Developments and Innovation in Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Capture and Storage Technology

Foreword

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need carbon capture and storage. But in an ideal world the inhabitants would have been quicker to spot that large-scale burning of fossil fuel could interfere with their planet’s carbon cycle and have serious consequences. By building a world economy over the last 150 years that flourished on the cheap and accessible energy that was available from coal and oil, we short-circuited the natural cycle. We have transferred from the solid Earth to the atmosphere huge quantities of carbon that would not otherwise have seen the light of day for many millions of years. We now know to our cost that the carbon cycle couples into the processes that control the Earth’s climate and that we have triggered rapid climate ...