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Pffft. CCS is a crock. Tony Maher's just supporting it because unions are clueless about this stuff. They aim to keep union members in the exact same jobs they're in today, forever. As though construction workers building coal-fired stations would be worse off if they had to build wind turbines instead... No bloody imagination. But that's the Australian way. "New! Different! Will make us heaps of money! Bugger that, let's just keep digging stuff up."
It is interesting that the CCS idea is getting some exposure. There is no doubt that overall it is at best problematic. What concerns me as a geologist is that a great deal is being made of the one component that will probably work OK at moderate scales atleast; ie the injection of CO2 into depleted gas/oil reservoirs. Variously volatile hyrocarbons have been trapped in some formations for tens of millions of years-sometimes hundreds of milloins. Why spend so much effort to prove the strongest link in the chain, when many very weak links exist? Could it be to get a feel-good positive result so that it can be said ' we are making progress!" I would have to say, though, that the scale of sequesteration required makes application highly improbable, although technicaly feasible.
Wait until the spotlight goes onto the other parts of the putative system.
I'm as dubious about CCS as anyone, but I figure enhanced oil recovery is probably feasible at some scale - but not enough to capture all our coal emissions.
People who have some imagination try and do something useful with the carbon, like these guys, which I'm more inclined to encourage :
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1586/81/
But on the whole we're better off biting the bullet and shifting to clean energy sources - we'll have to do it one day, so why not now ?
Yes.
About the only time CCS will be more economic than clean energy sources is when it is combined with enhanced oil recovery, which partially defeats the purpose.
The clever Norwegians found a way to make Carbon Capture and Sequestration and Enhanced Oil Recovery a win/win/win. The Government reduced the tax rate on the additional oil production that was achieved through EOR as long as the CO2 was sequestered. So the oil companies had a monetary incentive to capture and inject CO2, and in turn they made a (smaller) profit producing oil which would not otherwise have been produced. The Government wins because they get oil tax revenue they would not otherwise have got, and the environment won as well (assuming more CO2 was sequestered than the amount generated with the burning of the extra oil, which I believe is the case?).
So the oil companies clamour for Government support for CCS, but any reasonably economic analysis suggests that it would only be applied in conjunction with EOR. So the oil companies see a future where they can earn income disposing of somebody else's CO2 and producing extra oil which they can sell. That's why oil companies are prominently talking up the potential of CCS, when they otherwise don't give a rats about the fortunes of coal companies.
Of course, the number of locations where CCS and EOR can work happily together is pretty limited when we're looking at the global CO2 scale, so we're back to choosing clean energy sources in almost all cases..