I’ve always thought that the biggest issue with greens was not CO2 and AGW, but “progress in general”. This story seems to support that notion. Maybe they’ll get James Hansen to denounce it too. – Anthony
‘Emissions-free’ coal plant pilot fires up in Germany
BERLIN (AFP) – One of Europe’s biggest power companies inaugurates on Tuesday a pilot project using a technology that it is presenting as a huge potential breakthrough in the fight against climate change.
But green campaigners have denounced the project as a cosmetic operation that does not really address the problem of global warming.
At the site of the massive “Schwarze Pumpe” (“Black Pump”) power station in the old East Germany, Vattenfall wants to the new method to allow it continue burning coal — but with radically reduced emissions.
To do so, the Swedish firm is using Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS for short, which captures the greenhouse gases produced when fossil fuels are combusted.
This prevents the greenhouse gases escaping into the Earth’s atmosphere and contributing to global warming.
The captured gases are then sharply compressed until they become liquid and are injected deep underground, sealed away and therefore will not contribute to the increase in the Earth’s temperature, Vattenfall says.
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Greens are not afraid of this being a smokescreen. This article clears the green’s smokescreen enough, so we can see their real agenda.
Anti-man
Anti-technology
Pro-nothing
Greens are the ultimate pessimists.
Mike Bryant
As with geoengineering, CCS is another dumb, useless, and costly idea. They don’t say how expensive this new method “oxyfuel combustion” is or the CCS, but I’d be willing to bet when people see the cost of that energy they’ll be in for sticker shock. Or, maybe they aren’t even planning to reveal the actual cost.
It appears that England will be one of the first nations to walk silently back to the sixteenth century. Maybe their story will become a cautionary tale for those who look longingly back to earlier times.
Greens CO2 in atmosphere = bad!
Power Comp Capture CO2 and pollution = good?
Greens NO NO NO = bad!
The rest of us HUH???????
But green campaigners have denounced the project as a cosmetic operation that does not really address the problem of global warming
Real problem of global warming = green campaigners
In my opinion I would much rather this approach (CCS) than more nuclear reactors, as I’ve never heard of a decent enough, workable plan to store or get rid of nuclear waste. I am not an expert on nuclear technology and I allow that things may have progressed somewhat, but in my book nuclear power is neither clean nor green…
From Whackypedia –
In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states that there are “millions of gallons of radioactive waste” as well as “thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material” and also “huge quantities of contaminated soil and water”.[2] Despite these copious quantities of waste, the DOE has a goal of cleaning all presently contaminated sites successfully by 2025.[2] The Fernald, Ohio site for example had “31 million pounds of uranium product”, “2.5 billion pounds of waste”, “2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris”, and a “223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer had uranium levels above drinking standards”.[2] The United States currently has at least 108 sites it currently designates as areas that are contaminated and unusable, sometimes many thousands of acres[3][2] The DOE wishes to try and clean or mitigate many or all by 2025, however the task can be difficult and it acknowledges that some will never be completely remediated, and just in one of these 108 larger designations, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, there were for example at least “167 known contaminant release sites” in one of the three subdivisions of the 37,000-acre (150 km2) site.[2] Some of the U.S. sites were smaller in nature, however, and cleanup issues were simpler to address, and the DOE has successfully completed cleanup, or at least closure, of several sites.[2]
…
One of my fears is that the Greens will clamp so hard down on electricity generation from fossil fuels, that nuclear will be seen as the answer. I just don’t see how that could be…
At the risk of repeating myself, I would like to know just how much CO2 is going to be stored. If it is in the hundred thousands or millions of tonnes per annum, then it’s a total waste of time, since 1 part per million of atmospheric CO2 weighs 5.15 Billion tonnes!
Also, isn’t there a town somewhere in Germany, I believe, which tried to do something like this and now finds that the town is sinking? Great idea!
Just feed it to the plants as another poster above said, and to do that, you just release it into the atmosphere where it belongs.
The whole CCS push assumes CO2 is a problem. I would suggest that someone produce the evidence of this before jumping on the CCS bandwagon.
As several other posters have noted, pumping CO2 into reservoirs is nothing new – it’s been done for years in oilfield operations to enhance the recovery of oil (google CO2 flood). And it shouldn’t hurt any groundwater aquifers, because it would only be injected into deeper saline reservoirs below usable freshwater aquifers, and it shouldn’t leak out because known seal rocks (such as shales, anhydrites, & salts) can easily be mapped by geologists.
The real question is why bother with it all – if CO2 isn’t actually a problem.
We do need electricity 24 hours a day. That means solar and wind energy require massive batteries (that haven’t been invented yet) to replace coal, gas, hydro or nuclear power.
In terms of acidification of water tables or causing the ground to become unstable, any CO2 will be pumped very deep underground, thousands of feet down and probably underneath a impenetrable layer of rock so there is close to zero risk of any of these kinds of problems.
For this idea to work and have an impact, however, we need to sequester truly massive amounts of CO2. Total emissions are now 25 billion tonnes per year. The biggest sequestration project I have heard of only sequesters about 500 thousand tonnes per year (or 0.025% of total emissions.)
One issue not discussed here has to do with a couple of articles (on this blog too I think) about electrical transmission facilities. “Environmental” organizations in the west US are filing suit to prevent building new or reinforcing existing electrical transmission routes.
Without these routes the periodic, expensive power from wind and solar cannot get to population centers. The full court legal press amounts to a bait and switch scheme from the green team. The plan is (seems to me) hey look over here, this is a great new bleeding-edge technology, you(all) can use it without contributing to AGW!
Folks buy into this, then, after some building projects the green teams says “Now just try to get the power from the hilltops and deserts to your cities! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
According to power folks, who should know their business, the US power grid is in dire condition – needing both upgrading and repair, now being delayed or prevented by the AGW crowd. Let me give a possible senerio, without the benefit of a sophisticated computer program…
If, as some think, the Sun is the major climate mover, and it remains at low level, the earth will continue to cool. Therefore, more energy will be needed to heat homes and drive business during this cooling. Should the electrical grid fail, it will take a goodly amount of time to boot it back up, and if the words of the energy folks have any truth in them will only come up in sections at best. People will die. The east coast blackouts of recent times are just a taste of what could occur.
Wonder what the AGW crowd would think about that…
Me, I’m keeping propane in the trailer and my gas alternator tuned…
Coal powered plants in countries that couldn’t give a fart about what comes out the smoke stack are yucky. And many of these same countries provide coal for open fire cooking, etc. Back in the old days, like the ranch I lived on, we had a coal burning stove in the living room. It was not very efficient and turned both the inside and outside walls black from the sooty smoke that belched out into the living room and chimney. It was eventually replaced by an oil burning stove. That wasn’t much better. The carpet around the stove also turned black from residue. I have since replaced that with a more efficient and cleaner burning oil stove. A bit of an improvement but I still know that these kinds of home stoves are notorious for sooty residue hanging in the air.
I have now installed a double burning wood stove. It is in another room. No soot or smoke that I can see and there is a secondary chamber that burns the wood gases again before they go up the chimney. It isn’t without any kind of pollution but it is better. I think the greenies are concerned about all those countries that are still belching pollution in general. I can’t say that I blame them. You would too if you could see the remaining black stain on the carpet in the LIVING room.
Stu
Recycle, reprocess “nuclear waste” burying nuclear waste is roughly equivalent to mining silver out of the ground and finding your tailings are nearly pure gold but you bury them anyway because you were looking for silver.
I doubt it is possible to make coal fired power more environmentally friendly than nuclear already is.
I dislike conspiracy theories with great intensity as they are usually nothing but garbage. But in this case if you follow the trails of smoke you are bound to find the fire eventually.
The entire Green movement is a ‘smokescreen’ in itself on this issue of climate change. How can I deduce this? Because the main backers of the climate change issue are transnational politico types such as predominates the ranks of the UN and the EU. Al Gore and James Hansen are typical of the American manifestation of this type. This is not really a ploy to set mankind back into the “Stone Age”. Anyone in political power would see in an instant that going back to pre-Industrial days, however much this might satisfy some of the radical Greenies, is not compatible with any form of modernized government. The Greenies, however, are a useful tool in keeping people in line and keeping enviromental concerns foremost in the public mind. The threat and fear of radical climate change, along with the glaze of scientific credibility it has, is all that is needed to motivate a public that would otherwise be against such changes that are blatantly damaging to their economic interests. Climate change is the dominant issue of the day, and the most versatile with almost any action being able to be justified under this aegis that would otherwise stand out as unusual, absurd, or even criminal.
Think of all the technologies that are being advocated and at times deployed. What do they all have in common? They substantially raise the price of electricity. This threatens millions of lower income earners. When people are deprived of something that only then government has the power to offer them, they become a mob and a tool of those in power. Very useful. If you are beholden to someone else for that which you need to live, you bascially have to do whatever they say. If you want the privilege of having electricity, and all the conveniences that provides, then you will tow the line of the Government.
And in the EU that is not in Berlin, or London, or Paris, but in Brussels. The EU is thus far a case-study in how disparate groups of people will manage under a transnational government. It’s basically a gigantic experiment. You will find a great many ties between its leadership and the UN. And within the lab of the EU, they are setting up England as the first test sample. With the Continental disdain for the British, you can liken this (with a bit of historical irony) to how the British felt about Austraila. Massive immigration combined with an eventual shortfall in electricity generation is going to spark some kind of popular reaction, and you can bet that it will not go unlearned from or undirected.
It can’t be done all at once because people would notice that and take action against it. So it is done slowly over years or even decades allowing people to get adjusted to the change, and allowing for indoctrination via the media for two generations. See the recent posting by Dee Norris for an example.
I prefer to think of the current situation as wanting to blend the idealism of the early and mid twentieth century as regards the viability of international governing bodies (i.e., The League of Nations and its successor the UN) with the elitism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where the wealthy and powerful had much but the middle class had yet to really emerge in most places so the common man had very little and was thus largely at the mercy of his ‘betters.’ Controlling energy is the first phase in this.
Controlling information will be the next, and this is already underway in the EU with that government considering what to do with bloggers, particularly the anonymous ones that are critical of it (though that will not be the reason given of course). The traditional MSM (e.g., the BBC) is already under the sway of the EU as it provides massive subsidies in it’s so-called efforts to reach out to the public it attempts to govern and ‘educate’ it on the benefits of being European. After that is well in motion, the control of currency will come next. You can expect the EU to drop its leniency that is has thus far shown to nations not adopting the euro as their currency. They will want every nation in the single-market system to dump their national currencies (pounds, francs, marks) and exchange them for the euro exclusively. You will also see the EU want to absorb the ECB (European Central Bank) into its “institutional framework”. While the euro is in circulation now, it is not as pervasive as the dollar is in the United States, and that is the eventual goal.
All of these are not really ‘coming.’ They are in developing form now in the EU and they are being promulgated with varying speeds depending upon successes and setbacks. And the lessons are being well learned you can bet too.
If you want an idea of what is being contemplated there, think of the United States federal government being replaced by the United Nations. You have an unelected beauracratic administration at the top interacting with democratically elected provincial governments. This preserves the tradition of voting while at the same time rendering it largely impotent. Yet the governors of these provincial governments are inextricably part of the top level of governnment too. So you see the EU Council of Ministers is about the equivalent of the UN Security Council. And the EU Commission with its president is much like the UN’s Office of the Secretary General, except that for now the former rotates among the chief executives of various provincial governments (i.e., national governments) – but they are working on making it an electable position from the European populace much as the Sec Gen is elected by the General Assembly. The fraud that there is a European populace at all (instead of British, French, Germans, Poles, Italians, Romanians, etc) is the same fraud that says that an unelected transational governing body (the UN) can help bring peace and good to the world. It sounds good, and it can actually be made to work with the right set of conditions (think of what the UN could do if it were directly in charge of the US Armed Forces for example), but it does not really benefit anybody except those in power.
And to have true power you must control energy, information, and currency. If you can control those three, you can control trade. Once you control the wealth generation that trade provides you can more effectively control politics. After all, our own current system of lobbyists illustrates what happens when government becomes the primary mover and shaker in markets. And of course markets employ people – people like you and me, ordinary Joes and Jennifers. Once you control something, you can take it away if needs be, and people will go to any length to not have something as vital as those three taken away from them. Imagine your life without electricity, the Internet, or the ability to purchase things. Now try to imagine modern society functioning without these.
And that’s my point. We are not to do without these. We are just to be controlled by our need for these. It will probably be offered to us at first as something good, and will be freely chosen. After that, however, the project will not stop for any one or for any reason until it is completed. Some of it has already begun. Or else, after its various scandals, why do you suppose we still have the UN and are still members of it?
The Montana legislature has studied carbon sequestration. It seems they have decided to do nothing. See: http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/montana_legislature_wont_tackle_carbon_sequestration_and_thats_a_good_thing/C37/L37/
According to Rep. Brady Wiseman: “…It turns out that the costs are high, the benefits are dubious and years away, and the desire to proceed within our power industry is negligible.
My report to you is that doing nothing is a reasonable option. We will probably see carbon dioxide pumped into the ground in Montana, but only for the purpose of getting more oil out, and we don’t need any new laws to do that.
And in addition, carbon sequestration provokes the argument over global warming. In our political environment, polarized and solidified by intense subcurrents of high-voltage activist religiosity, trying to have a fact-based discussion about global warming has turned into a total waste of time, from a public policy perspective…”
That kind of life is colloquially known as “short and brutal”. No thanks.
I think the greenies are concerned about all those countries that are still belching pollution in general.
Unfortunately, far from it, Pam. So-called Greens are not interested in the environment, or in pollution, though they claim to be. Their interests are solely political, and all else is a sham. Greens are indeed the “new reds”, only are even more insidious and dangerous than the old ones. Democracy itself is in grave danger.
The motives of the environmentalists have little to do with science or ecosystems. I have posted a bunch of stuff on my blog about the self feeding government structures which need AGW to survive.
On another point, I just compiled the latest hockey stick data, which many don’t realize is constructed by collecting random information which may be temperature, and throwing away data which won’t contribute to the blade of the stick. I think the graphs I made show clearly the selection bias used and how it reduces the past ‘temperature’ signal relative to modern times.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/manns-statistical-amplification-of-local-data/
Leon Brozyna (23:03:19) :
They call these environmentalists Luddites! However. they do have a socialistic political agenda.
As Heinlein said, it is easy to mistake stupidity for malice. I’d like to think most Greens are sincere and mislead. Some of their leaders are another matter. They want the benefits of technology (at least for themselves) but want the rest of us to live ‘in harmony with nature’ or at least their definition of it. That means higher taxes and less freedom.
It is always for a good and noble cause, of course, and what could be more important than ‘saving the planet’?
We now see the result of growth and progress. 150 years ago, most folks worried about putting food on the table. Basic survival. Today, we have the ‘luxury’ of giving voice to the Disaster and Crisis types who would have been laughed off the stage a few generations ago. Given the lack of scientific knowledge (and common sense) of the general public, the D&C’s have a willing audience. It is always easier to blame someone else.
It would be comforting to think that the pendulum will swing back, but that requires an educational system that teaches young people to think, rather than ‘feel good.’ A few may rise above, not a majority in my experience.
And when the lights do go out, the rest will just blame someone else.
I think there is a creepy Kaczynski core in some of the environmentalist groups. They go beyond Luddites and are willing to risk other people’s lives to attain their goals of saving the planet, i.e. freeing it from the yoke of humanity. There was an Australian article a few weeks ago that babies are a drag on the economy. Of course eating is bad too, and breathing generates CO2. Only in rich countries could you find the amount of self-indulgence it takes to create an entire class of misanthropic people who probably could not tell the difference between a starling and a grackle or a cold front from a high pressure area.
Lets face it, there’s just no pleasing some people.
Nah … Carbon capture doubles the capital cost of building a coal-fired station, increases energy consumption by 25 percent and then increases the operating cost by upwards of sixty percent.
Since, currently, in the UK, eighty percent of the coal used for electricity production is imported – and nearly half of that from Russia – and, in the near future, near 100 percent of German coal will be imported, we have in carbon capture a policy which will increase our usage of raw materials, massively increase our electricity bills and also reduce our energy security.
A much better option is to use nuclear for electricity generation and to use the (off peak) excess to power underground coal gasification, using the gas as a domestic fuel.
same thing in Canada. Alberta is derided as polluting eco-nightmare, but when the Alberta government announced a CCS plan, Suzuki et al jumped all over it.
Apparently facts have nothing to do with the propaganda. Alberta has the toughest environmental regulations in Canada, and even in North America. Alberta is the only jurisdiction that requires new power plants to have the same emissions or less, as a gas fired plant. This applies to CO2, mercury, NOX, PM10 etc.
Alberta also has 1/2 of the total wind generation capacity in Canada. Alberta has literally 1000 times more wind generation than Ontario, which has 4 times the population of Alberta. Most of the eco-criticism, comes from Ontario, of course.
There is one sort of carbon sequestration that makes sense.
Pumping the exhaust through a greenhouse.
If there’s one thing we know from the crazy Bristlecone Pine Proxy fiasco, it is that moisture and carbon dioxide both directly influence plant growth.
Even algae pools should benefit.
All: As for carbon sequestration into underground formations, the technology is decades old. The oil industry has been using it since the 50s.
It is safe. Its exactly the same mechanism that stores oil and natural gas for millions of years.
Your natural gas for heating will come from temporary underground storage, during the winter. Natural Gas is pumped underground during the summer, closer to the market, for storage. During the winter its released to the pipeline system. Trillions of Cubic feet of gas are stored this way, every year. Right now, there is nearly 3 trillion cu ft in storage.
Gas (CO2 in this case) is pumped into a permeable rock horizon. The formation is itself isolated. It has impermeable shale above and pinching it off at the zonal boundaries. It holds oil and natural gas in place for millions of years. It will hold CO2 for millions, too.
Assuming, of course, that we actually NEED to dispose of CO2. If we don’t need to dispose of CO2, its an expensive, useless, add-on.