active projects remains constant between both periods (around 100), the size of the network more than doubles from 89 to 192 unique actors in the second period. The latter can be explained by the implementation of more than 20 small-scale storage field tests that involve a relatively large amount of actors per project.…”

“…Despite a successful start of DOE's CCS support programs, the deployment of large-scale CCS projects suffered severe setbacks in 2007 and 2008. High profile projects were cancelled or postponed, including NRG's Huntley coal gasification plan with CCS in New York State; Hydrogen Energy's zero emissions power plant in Carson, California; and most (in)famously, the desire by US-DOE to restructure the financial arrangements of the FutureGen project in Illinois, because of escalating cost estimates [5]. The rethinking of these projects -which often have been portrayed as the gateway to a cleaner and secure energy future -outlines that new technologies, like CCS, are often not able to negotiate the various market and institutional barriers that confronts them [6].…”