text: Though many recent scientific reports (e.g.: the seven-wedge stabilization plan by Pacala and Socolow) convey an urgent need to deploy CCS, this urgency has not spread to the political establishment, mainly due to the high costs and energy penalty of CCS  The economics of calcium looping are integral to its political viability.  One economic and political advantage is the ability for Ca-looping to be retrofitted onto existing power plants, rather than requiring new plants to be built. The IEA sees power plants as an important target for carbon capture, and has set the goal to have all fossil fuel based power plants deploy CCS systems by 2040. However, power plants are expensive to build, and long lived. Retrofitting of post-combustion capture systems, such as Ca-looping, seems to be the only politically and economically viable way to achieve the IEA's goal.
  A further political advantage is the potential synergy between calcium looping and cement production.  An IEA report concludes that to meet emission reduction goals, there should be 450 CCS projects in India and China by 2050. However, this could be politically difficult, especially with these nations' numerous other development goals. After all, for a politician to commit money to CCS might be less advantageous than to commit it to job schemes or agricultural subsidies. Here, the integration of calcium looping with the prosperous and (particularly with infrastructure expansion in the developing world) vital cement industry might prove compelling to the political establishment.
  This potential synergy with the cement industry also provides environmental benefits by simultaneously reducing the waste output of the looping process and decarbonizing cement production.  Cement manufacture is energy and resource intensive, consuming 1.5 tonnes of material per tonne of cement produced. In the developing world, economic growth will drive infrastructure growth, increasing cement demand. Deploying a waste product for cement production could therefore have a large, positive environmental impact.