Carbon-capture coal or climate-crashing cheat?

Via DeSmog Blog, here’s the lowdown from Greenpeace on the eco-failure carbon capture could well be.

Here’s the summary:

CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change.
The earliest possibility for deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected before 2030. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not expect CCS to be commercially viable until at least 2050.

CCS wastes energy
The technology uses between 10-40 percent of the energy produced by a power station. Wide-scale adoption of CCS is expected to erase the efficiency gains of the last 50 years and increase energy consumption by one-third.

CCS is expensive
It could lead to the doubling of plant costs.

“Capture Ready” coal plants are greenwash
CCS is being used as an excuse by power companies and utilities to push ahead with plans to build new coal-fired power plants branding them as “capture ready.” Promises to retrofit are unlikely to be kept. Retrofits are very expensive and can carry such high efficiency losses that the plants become uneconomical.
Storing carbon underground can have unintended consequences
The world has no experience in the long term storage of anything, let alone CO2. In Cameroon, a sudden release of trapped, naturally generated CO2 from the bottom of Lake Nyos killed 1,700 people by suffocation in 1986.

You know the financial side is bad when, despite the opportunity for all the greenwash, electric companies still won’t actually touch carbon-capture coal-fired power plants.