The McKinsey Quaterly presents a quick introduction to Carbon Capture and Storage via an interative feature. If you have no clue as to what CCS  is, this is a  good place to start.

Shell are advertising their version of the energy future prominently in the NY Times as sponsors of NY Times Extra. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) figures prominently and have a nice write-up on it. CCS needs to be better understood by the public and all efforts are appreciated. Nevertheless, they haven’t got the artwork right on many levels….least of which is trying to catch a gaseous CO2 with a net.

Another thing which gets to me is using the term clean coal to indicate coal gasification with CO2 capture. Clean coal is a misnomer – coal can never be CLEAN. I work with coal gasification myself and believe that this a critical area in the near future – but selling it as clean is doing a disservice. It gives skeptics cheap shots at the technology, as can be seen at sites such as This is Reality and Coal is Dirty.

I do not agree with the main theme of either of these sites. Like it or not, coal will be the predominant fuel for the next 30-50 years and CCS is a viable technology for mitigation of greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) . More on CCS and coal gasification in later posts.