How Carbon Capture can Save the Coal-Burning Industry

Kim Strassel interviewed Robert Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, on Saturday. Both Strassel, who works for the WSJ's editorial page, and Murray are very much on the denialist end of the global-warming spectrum, and I'd normally ignore them. But Murray said something interesting, which Strassel didn't pick up on:

The science of global warming is speculative. But there's nothing speculative about the damage a C02 capture program will do to this country.

This is the first and last that we hear of carbon capture in the interview. And one interesting thing about Murray's statement is that he gets it exactly the wrong way around. The science of global warming is far from speculative, while the economic impact of carbon-capture systems is entirely unknown.

In fact, it's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that the future of humanity rests on the successful development of carbon-capture technologies. Whatever happens in the US, both China and India are going to build thousands of new coal-fired power plants in the coming decades. That's a given. So the question is how the world is going to deal with all those coal-fired power plants coming online – and there's only really one answer: carbon capture.

This is why Murray is so off-base here: carbon capture is one of the most exciting nascent industries in the world. If Murray could find a way of capturing and storing the carbon emissions from his coal-fired power plants, he would certainly help the planet. But more to the point, he would make much more money than he'll ever be able to make just by burning coal. The world is crying out for workable carbon-capture systems, and the likes of Robert Murray are exactly the people who are best placed to start implementing them.

Now carbon-capture technology is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing: it depends very much on the geology surrounding the power plant, for starters. But if Robert Murray and his fellow denialists would stop railing against the inevitable and start seeing the opportunities that an enlightened carbon policy affords them, they might go down in history as heroes, rather than villains.