Canada Opens First Carbon Capture Power Plant

Canada recently completed the first commercial-scale coal-fired power plant designed to capture and sequester greenhouse gases. The plant will capture around 90% of the CO2 that the plant generates - about a million tons a year. The CO2 will either be sold to a nearby oil company to enhance oil production or buried deep underground.

The new plant, called Boundary Dam, demonstrates that it is possible to burn coal without damaging the environment in the process. But don't expect the more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants in the planning stages worldwide (most of them in China) to adapt the technology any time soon. The technology is economically feasible at the Boundary Dam plant because the plant received substantial subsidies from the Canadian government and because the plant is located in an area in which the CO2 could be sold to oil producers, who use the CO2 to enhance oil production.

And there's the irony. Some of the CO2 not released into the atmosphere by the coal-fired power plant will be used to enhance the production of oil, which of course is also a fossil fuel that releases CO2 when it is burned. I suppose there's still a net reduction in CO2 released into the atmosphere, but it's not the full million tons a year.