• Listen to this segment

GUEST: Emily Rochon, Climate and Energy Coordinator for Greenpeace International, lead author of the report, “False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate”

Earlier this week , oil giant ExxonMobil announced plans to complete the development and testing of a natural gas treatment plant to “make carbon capture and storage (or CCS) more affordable and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” The Wyoming based project would cost about $100 million and is intended to stave off recent harsh criticism of ExxonMobil for ignoring its shareholders concerns about its environmental impact. Unlike other major oil companies like Chevron, BP and Shell, all of whom have attempted to re-cast themselves as green-friendly, ExxonMobil has remained firmly committed to fossil fuels – that is until now. The CCS technology, called Controlled Freeze Zone, is based on a cryogenic separation process that will theoretically freeze and then melt carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. The carbon dioxide and other components will then be discharged as a high-pressure liquid stream which can be injected into geological features for underground storage or alternatively pumped into oil fields to help bolster yields. ExxonMobil is following in the footsteps of the American coal industry which has been vociferously promoting the idea of “clean coal” through the usage of this technology as a solution for global warming. But a number of environmental groups warn that CCS has yet to be proven efficient on a large scale and may remain in the realm of theory for several more decades, while the fate of the planet hangs in the balance.

Greenpeace has just released a new report, that they say systematically debunks all of the coal industry’s claims about CCS. Download the report’s executive summary here: http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/usa/press-center/reports4/
false-hope-why-carbon-capture/executive-summary-false-hope.pdf