In the push to cut the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere, solutions usually focus on how to reduce our power use or how to replace our carbon fuels with renewable sources.
But even in the most optimistic situation, we will be using fossil fuels such as coal for years to come. China and India aren't going to suddenly shut down all their new coal power plants, nor will Western industrial giants close their factories overnight. Solar and wind may be today's attractive new energy sources, but coal is the fastest-growing fuel in the world, boasting twice the known gas reserves and three times the known oil reserves. "Coal is here to stay," Milton Catelin, head of the World Coal Institute, told the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi.
That's why governments and industry have recently begun to pay more attention to carbon capture and storage (CCS)—a process that traps CO
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produced by factories and gas or coal power stations and then stores it, usually underground.
The potential impact of CCS is huge. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says CCS could contribute between 10% and 55% of the accumulative worldwide carbon-reduction effort over the next 90 years.
Though it requires up to 40% more energy to run a CCS coal power plant than a regular coal plant, CCS could potentially capture about 90% of all the carbon emitted by the plant To solve the problem of climate change, we "need to use every option we can," says Nick Otter, head of the newly created Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI) in Australia. "And we've got to have some realism to the approach."
Like most technologies, CCS was developed as a way to make money. Oil companies started injecting CO
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into underground oil-bearing rock layers in the U.S. in the 1970s. The technique—known as enhanced oil recovery—allowed them to extract up to two-thirds more oil than by simply pumping the fuel to the surface.
The first country to store C02 underground deliberately to keep it out of the atmosphere was Norway. When the government there introduced a carbon tax in the early 1990s, energy giant Statoil began capturing the CO
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from its Sleipner natural-gas platform in the North Sea and pumping it into a saline-fitted ( 充满盐溶液的) sandstone layer under the seabed. Since 1996, the operation has cut Norway's CO
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emissions by almost a million tons a year, or about 3% of the country's 1990 CO
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emissions. Other projects have followed, including one on the U.S.-Canada border that has been pumping CO
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from a coal plant into an oil reservoir (储藏) for the past decade.
单选题
The passage mainly focuses on discussing______.