"Carbon sequestration from large sources of fossil fuel combustion, particularly coal, is an essential component of any serious plan to avoid catastrophic impacts of human-induced climate change. Scientific and economic challenges still exist, but none are serious enough to suggest that carbon capture and storage will not work at the scale required to offset trillions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next century. The challenge is whether the technology will be ready when society decides that it is time to get going."Carbon sequestration from large sources of fossil fuel combustion, particularly coal, is an essential component of any serious plan to avoid catastrophic impacts of human-induced climate change. Scientific and economic challenges still exist, but none are serious enough to suggest that carbon capture and storage will not work at the scale required to offset trillions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next century. The challenge is whether the technology will be ready when society decides that it is time to get going."

...unlike petroleum and natural gas, which are predicted to decline in total production well before the middle of the century, there is enough coal to last for centuries, at least at current rates of use, and that makes it cheap relative to almost every other source of energy. Today coal and petroleum each account for roughly 40 % of global CO2 emissions. But by the end of the century, coal could account for more than 80 %...

...So developing and deploying the technologies to use coal without releasing CO2 to the atmosphere may well be the most critical challenge we face, at least for the next 100 years, until the possibility of an affordable and completely nonfossil energy system can be realized.

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