"A watchdog report found that the government was eager to throw money at projects that never got off the ground."
"The idea of trapping a dirty coal plant’s carbon emissions at the source and storing it underground may sound like the solution to our climate problems. In practice, it’s proven all but completely unfeasible, but that hasn’t stopped the government from plunging money into it.
A recent report from the Government Accountability Office found that the federal agencies have spent more than $1 billion dollars on mostly failed projects. What’s more, the report found that officials kept on funding projects that weren’t hitting important milestones, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on pilots that never got off the ground.
While carbon capture and storage, or CCS, may sound great in theory, it’s consistently proven to be far more complex and expensive in practice compared to cutting emissions like winding down fossil fuel use and installing renewables. CCS has proven especially problematic when linked with coal plants, which are among the dirtiest ways to generate electricity and increasingly cost more to run than other forms of energy.
“You’ve not only got to prove the technology, you’ve got to prove it works over the long term, and it’s got to be economic,” said David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “The best way to do carbon capture is don’t produce carbon in the first place.”"
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