Daniel Schrag gets visitors all the time—graduate students in despair over their dissertations, fellow faculty members dropping by to chat about the Cretaceous sulfur cycle or some equally abstruse topic, or visiting scientists collaborating with him on one of the scores of scholarly papers he has churned out in a career that has earned him a professorship in Harvard’s department of earth and planetary sciences and a MacArthur genius grant.
The two men who stopped by his office one afternoon three years ago were not interested in professorial chitchat, however. Frank Smith and Jim Croyle are hard-nosed businessmen, and they wanted Schrag’s advice on a major investment. Smith and Croyle are cofounders of SCS Energy, a power plant development company in nearby Concord, Massachusetts, and they were planning to spend 5 billion dollars on a radical new type of coal-based power plant called PurGen One. Burning coal accounts for about 40 percent of all carbon emissions worldwide, but this plant would emit essentially no carbon at all. Smith and Croyle had read some of Schrag’s papers about carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS—a technique for keeping globe-warming carbon dioxide out of the air by burying it—and they were ready to put it into action. “I was kind of surprised,” Schrag admits. “I told them, ‘I’d love it if you’d sequester carbon. But how would you make money?’”
Coal is plentiful around the world, especially in three of the most energy-intensive economies: the United States, India, and China. It would be tough to abandon it entirely. On the other hand, capturing the carbon from a coal-burning plant and pumping it underground is expensive. Such “clean coal” technology could cost 50 percent more than regular, dirty coal-generated power, wiping out much of the black rock’s economic appeal. Schrag politely brought up all the reasons why CCS might never be commercially viable, but Croyle and Smith just kept talking. They didn’t seem to care how much money it took to get started. “They knew the project depended on making a profit,” Schrag says, “and they thought they had figured out the way to do it.”
