Carbon capture technologies are expensive, wasteful and woefully unprepared for the large volume of carbon that will need to buried, reused or otherwise discarded.
Carbon capture is energy intensive and the volume of the waste stream is equal to the world's daily oil production, says Robert Bryce
This according to a Op-Ed piece in The New York Times urging Senators to excise $2 billion in carbon capture research funding from John Kerry’s and Joseph Lieberman’s newly introduced climate bill.
The spending would come on top of $2.4 billion in Recovery Act money already being spent on capture and sequestration technologies. The theory, of course, is that these projects will remove carbon, a greenhouse gas, from the exhaust plumes of coal-fired power plants and reuse it, perhaps to enhance oil extraction at depleting wells.
But Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, argues the effort may be a fool’s errand. For one, he writes carbon capture is an energy intensive process that could siphon away 28 percent of a plant’s output, cutting into fuel efficiency.
In addition, as much as 23,000 miles of new pipeline will need to be laid to transport the large carbon stream. That stream could amount to 8.2 million tons a day – or roughly the equivalent of the world’s daily oil production.
Capture and sequestration is not the Holy Grail of climate change fixes, he writes.
Posted by Mark Boslet 
