Formulating a good question on carbon capture

Question

I've had a bit of interest in my question about carbon capture, but re-visiting it, I don't think it's scoped properly to get a good answer aside from the one it provides in the question itself - that is amine amine solvents are the technology to be employed in the first commercial scale ccs coal facility in the world.

Chad made an edit saying he is interested the price of captured CO2. I could re-ohrase the question:

what conditions are required to achieve cost parity for a CCS coal plant?

Three variables would determine the answer:

1. Cost of capture
2. Market price for CO2
3. Any sort of carbon tax

That seems like it may be a better question, however, there is not a lot of certainty in any of those variables and they may all likely change in the near future.

Any one have any strong opinions on the matter? Once I have a good question, i can out some more time into researching a good answer.

Answer 1

A good question should:

• be clearly stated
• show research effort
• be directly related to sustainability and living without depleting natural resources at a rate faster than they are regenerated.
• have an objective answer that can be given clearly in a few paragraphs
• and not be too localised to any one time or place

Don't leave the reader having to infer any of these: state them explicitly. Your question body should make it clear to the reader that it is on topic, and that it is general, and not too localised.

For carbon capture, you might perhaps be interested in questions that meet the above criteria, and related to:

• the impact on energy-efficiency of carbon-capture technology X
• the proposals of specific governments as to what they will do with the captured CO₂
• the volumes of CO₂ that would be generated in [country X] at current fossil-fuel burn rates, and the availability of suitably-sized reservoirs
• the impact of leakage rates on the sustainability
• Net GHG emissions per net unit electricity delivered, of carbon-capture technology X and fuel-stock Y (where Y could be coal, oil, gas, biomass).
• the existence of any specific proposed market structures that would make CCS-fossil competitive with typical existing fossil;
• and under such market structures, which other technologies would out-compete CCS-fossil

and some best asked on Chemistry.SE:

• the chemical pathways to recycle the captured carbon into either mechanically and chemically stable form; or into synthetic fuels or other industrial feedstocks
• the turnover number and regeneration /reformation pathways of specific catalysts

Note that single questions should contain, well, single questions. They shouldn't be several questions all piled together into one post.