One of the driving forces behind renewable energy adoption is that, they are clean and do not emit any carbon-di-oxide into the environment. Energy generation techniques using traditional sources (oil, coal, petroleum products) generates a lot of carbon-di-oxide into the atmosphere. Carbon is directly responsible for climate change and rising global temperatures, melting of artic caps, etc. That is why it is important to offset/reduce carbon generation due to human activities, especially production, energy generation, etc.
One way to reduce our carbon emissions is to use renewable sources of energy generation. Even though solar, wind, hydro and other renewable energy technologies are steadily gaining in popularity, it is not possible to eliminate oil-fired, coal-fired power plants, at least in the near future. But we can do one thing - Capture the carbon generated by these conventional energy sources, transport it to a safe/inaccessible location and store it for the long-term.
This is the essence of carbon capture and storage technologies. They try to minimize the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere directly by capturing them, transporting them, treating them (using solvents) and compressing them before finally storing them/releasing them deep under the earth for permanent storage.
The extracted/treated carbon can also be used once again for downstream industrial applications like enhanced oil recovery, enhanced coalbed methane recovery, algae production, beverage/industrial uses, etc.
In India, this is a relatively new concept, but there are companies like Carbon Clean Solutions which offer Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) solutions to industrial customers. Recently, Carbon Clean Solutions has received a 3.5 Million Pound grant (from DECC, UK) for demonstrating/perfecting the carbon capture technique patented by them.
Below embedded is a wonderful video animation film explaining the carbon capture/storage process.
