New Recovery Act Funding Boosts Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage Research and Development - U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced the selection of 22 projects that will accelerate carbon capture and storage research and development for industrial sources.

If there is anything worse than throwing away taxpayer money on a useless technology, it is throwing it away on a technology that possibly does more harm than good.  CCS is the latter.  It adds very significantly to the capital cost of power plants, it greately decreases the efficiency of the power plants to which it is applied, and it removes oxygen from the atmosphere as well as food for green plants.

An article I was reading earlier today in EnergyBiz suggested CCS would have capital costs of $3000 to $6000 per KW of coal-fired plant capacity.  That is potentially more than the cost of the power producing part of the plant.  Other articles I have read in the various technical journals indicate CCS will result in consumption of 30 to 40% of the power produced by a plant.  That means upwards of 40% more heat rejected to the environment.  That means upward of 40% more ash to dispose of, 40% more SO2 and SO3 slippage to the environment, 40% more NOx slippage to the environment, 40% more mercury slippage.  It also means 40% more oxygen consumed in combustion that is then captured and pumped down a hole where there is no photosynthesis going on to convert it back.

For what purpose?  Reaction to a "consensus" conclusion the IPCC authors could not support by the scientific method that manmade CO2 is the principal cause of global warming.  So, the DOE is spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to support a technology to rectify an unproven theory which will raise the price of electricity which those same taxpayers will have to pay more to get.

Stupid.  Incredibly stupid.