Last week, our team had the opportunity to speak with West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin at ACI’s Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) Summit in Washington, D.C.

Gov. Manchin shared his enthusiasm for deploying clean coal technologies like CCS in his state; he knows all too well that coal provides much-need jobs and affordable energy—nearly 98 percent of the state’s electricity is generated from coal. His experience at the local level has undoubtedly given the governor a national and global perspective on energy.

“Coal will continue to be a major energy source for the next 30 years or more as the nation and world transition to the energy of the future, and leaders must find a balance between the economy and environment,” he said, at a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce event.

The governor’s state is leading the way, with plans to retrofit outdated plants with new, emissions-reducing technologies, as well as the construction of a commercial scale CCS plant in the town of New Haven.

With advancements in CCS happening here at home and across the globe, it’s baffling to read stories questioning the existence of CCS—one writer recently when so far as to say that “CCS is dead.”

If that’s true, then according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), the notion of reducing the global concentration of greenhouse gases is dead as well. Both of these groups—along with many of the world’s top scientists—agree that CCS is a crucial component to cost-effectively achieving target global emissions reductions.

Just take a look at our recent videos on the Balanced Energy YouTube channel to see students, professors, scientists and elected officials working hard to solve our energy and climate challenges—using the abundant and affordable resources we have available to us.