Earth Equity News

Obama Administration Releases First Funds for Elusive 'Clean Coal'. By Stacy Feldman, Solve Climate, October 5, 2009. "The Obama administration announced the winners of the first phase of 'clean coal' dollars from the economic stimulus package, with the largest sums going to oil firms. Only $21.6 million of the $1.4 billion for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies was made available in phase one. The money was awarded to 12 companies that will test ways to catch and compress CO2 from polluting plants, transport it by pipeline and pump it underground. The biggest winners were C6 Resources, a Shell Oil affiliate; ConocoPhillips; and Shell Chemicals, another division of Shell Oil. Each nabbed $3 million to demonstrate their technologies for seven months... And while CCS has become the solution of choice for politicians, its actual implementation worldwide is all close to absent…A recent Harvard study shows the... first-generation CCS plants in the U.S. would be double the costs of electricity from a conventional plant, up from the national average of 9 cents per kWh to 20 cents per kWh. Every ton of CO2 captured and stored would carry a price tag of $120 to $180. Planned CCS plants in Europe have gone to the chopping block in large part because of their capital costs. Currently, there is no commercial-scale CCS operation up and running, anywhere."