Accession Number PB2012-112716
Title Federal Efforts to Reduce the Cost of Capturing and Storing Carbon Dioxide.
Publication Date Jun 2012
Media Count 29p
Personal Author N/A
Abstract Electricity generation in the United States depends heavily on the use of coal: Coal-fired power plants produce 40 percent to 45 percent of the nations electricity. At the same time, those facilities account for roughly a third of all U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), which together with other greenhouse gases has become increasingly concentrated in the atmosphere. Most climate scientists believe that the buildup of those gases could have costly consequences. One much-discussed option for reducing the nations greenhouse gas emissions while preserving its ability to produce electricity at coal-fired power plants is to capture the CO2 that is emitted when the coal is burned, compress it into a fluid, and then store it deep underground. That process is commonly called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Although the process is in use in some industries, no CCS-equipped coal-fired power plants have been built on a commercial scale because any electricity generated by such plants would be much more expensive than electricity produced by conventional coalburning plants. Utilities, rather than federal agencies, make most of the decisions about investments in the electricity industry, and today they have little incentive to equip their facilities with CCS technology to lessen their CO2 emissions.
Keywords Carbon dioxide
Climate scientists
Coal
Coal-fired power plants
Electricity
Emissions
Greenhouse gases


 
Source Agency Congressional Budget Office
NTIS Subject Category 99D - Basic & Synthetic Chemistry
55C - Meteorological Data Collection, Analysis, & Weather Forecast
Corporate Author Congressional Budget Office, Washington, DC.
Document Type Technical report
Title Note N/A
NTIS Issue Number 1222
Contract Number N/A

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