Making electricity from coal with CCS will add costs
Depending on the technology involved and whether you were building a new plant or retrofitting and old one, the National Energy Technology Laboratory estimates it might cost anywhere from 15% to 80% more to generate electricity from coal using carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) than it does without.1 (The price you pay for electricity would not go up by this much, however, because the cost of generating electricity is only one component of the price you pay for delivered electricity.)
The impetus for CCS comes from the fact that rising CO2 is causing the planet to warm and that the ongoing increase in atmospheric CO2 comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal.
Even so, without any sort of tax or cap on emissions, there is no financial incentive to build a commercial CCS plant in the US today, which is undoubtedly why they do not exist.
References
- Klara, Julianne. "Bituminous Coal and Natural Gas to Electricity Summary Sheets." (PDF) Fossil Energy Power PlantDesk Reference. National Energy Technology Laboratory, May 2007. ↩
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