Written by John Glassco   

For hundreds of years, powerful men have searched for the secret of the philosopher's stone. The "stone" had the power to change common metals like iron into gold. This was for centuries the main purpose for the study of chemistry.

Today, the energy industry is promising similar rewards for Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). The industry lobby is already persuading us that any day now, we will be able to burn coal, oil and natural gas in the atmosphere without concern for global warming. With CCS, they promise, we could burn as much of our fossil fuels as we want without turning our world into a dust bowl. They are counting on this "industry" solving the many technical problems that have so far prevented any successful commercial demonstration that this idea actually works.

Like the philosopher's stone, this yearning for a clean way to burn dirty fuel may be a pipe dream. Certainly the industry is downplaying the "potential problems" and stressing the unproven advantages.

Most people do not realize that coal combines with a lot of oxygen from the air when burnt. This more than doubles the volume of in-compressible waste if one includes the tons of carbon dioxide one gets from burning coal. Even if the industry was able to somehow figure out how to hide this carbon waste underground, few people have grasped what a job this would be. This process requires a monumental scientific breakthrough, even if the waste carbon dioxide was stable, and did not have to be compressed into a volatile liquid form, and then be transported likely through a pipeline to a remote location where it would be "sequestered" for ever below the ground surface.

The explanation of much of the mystical CCS process is left to the imagination of the capable minds in the advertising field. This is because most of the capable minds in the scientific field agree that CCS technology, like the much sought after philosopher's stone, will forever remain a distant dream.

The industry is not exclusively banking on our optimism. They are deliberately feeding us their own vision of a future, with their continued management and marketing of their conventional energy sources. This vision of our energy future turns a blind eye to alternatives, and depends more than anything on the success and popularity of CCS. People who have bought this pipe dream probably do not realize how desperately the industry needs us to believe it too. In spite of all the experts and ideas churning out there, the industry has no Plan B.