Hooray for insightfulness...
The International Energy Agency, with its inability to see anything but fossil fuels as the premier source of energy and no alternatives to the infinite growth/consumer capitalist economy, has made a dire prediction:
Only Carbon Sequestration Can Prevent Environmental Nightmare In 25 Years or Less.
Carbon Sequestration, the mythical process by which the dilute flue gases of carbon-burning power plants are separated, concentrated, compressed to extremely high pressure, then stuffed in the ground somewhere, is being touted as the only solution to the problem.
The most realistic carbon sequestration schemes require an entirely new power plant which will convert the coal to synthetic gas before burning it or an air separation plant to produce pure oxygen in which the coal is combusted in order to concentrate the CO2. Simply retrofitting existing power plants, as many people seem to imply will be done, is extremely impractical.
COGENERATION is the first and foremost solution to our problems. I repeat: COGENERATION!!! WHY IN THE WORLD would we build more power plants which will consume even more coal when the ones we have now throw away twice as much energy as they produce for use? That logic makes absolutely no sense (other than the money-making that is to be had for the fossil fuel industry). More power plants are the last thing we need. Some new, more efficient ones to replace the old ones wouldn't be bad, though the proposed carbon sequestration schemes don't exactly come out as winners when it comes to efficiency. Cogeneration still uses fossil fuels, but it uses those fossil fuels 2-3 times more efficiently.
The people promoting all of these fancy power plants and mythical technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions need to first get back to common sense. Seriously, more power plants? More power plants when the ones we have now in the United States throw away twice as much energy as is used by the entire continent of Africa? People are struggling to pay their oil and gas heating bills while a single large coal-fired power plant simply blows away enough heat in the cooling towers to heat over a million households! What good is a 20% efficient power plant that will store its CO2 emissions underground (other than burning more coal and boosting the profits of the coal industry and running out the world's finite coal reserves even faster)?
Carbon sequestration technology should be developed and funded by the fossil energy industry itself, as they are the ones profiting from the extraction and combustion of carbon. If it is able to prove that it is safe and feasible to use, then that's great, let's us it! If not, the world will have to eventually move fully to other sources of energy to meet its needs. Research efforts should be focused towards energy sources which do not require carbon to be brought to the surface, burned, and then put back underground. It is an extremely roundabout and inefficient way to get the job (of electricity production) done.
I'm betting that district heating pipes will lower carbon emissions more than carbon sequestration. The age of cheap fossil fuels is over, and that means the building of inefficient infrastructure is over.
