A new report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to be very expensive in Canada.
According to the report, which focuses on carbon capture in the context of Canada’s oil and gas industry, the climate solution’s persistently high costs are rooted in the ‘high design complexity and the need for customization’.
The report published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) compares the way that financing and deployment of CCS projects has been going with that of the way switching to renewable energy sources has been developing.
Namely, the comparison highlights the slow pace at which CCS tends to be weaned off government support, whereas renewables only relied on subsidies from the state in their initial stages.
With that in mind, the report also addresses how expensive carbon capture is and questions the economic viability of this climate technology.
Current costs of CCS projects in Canada tend to run in the upper range of the predicted costs of CAD 50–150 (~$37-110) per ton of CO2 for diluted gas streams and CAD 27–48 (~$20-35) per ton of CO2 for concentrated gas streams.
Despite its high costs and slow rate of being deployed at a large enough scale to start gaining independence from federal and provincial government financial support, the IISD acknowledges the value of CCS in hard-to-abate industrial sectors, such as steel and cement production.
Read more: Canada’s Emissions Cap Proposal To Be Unveiled In October
