How much has Australia spent on CCS, and what has been achieved?

Quora.

About 200,000 tons of CO2 has been captured and sequestered in CCA project for power generation at a cost of over $A1 billion since 1998 in various schemes. The cost per tonne sequestered was about $4,300 AUD.

That’s a ratio of one to 38,000 of the CO2 sequestered vs the roughly 9 billion tons of CO2 emitted by Australia since CCS technologies started being investigated. It’s a ratio of about one to 2,300 of the 549 million tons of CO2 emitted by Australia last year alone.

Here are the various carbon capture, distribution and sequestration efforts made in Australia since 1998. Exactly two sequestered some CO2.

About $700 million of this was funded by the Australian government and $300 million by the industry itself, so the coal industry isn’t even paying its own portion of this failure. Australia continues to put lipstick on the pig of CCS with its Coal21 Fund, a tiny pittance of research dollars annually intended to provide air cover for the emissions of the coal industry.

Michael Barnard is a regularly published low-carbon innovation analyst. Source: Quora. Reproduced with permission.