NEW YORK, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The United States needs to address multiple challenges in a bid to scale up carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS), one of the major means to deal with threats from climate change, experts said.
Existing regulatory framework and incentives with CCUS are insufficient for wide implementation of CCUS in the United States, said Sarah Forbes, a scientist at the Office of Fossil Energy under U.S. Department of Energy on late Tuesday.
The financial hurdle with CCUS is really one of the lynchpins to scale up CCUS, said Forbes at a panel discussion in this regard organized by Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy.
"We have to have a willingness to invest in it and the willingness to do it as much as anything else," she said, noting the existence of technical hurdles and regulatory restraints.
One of the highest potential opportunities for the commoditization of CO2 lies in enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a process of extracting crude oil, according to Sallie Greenberg, associate director of energy and minerals at Illinois State Geological Survey.
A lot of work needs to be done to correlate the places of CO2 production and the sites for using CO2 in EOR by means of shipping or pipeline transmission, Greenberg said.
Greenberg noted that the building of infrastructure linking sources of CO2 generation and potential places for utilizing CO2 would help the market considerably. Oil-rich western Texas faces poor availability of CO2 despite the existence of a direct market with a large size, she added.
Erin Burns, associate director of policy at climate-focused non-governmental organization Carbon180, said financing for CCUS has been missing a little bit but not entirely.
Efforts should be made to be more interdisciplinary and expand the roles of the finance community, community engagement and labor unions, according to Burns.
The deployment of carbon capture and storage is a crucial component in a portfolio of technologies required to reduce greenhouse gases. The United States now has a few demonstrative CCUS projects in operation with the support of governmental incentives.
