Also Going Down: Carbon dioxide burial reaches a milestone

Tom in FL:
Depending of what you choose to believe, humans produce 8-20 billion tons of CO2 from combustion. 100,000 tons is around 0.001% of the total. Assuming they can do that for $40 mil, any serious impact would cost trillions of dollars. With questionable benefit. Maybe they’ll get a volume discount.
Truck load of sand, indeed.

And then there is the obvious, nuclear power.
A few days ago, a major part of Saddam’s nuclear bomb program was delivered to a Canadian nuclear fuel manufacturer. 550 tons of yellow cake. Saddam was planning to no doubt use the yellowcake in Iraq’s nuclear reactor. The Canadian firm plans on making reactor fuel out of it, they paid tens of millions for the yellowcake. Saddam had a very successful Oil for WMDs plan before he fell on hard times recently.
A small volcano will spew out several thousand tons of CO2 a day, lots of SO2 and plenty of particulates for good measure, A big volcano, the sky’s the limit. Hawaii is today having big problems with Kilauea because of all the VOG it’s been spewing, VOG is mostly SO2, mucking up the air around there. Plenty of volcanoes are popping off worldwide nearly every day, Anak Krakatoa is one of the more spectacular today, all these volcanoes leak CO2 at prodigious rates — who pays the cap and trade costs for them?
And then there are fires, here is a cool site to keep you on top of fires worldwide, most fires are either lightning caused or agricultural burning … http://firefly.geog.umd.edu/firemap/ it’s a cool interactive worldwide fire tracker funded by NASA using the MODIS images. Look at all the fires in Africa, most are agricultural burn off. You would be amazed to know how many fires are burning worldwide at any given time. Who is going to pay the cap and trade fees for that?

Has anyone seen any cost projections for commercial quantities of sequestration? Let’s be real about the quantity of CO2 described in this article.
Please note that I am a mechanical engineer, BSME, as well as a nuclear engineer, MSNE. The former makes me tend to round numbers to 2 significant figures, the latter to never round at all. For the sake of simplicity I will stick to rounding to 3 significant figures.
Per this reference, http://www.netl.doe.gov/coal/refshelf/ncp.pdf, as of earlier this year there were 47 coal-fired power plants under construction, near construction, or permitted for construction in these United States. The average electric generating capacity of these plants is 493 megawatts electric (MWe) each. (The typical large second generation commercial nuclear power plants started up in the 1970’s and 1980’s are 1,200 MWe each.)
Based on a conversion factor found here, http://www.seen.org/pages/db/method.shtml, which is based on USEIA and USEPA information, 10,000 metric tons of CO2 are the result of burning enough coal to generate 11.0 megawatt-hours of electricity. (That would result from operating a 1.26 MWe coal-fired power plant for 1-year.)
For one typical new coal-fired power plant of 493 MWe rating, each year the plant would generate 3,910,000 metric tons of CO2. That is 391 times the amount sequestered in the article.
It takes energy to sequester that much gas. It takes energy to capture and then pressurize the exhaust gas so that it will be driven through the piping, down the well, and through the sandstone or other geologic formation being used for sequestration, about 10% of the electricity generated. Many studies are federally funded by these USofA and are up and running to iron out the technology. The current DOE goal for coal-fired power plant sequestration technology is to achieve the following by 2020: the technology to sequester 90% of CO2 at 10% increase in electricity costs.
This 10% cost increase to the consumer (private and industry) assumes that
(1) Other nice things like oil and gas will be forced out of the ground by being displaced with the CO2. This is projected to reduce the overall cost.
(2) Economy of scale (in other words, every coal-fired plant implementing this) will reduce capital investment and operating costs to 10% of the current cost.
(3) Additional coal-fired power plants will be constructed to make up for the 10% loss of electricity used to perform the sequestration.
For a good web site to browse and read-up on this subject try http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/sequestration/publications/programplans/2006/2006_sequestration_roadmap.pdf.
Further more detailed information can be found at http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/sequestration/publications/.

Most AGW skeptics that I know are sincere and good people, and from what I read about Anthony, he is also a good man. That is why I am somewhat puzzled about the direction of the AGW criticism, a pattern of almost certain dismissal of any alternate fuel or procedures to reduce CO2, and personalizing AGW criticism with Jim Hansen and Al Gore. I am not sure whether my comments belong in this topic, but I will just write one brief but comprehensive response after reading this forum (and other forums) for a number of years (I work in a university but I not in climate science). A part of the debate equates Al Gore and Jim Hansen with AGW, and then claiming that there are some alleged issues with both of them, so somehow AGW formulation is tainted and so may be it is wrong; of course there is the other part relating to the evidence, which is of course legitimate. I would assume scientists working in this area are the most capable for evaluating the evidence to reach a conclusion. The views of an overwhelming majority of scientists and almost all scientific societies are clear.
http://www.nationalacademies.org/morenews/20080610.html (U.S. & other National Academies)
http://www.academie-sciences.fr/actualites/textes/g8_gb.pdf (French Academy of Sciences among others).
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=6229 Royal Society’s position (UK)
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=4761 (Royal Society’s special discussion on climate change)
http://www.royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=13619 Royal Society of Canada and others)
http://www.socc.ca/permafrost/permafrost_future_e.cfm (State of the Canadian Cryosphere)
http://epa.gov/climatechange/index.html EPA
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/climate_change_position.html (American Geophysical Union)
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/climatechangeresearch_2003.html (American Meteorological Society)
http://www.aip.org/gov/policy12.html (American Institute of Physics)
http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/cc_1.html (National Center for Atmospheric Research)
http://www.cmos.ca/climatechangepole.html (Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society)
http://www.esf.org/focus-on/focus-on-climate-change.html (European Science Foundation)
etc., etc., etc.,……
The members of these societies are the best and the brightest in the world. Except for the American Society of Petroleum Geologists (which we can understand) every one these scientific societies agree with AGW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
I hear the funding motivation as a reason for supporting AGW. But in many places like China and India, the governments funds all the projects, and when the National Academies in those countries go against their own governments’ intentions of economic expansion by agreeing with AGW, one has to wonder whether the funding motivation has any validity. This is exactly the case in U.S. too, where most of the scientists are going against the administration’s preference. Not only that such an overwhelming number of premier scientific organizations agree with human influence on warming, with few exceptions the scientific reputation and publication record of the scientists who believe in AGW far outnumber that of the scientists who are AGW Skeptics. Apart from Richard Lindzen and Frederick Seitz and Claude Allègre and may be Freeman Dyson, I have not seen that many National Academy members who are AGW skeptics. Other than may be Ivar Giaever, I am not aware of any Nobel Laureates in science holding skeptical views on AGW. So, looking from outside, it seems to me that if this so called consensus is a conspiracy or an illusion, then it is an unbelievably complicated conspiracy, which is rather improbable to occur.
Also, I saw some exchanges on whether or not Hansen once believed in Global cooling, and if he did, then the reasoning goes, his AGW arguments are not sound. I think such exchanges are based on an over-simplification of the state of affairs. First, I cannot find any papers where both Hansen and Rasool were co-authors. In the 1971 Rasool’s paper, the acknowledgement on Hansen is very clear, for “making these Mie scattering calculations for us, for suggesting the use of the two-stream approximation, and for checking the fluxes obtained by the two-stream approximation against some exact solutions…”. In fact Rasool’s paper was not just about global cooling, it was on the competition between CO2 induced warming and cooling facilitated by aerosols. This is still an active area of scientific discussion, not too long ago NOVA had a show on how pollution is masking the full impact of global warming (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/ ). But no matter what it is, there is no evidence that the conclusions reached by Rasool was in agreement with Hansen’s beliefs. If they were and if Hansen actively participated in that work, Hansen’s name would have been on the paper as a co-author.
Now, on the consensus issue – just like in other fields like engineering, medicine and history, almost all scientific conclusions are reached by consensus – either by a representative group and then by the larger group and either repeating the same experiment or calculations, or by studying the logic and compatibility with other existing laws. Whether or not the high energy particle collider at CERN is going make black holes that can eat up our earth, whether a fusion reactor is possible, whether or not string theory is accurate and useful (and a true representation), whether statin drugs that reduce cholesterol are beneficial, or what cholesterol level one should start taking medications, whether to approve a new medicine (as the FDA panel), or the units we should use for measuring something, whether the big bang theory is true, what caused dinosaurs’ extinction, whether neurons regenerate, whether Pluto is a planet, whether holocaust actually happened, whether Sun is going to become a red giant, when a volcano might erupt (see Claude Allègre vs. Haroun Tazieff !!) , etc. There are people who claim General Relativity is wrong even now, there are people who believe CERN may create a black hole that will destroy earth, there are doctors who claim cholesterol is not the problem and statins are not useful, etc. The assumption is that given strong and convincing evidence, the majority of experts who are at least trained to be rational from their long studies and research will eventually come to the conclusion consistent with the evidence, which will be the correct interpretation based on that evidence. It is possible that such a conclusion is wrong, which we may find at a later time. But acting on what we know now is the only rational way to make decisions, we have to make decisions based on our current knowledge and evidence, not based on what we might find out in the future. Once up on a time we were told that all fats are bad to eat, and it was reasonable to reduce consumption of all fats based on that consensus. Now the consensus says only the saturated fats are bad, so as rational people we follow that recommendation until it changes (if it ever does).
I see many articles making fun of Hansen on his 20 year old predictions. In fact his prediction was pretty correct (with Case B scenario) until a year ago (http://www.pnas.org/content/103/39/14288.full
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/39/14288/F2.large.jpg ). We will have to wait until the end of 2008 to find out exactly how it did this year. Given the complexity, I think Jim Hansen’s prediction until a year ago is very remarkable. So, I am not sure why so many blogs are making fun of his predictions. Another continuous criticism has been about Hansen’s data corrections, and the state of surface stations. Well, as it was posted in this forum, all four major historical temperature tracking sources (including the satellite data) shows a remarkable correlation. Given such a high correlation, I do not how one could justify such criticisms directed at him.
When alternate fuels (of course, not ethanol) or carbon sequestration is proposed, it is unfortunate that we get a response like from Anthony stating that we do not need them because CO2 is not a problem, and there are problems with such alternate fuels or carbon sequestration. I am sure the scientists (and those who evaluate their proposal, as well as policy makers and businesses) will have to evaluate such technology, but in my opinion at least we should continue exploring such options.
Now, I am all for keeping a degree of skepticism about all groups, including the scientists. But when such skepticism reaches to a stage where people are trying to come up with even trivial criticisms, then we have moved out of the rational domain to creating an unhealthy and irrational motivation, it is not good for progress. In any case, I hope the general debate will focus on substantive issues than trivialities and personalities.

John McLondon also does not cite the opinions of the CLOUD working group. See http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=975f250d-ca5d-4f40-b687-a1672ed1f684 for more info on the eco-political correctness problems faced by the CLOUD experiment. The only black hole associated with CERN is getting updated or current information on the status of their project. They don’t talk about it for fear of getting canned (that’s sacked for those of you in England). The team at CLOUD consistes of about 50 top notch atmospheric physicists, solar physicists, and cosmic ray and particle physicists from 18 institutes around the world.

Yes, thank you Gary. Even we on the other side of the pond understand the term “canned” from the odd American television (that’s TV for you in the US) program that’s shown here! 😀

Now, on the consensus issue – just like in other fields like engineering, medicine and history, almost all scientific conclusions are reached by consensus – either by a representative group and then by the larger group and either repeating the same experiment or calculations, or by studying the logic and compatibility with other existing laws.
Ummm no. Really emphatically no.
Anthony, I admire your willingness to air all aspects but hundreds and hundreds of words transcribed from certain well known sites is not an aspect of the discussion but rather an attempt to shut down the discussion.
I approved the post and did think it a bit long winded. My first reaction was that he needed a girlfriend. If this is truly just regurgitated cut and paste, then it may fall into the Spam category. Point me to links that back up your assertion and follow through on my part may be in order~jeez.

These carbon sequestration schemes produce nothing and cost money. There’s a far-better charcoal-making alternative, which is terra preta (argrichar or biochar) which is produced via anaerobic pyrolysis. It soaks up carbon dioxide in production and when added to the soil and makes for an incredible soil amendment in sandy or nutrient-poor soils.
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/WCSS2006/Marris%202006%20Black%20is%20the%20new%20green%20Nature%20442,%20624-626.pdf
“…a hectare of metre-deep terra preta can contain 250 tonnes of carbon, as opposed to 100 tonnes in unimproved soils from similar parent material.”

Ric,
One report I prepared for my masters program compared the radiological effects of coal fired elecrtic energy vs. nuclear energy. Some little known facts are:
1. The coal pile storrage facilities at poer generating stations ar usually kept a around 10-feet thick and spread out over acres of area. They are constantly cooled with water sprinklers to prevent spontaneous combustion. The runoff water is collected in catch basin ponds and the silt in these ponds qualifies as low-level radioactive waste.
2. Coal contains many heavy element radionuclides such as thorium, radium, and bismuth. These are vaporized in the combustion heat and are a part of the flu gasses expelled into the atmosphere.
3. While commercial nuclear power plants expell a significant amount of tritium to the environment (it is essentially heavy hydrogen and migrates through high temperature piping), it is eventually water. Tritiated water does not concentrate in any part of the human body and has a biological half-life in the human body of about 12 days. Tritium also decays with the weakest gamma ray of any nuclear isotope.
4. The heavy radionuclides emmited to the atmosphere from coal-fired generating plants: (a) Tend to specifically reside and are stored in specific organs such as bones, never leaving the body until they decay and give off a very high energy gamma ray. They therefore have a long biological half-life. (b) When they finally decay, they usually decay several times because the first decay product is usually very short lived. Therefore, not only is the ionizing potential of the gamma ray an order of magnitude greater, there are also more of them. This is why 1 Curie of tritium is much less important than 1 Curie of coal exhaust.
For the same amount of electricity, there is equivalent or greater radio-biological effects to man from burning coal vs. splitting uranium. Of course, different coals from different regions have different levels of radionuclides, some with twice as much as others.
I know of a specific power generating complex where the utility operates 2 nuclear plants and one coal fired plant at the same site. Whenever the wind gently blew from the coal smoke stack toward the nulear plant radiation monitors, well, it would set off the alarms. LOL.

Build your own hybrid car:
http://www.ecomodder.com/blog/2008/01/30/a-672-electric-car/
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Green-Transportation/1993-06-01/Hybrid-Electric-Car.aspx
I’d also want a way to have air conditioning that would be efficiently belt driven or use the waste heat from the motor. Any ideas? Maybe an isolated ammonia system?

I think that all I need to know is that CO2 is .04% of the atmosphere. Pointless to assume that .04% of the atmosphere controls climate. Further, humans put 7% of the amount of CO2 that is added every year and nature does the other 93%. Included with nature is the amount released from oceans – a huge carbon sink. La Nina, warming of the waters, releases more. Humans do not cause La Nina. Sun and underwater volcanos and wind currents cause La Nina. Pointless for humans to try to control their 7% at a cost of trillions of $’s.