About MIT Energy Conference CCS Panel

Today half of US electric generation comes from coal-fired power plants, and business-as-usual forecasts show that by 2030, our coal-fired capacity may increase by as much as 120 GW, with tremendous impacts on US carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon capture and sequestration technology promises a method of decoupling CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power production. However, the first at-scale demonstration plant with capture and storage at the same site, the FutureGen project, has recently lost the backing of the US Department of Energy. Also in the past year, several other proposed at-scale demonstration projects have been cancelled or postponed. As panel moderator Howard Herzog recently said in the Wall Street Journal: “How can we do hundreds of these plants by 2050 — and that’s what we’ll need — if we can’t even do one?” The challenges to implementing CCS are great: * addition of expensive CO2 capture technology * large changes in optimal plant design * infrastructure to move supercritical CO2 to sequestration sites * reservoir characterization and injection * measurement, monitoring, and verification of injected CO2 over hundreds of years This panel will examine the technical, economic, regulatory, and political hurdles to building the first generation of CCS coal plants from government, industry, and environmental standpoints.