Carbon capture and storage: it has a cost, but does it have any value?

Speaker: Professor Niall MacDowell, Imperial College London

It is understood from the work of the IPCC that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is vital to meeting global carbon emission reduction targets by 2010 in a least cost manner , and more recent work by the ETI indicates that the same is true for the UK’s 2050 targets. However, despite this plethora of evidence, CCS has yet to be deployed in a meaningful sense. At the same time, alternatives to CCS , including renewable power and energy storage, have been achieving material cost reductions.

In this seminar, we will quantify and qualify the role that CCS might be expected to play in a deeply decarbonised future, provide insight as to the key technical characteristics of CCS , and consider the alternatives to its deployment, in order to attempt to answer the question – “does CCS have any value?”