Well, not really a good plan. For one thing it's very expensive.
The CO2 must be piped to someplace where it can be compressed underground. When they analyzed the piping requirements for an extensive system they turned out to be much greater than even the oil pipelines.
CO2 is an odorless poison, so if it leaks upward into inhabited places you will get a certain die-off, including humans. There's an example of this in a certain valley in Africa, which gets CO2 leakage from a volcano. It looks healthy because it is verdant with healthy plant life (of course, because plants LOVE CO2), but there is NO animal life, and everyone who ventures there without an oxygen mask has died (including several generations of unwitting natives). For this reason, the state of Florida has prohibited CO2 sequestration. The Clean Coal advocates were trying to get someone to indemnify them because they want to put Clean Coal into FL.
Also, where do the CC systems get their Oxygen? Why, I suppose, they deplete the atmosphere.
There is NO clean coal plant in operation, in spite of a long history of taxpayer subsidies. CC is second only to Nuclear for government subsidies, and even now gets about 10 times as much subsidy as the next option, which IIRC is wind or solar.
There is a Pilot Plant being built in Germany. We have to see how it turns out. That's the only PP for CC I know of. Nobody wants them in their backyard.
After all the talk and all the money spent on CC it seems to be going nowhere. I suspect that CC is just a ruse to hold off subsidization of more promising technologies. YMMV.
"Sounds like a great technology to subsidize heavily."
CC is already heavily subsidized. Even several state governments, such as Wyoming, are subsidizing CC because of their large coal resources. CC is second only to nuclear in subsidization. There are powerful political forces pushing the CC agenda. Pretty meager results after all the money spent.
"Would make a great "bridge" to future clean sources which are still pie in the sky but gaining steam."
Actually, some of those "pie in the sky" clean sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal, are ready to go and actually have producing plants running. And more are being installed all the time. Way beyond pilot plants.
What's needed for wind, solar, geothermal, etc., is to free up the Tax Credits that have to be renewed every year. They don't need direct subsidies, unlike coal and nukes.
Turns out that weird government accounting allows them to NOT count temporary costs (such as energy Tax Credits or renewable Tax Cuts) in the budget every year because they are not permanent. That's why the Bush tax cuts were not made permanent in the first place: they wouldn't have to be accounted for.
Incidentally, talking about energy research, at Ohio state they've 'created' a new material for Solar power that produces power even after dark! It employees phosphorescence as well as photovoltaic, so that it sorta glows and releases power to the PV after dark. They've only made a few molecules of the material, so far, and it'll take years to develop anything practical. Apparently OSU has some kind of "materials" designer system using supercomputers where you input your Materials requirements, turn on the behemoth computers, and it cranks out a Material design.
Now THAT's interesting!
