There are powerful forces driving the growth of the Carbon Capture and Sequestration industry. Those forces — the need to mitigate climate change, a looming price on carbon such as through a cap-and-trade system, and large amounts of government funding — could push the emerging industry to capture and store carbon emissions from power plants toward global annual revenues of $128 billion to $221 billion by 2030, according to a report released today from Pike Research. Energy Secretary Chu has said that CCS technology today would increase the cost of generating power from coal by about 80 percent. To be tolerable he claims the cost needs to be 20-25%. In the absence of a firm price on carbon, capital investments in CCS technology from private industry will remain limited, the Pike study said. But in the meantime, governments have been steadily increasing their commitments to fund R&D projects focused on advancing systems for capturing and storing emissions.
