New reports, but same old message from the carbon capture and storage (CCS) crowd: high costs and regulatory uncertainty still hamper the technology reaching commercial scale.

A study by the Alberta Carbon Capture and Storage Development Council says that between $1 billion and $3 billion of local and national government support for the technology will be required every year after 2015, when full-scale projects are supposed to take over from the first wave of demonstration plants. The province is among the world’s keenest: it has already announced a $2 billion investment towards three CCS pilot projects to be built by 2015.

Last week, researchers from Harvard’s Belfer Center released a paper on the ‘realistic’ costs of carbon capture, which reckons that first (most expensive) plants will add 10 cents per kWh to electricity prices, and that each ton of captured CO2 will cost between $120 and $180. That figure is higher than widely-cited estimates[pdf] from consultancy McKinsey, which put initial costs at €60-90/tCO2 avoided. And both of these are way higher than the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide on the European Trading Scheme, currently around €14.

Meanwhile in the UK, the winners of a 400MW demonstration plant competition were supposed to be announced in the summer this year, but the timetable has slipped back. The UK’s carbon capture and storage association, an industrial lobby group, has repeated its message that the country is slipping behind others. [Bloomberg]

At least one more small demonstration project opened this week, as Doosan Babcock started up a pilot oxyfuel combustion burner in Renfrewshire, Scotland. It burns coal in pure oxygen, rather than air, producing a waste stream of almost pure carbon dioxide gas and water, from which it’s easier to trap carbon dioxide.

But the Financial Times points out that Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe 30 MW pilot plant, which began operation last September, has yet to bury underground any of the 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide its plant has captured. That is because in June Germany put off a legal framework to govern CCS storage “due to concerns from local officials,” the FT says. As its reporter Joshua Chaffin sums up: “Even if CCS backers can solve the technical and financial puzzles, they may still face a more daunting challenge: winning public acceptance.”

Image: Vattenfall