This paper looks at ten different forms of public support for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies including investment tax credits, accelerated depreciation, production tax credits, loan guarantees, capital grants, allowance allocations, and storage tax credits. The paper compares the cost reduction potential of each option against a conventional coal-to-electricity facility without CCS.

"Since last year, American Electric Power Mountaineer has employed CCS on a smaller scale of about 30 megawatts and, as such, is a unique example of CCS technology working today. As CCS scales up from this small size, the risks of capture and transport are negligible, making larger plants possible. Because renewables, for various reasons, cannot be implemented at the large scale sufficient to meet the 80 percent emissions reduction goals, we must deploy CCS for larger-scale commercialization. As a crucial means of decarbonizing some industrial processes, CCS will reduce emissions across industries, allowing chemical producers, for example, to meet their targets."

Mohammed Al-Juaied, a 2008-09 visiting scholar with the Belfer Center's Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group, co-authored the Belfer Center discussion paper, "Realistic Costs of Carbon Capture," with Adam Whitmore, chief economist with Hydrogen Energy International Ltd. The paper, published in July 2009, is available at:  http://belfercenter.org/CCcosts.

There is a growing interest in carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a means of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However there are substantial uncertainties about the costs of CCS.  Costs for pre-combustion capture with compression (i.e. excluding costs of transport and storage and any revenue from EOR associated with storage) are examined in this discussion paper for First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) plant and for more mature technologies, or Nth-of-a-Kind plant (NOAK).