Clean Coal Can't Get A Break In City Hall

Call it a strange twist of fate or just a failure of the democratic process to resolve a crisis. Call it a case of NIMBYism, or, perhaps in this case, NUMBYism. Call it whatever you want, but the cat's out of the bag and the truth is out; the famous German coal capture and storage (CCS) project, which proposed to produce electricity through traditional coal-powered means but then capture the carbon emissions and bury them underground, has been releasing CO2 gas into the atmosphere all along.

The plant was opened in September of 2008, and was immediately heralded as a solution to the developing world's growing demand and sharp cost margins. With CCS systems, countries like India and China, which have both relied heavily on coal power plants to fuel their explosive economic growth over the past decade, could retain their existing infrastructure while curbing the wanton release of CO2 into the atmosphere. In other words, coal capture and storage was going to let the developing world have their cake and eat it too.

At least in theory. In a stunning admission, Staffan Gortz, a sort of PR figure for the project, said at a recent conference that the plants have been releasing CO2 gas directly into the atmosphere all along, citing resistance from the public as the main reason that the CCS systems haven't yet come online. "It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year, but we don't have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project."

The prospect of a public backlash against clean coal is troubling, and potentially chilling. While numerous environmental profiling teams have shown time and time over that there would be very minimal consequence if any to public health in storing CO2 underground, the grave consequences of recklessly releasing carbon into the atmosphere are all around us, evident at every level of the natural world, and throw the very future of humanity into question. With Vattenfall (the Swedish company that has invested €70m to build the plants) meeting resistance at every turn from an uninformed public armed with veto power to forbid the project from moving forward, the danger is that the quasi-populist meme of perceived undesirability for CCS projects among town councils and city halls might gain a foothold and become a more broadly held position, permanently stunting the spread and adoption of CCS technology and prolonging our planetary nightmare. Unfortunately for us, only time will tell.

(Source: http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gmg/op/sr9W_6zSGd03e3RtcOrYA_w/view.m?id=137163&tid=120787&chk_my-text=t,1;c,1&cat=Climate_change)