Carbon capture not realistic

The editorial, "Consider climate bill despite costs," is deeply flawed on several levels. I will address one, which is the premise on which Waxman-Markey is based.

Representatives who supports Cap & Tax legislation assume Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) will be available by 2020. The facts belie this overconfidence.

There are no technologies currently available for capturing CO2 from existing coal-fired power plants. Some experiments are under way, but hardly any knowledgeable person believes these technologies will be commercially available by 2020, if ever.

Even if they eventually work, they require derating our approximately 600 coal-fired power plants by around 30 percent. This means 200 new power plants will have to be built to replace the electricity no longer available from retrofitted power plants.

Large scale sequestration, which consists of injecting CO2 into geologic formations, is improbable. There are a few small examples of sequestration, such as the Sleipner field, but the amount of CO2 we must sequester just from generating electricity is 2,000 times greater than the amount being sequestered at Sleipner.

No one knows whether CO2 will leak back into the atmosphere or whether it will leak into adjoining geologic formations, such as drinking water aquifers. Legal issues abound. For example; who owns the geologic formations? Who is liable for leakage?

ln addition, over 11,000 miles of pipelines will have to be built to carry the liquid CO2 from coal-fired power plants to the nearest geologic formation where the CO2 might possibly be sequestered. Rights of way will have to be acquired, probably involving large takings under eminent domain.

The uncertainties surrounding Carbon Capture and Sequestration, combined with the associated huge costs, make CCS by 2020, if ever, no more than a pipe dream.

Waxman-Markey is akin to jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

Donn Dears

Geneva