What hope for making clean coal?

Abstract

The Prime Minister’s recent decision to back coal rests on the assumption that it can somehow be made 'clean' or more precisely, that carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies can be made to work for coal plants. The problem is that they can’t and the US experience shows why.

The US has for a long time been the leader in the development of this technology and has driven some of the most ambitious CCS projects over the last two decades.

So if any nation can get CCS to work it should be the US. However, there are three factors that make the commercial large-scale development of this technology unlikely in the US. Show more