Sustain Our Earth

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) hit the headlines again this week as the world's first CCS leakage experiment , running off the coast of Scotland released its results. Meanwhile, you may have heard the news that plans for a new coal-fired power station with a test CCS system in Ayrshire has been abandoned .

 

But what is CCS? And why should you care?

 

What is CCS?

 

At its most basic, CCS does exactly what it says on the tin - technology to capture carbon emissions, and store them. In theory, this means carbon that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere can be locked up somewhere else - without the climate-altering effects.

 

CCS is a geoengineering technique, and ultimately it has been suggested that carbon capture could be used to grab carbon dioxide directly out of the air - so-called 'direct capture'. At the moment air capture is just a distant dream at anything other than the very small (and very expensive) scale.

The form of CCS that's most familiar is related to fossil power stations. Installed on power plant, the idea is that the technology will capture the carbon emissions directly from the source. Or at least that's the plan.

 

Via Athena Drakou, Anna Syngellakis