By Hugh Price
In New Haven, W.Va., the Mountaineer Power Plant is using a complicated chemical process to capture about 1.5 percent of the carbon dioxide it produces. The gas is cooled to a liquid at a pressure of about 95 atmospheres and pumped 2,375 meters down to a sandstone formation, where it is meant to remain indefinitely. The objective is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being added to the atmosphere from the coal burning at the plant.
This certainly seems to be doing it the hard way. Extracting just this 1.5 percent of the CO2 from the plant’s flue requires a $100 million investment, and whether the gas will remain underground or bubble to the surface is in question.
Fortunately, there is a way to capture and store excess carbon from the atmosphere that is cheap, efficient and environmentally friendly. It relies on two technologies that have been in use for more than 8,000 years: agriculture and the garbage heap.
…
The biggest problem with this approach may be that it’s so low-tech. No green-technology subsidies are required, so there may not be a natural constituency for it. On the other hand, environmentalists should love it. What could be greener than growing plants? And for those concerned about the economy, this approach provides a low-cost method of reducing the country’s carbon footprint without increasing the cost of energy. It is also reversible. If current concerns about CO2 concentrations turn out to be unwarranted, the stockpiled material will be readily available for use. What could be simpler?
Read the entire story here
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It would never work.
The feds/EPA would be in charge of regulation.
’nuff said !!
To everyone who commented that it better to compost plant waste on site. You are so correct!
CCS, Carbon capture and Storage as enormously expensive to no environmental gain. CO2 does not drive climate. It never did in the past so why would the physics change to make it drive climate now. During the Ordovician, 450ma ago atmospheric CO2 content was over 8000 ppmv ( we have 384 ppmv now) and there was a severe ice age. We need to look again at the science and stop living in this costly dream where the laws of physics are violated. Extra atmospheric CO2 will help feed people due to extra crop yield.
Increase CO2 and feed Africa!
The bacteria in this process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion will take over and fill the dump with methane.
Bang goes that idea.
Commercial greenhouses use CO2 generators to boost growth. Studies in many universities have shown the optimum concentration is 800 PPM compared to the current 385 PPm in the atmosphere. The arguement that the carbon cycle is in equilibrium and handles the 97% of carbon dioxide created naturally (according to the IPCC 200y report) and is overwhelmed by the 3% of CO2 fossil fuel creates is unrealistic.
There may be a good arguement that worldwide deforestation may be somewhat responsible. Supporting this possibility is the fact that North America is a carbon dioxide sink (net minus CO2 production) which may be caused by reforestation upon conversion from an agrarian society. The Northeast especially and most of the land East of the Mississippi during the mid eighteen hundreds was cleared for farming. Even with greatly expanded populations there are far more forests than there were 150 years ago.
I also don’t know where Mr. Price gets the idea that landfilling is inexpensive, he oviously has not been to the dump lately.
@MikeEE says:
September 20, 2010 at 5:58 am
‘I’ve often thought this seems like a potential solution.’
To a non-existent problem?
Remove all of the ag “waste” and you have to replace it with more fertilizer. Producing the extra fertilizer will make way more CO2e than is saved. The authors idea is misguided and uneducated.
If you don’t capture the methane released during anerobic decomposition, this solution might actually cause a net larger radiative forcing in the short-term due to the 20x or so higher GWP or methane. Depends on what methane generation per volume of carbon stored you end up with.
Jack says: “Why not just plant and grow trees? Wouldn’t that do?”
Jack, you may as well ask: “why have solar panels — why not just have big windows?”
Big windows are virtually cost free … there’s no money to be made flogging big south facing windows, similarly solar hot water heating is very cheap to install and pays for itself within a few years … but PV is expensive, requires huge public funding and in most cases never pays for itself before it breaks down.
So, where does the public money go? To bigger windows? To increasing the amount of carbon based trash/rubbish with capture in land fill?
NO! NO! NO!
This is the worst kind of commercialism … money making businesses … making money without giving any benefit, without being competition … just because they can con some government toady to push huge subsidies their way to do what could be done much better some other way and which in most cases needn’t be done at all!
An extra composting tax is just the solution.
If I don’t say it, somebody else will:
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
The cost of this stupid scheme to achieve almost nothing is ridiculous. Perhaps, we shall now see thousands of pictures of power generating executives from all over China and India hanging their heads in shame for not burying their CO2 emissions as well – a visit by the tooth fairy is more likely.
This concept and cost of burying CO2 is so ridiculous and pointless, it could only be deemed worthwhile by greenies and leftie/loony/loser politicians.
Physicist Denis Rancourt has an interesting essay with some calculations where he concludes that fossil fuel burning releases no more CO2 (and maybe less) than the amount of CO2 released by simple breathing from humans and their domestic animals.
————-
Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?
by Denis G. Rancourt – 2010
Excerpt:
[…]
“Given all the fuss that is made about the present rate of fossil fuel burning (2010; 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y), it is important to keep in mind that this represents an amount of CO2 release comparable to or somewhat less than the CO2 released by simple breathing from humankind and its domestic animals [LINK]. The combined biomass of humankind and its domestic animals (cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, pets, etc.) is in turn estimated to be only 0.04% of Earth’s living biomass (all expressed as kilograms of carbon, kg-C), which is a lot more CO2-producing breathing. (Ants, for example, are estimated to represent ten to one hundred times the biomass of humankind, and ants can be argued to have “transformed” the planet and its ecology far more than humans.)”
[…]
Full article:
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-burning-of-fossil-fuel-significant.html
Don’t forget all those non-biodegradable plastics that go into landfills, thereby returning petrochemicals to whence they came.
As for whether anything can go wrong with pumping high-pressure CO2 into the ground, just ask BP… I expect that within decades the CO2 geysers will start to erupt.
We knew it already!….It is LITERALLY that: All that Green stuff it’s S*….sorry!, I meant COMPOST.
Sloppy discussion. The garbage heap is carbon sequestration. It is not CO2 sequestration. Why do they use the expression of carbon sequestration interchangeably with CO2 sequestration? Remember if we sequester CO2, we sequester twice as many Oxygen molecules as carbon. Mt Garbage is now generating CH4 another greenhouse gas as we speak.
Now I remember a couple of years back reading in an old National Geographic about a project studying rubbish heaps (In Arizona, I think) finding thirty year old newspapers that were still readable, and commenting in jest to someone that the simplest method to sequester carbon would be to take every newspaper article, every book and every pamphlet about global warming and bury it forever in a dry, airtight landfill in a desert somewhere.
That should be good for a gigatonne or two….
Pampers come in “Dump” sizes?
Whoa!!!,Dude!!!
Carbon sequestration will end in people’s sequestration
I’ve often thought the best solution would be to use the CO2 to grow cannabis plants, press them into blocks and over the decades contruct a new desert mountain range. Should things go the coolist way then we could get together and release that needlessly pent up CO2 in a joint effort.
Make houses out of wood.
[We can still burn them when it gets cold, he he he.]
harvest the 300year+old forest and sink the logs in the 500ft deep parts of the great lakes, this has some side benefits as well, in 500 years the wood can be recovered and made into wood products.
I once commented on Slashdot that perhaps what we need to do to help carbon sequestration is to stop recycling paper.
After all, paper comes from trees, most of which are farmed. Farmed trees take up carbon, and turning it into paper means the carbon in the trees have a temporary useful form which helps subsidize the process. And given that in the New York dump, nearly intact newsprint was found 50 years later, paper is fairly stable, allowing it to hold its carbon without degrading and releasing methane in the process.
So if we were to stop recycling paper, paper can then go straight to the landfill where it will help sequester captured carbon.
My comment at Slashdot did not go well.
Gee, massive piles of undisturbed biomass. Which numerous critters will burrow into. Which will yield numerous air passageways throughout the piles of biomass. What could go wrong?
New tonight on the News at 11: The raging fires at the South Side Carbon Sequestration Site continue unabated. EPA officials have confirmed the magnitude of the catastrophe. To compensate for this release of carbon, the EPA has ordered an immediate reduction in electricity use of 40% statewide. For the few homes still not connected to the SmartMetering energy control system, you can expect an immediate disconnection if you are found to not be in compliance.
On the upside, the EPA has noted that the high percentage is due to the drastic reduction in carbon-based power generation. Just ten years ago before the three trillion dollar federal investment plan in clean renewable wind and solar power, the equivalent carbon reduction offset would have been only 35% by EPA figures.
I am glad that I do not live anywhere near New Haven, W.Va. If that CO2 fails to remain below ground and finds its way to the surface, it will create a blanket of death across a wide area. It looks like it would probably follow the Ohio River valley southwest.
I wonder if the Mountaineer Power Plant has taken out insurance against this possibility?
MJB says:
September 20, 2010 at 6:06 am
Low tech is great, but this is very misguided. Maybe it is meant to be satire? Agricultural “waste” typically goes back into the soil. This helps to maintain soil structure and fertility thereby reducing the amount of fertilizer and irrigation required. The assumption that the amount of waste is atleast equal to the production is ridiculous. Has the author ever seen a corn field after it has been combined for silage? If there is waste, the first aim should be to adjust systems to make as much of the waste as possible stay in the fields. Then, if there is still waste, pile it up, or burn it for electricity production, or pyrolisize it for bio-oil, etc. Of course, these last options assume CO2 even matters
————–
well said.
I can’t believe how ill informed the articles writer is.
in France for decades they have mulched all green and food waste along with any organic materials ie fabrics. and fed it direct to a worm farm, then to biogas production. and back to the soils.
to suggest removing any remaining stubble and not return it to the soil is arrant stupidity, for every grain and gram Taken as food crop or animal product the soil need it back
the law of return, no return and the soils fail.
I dont believe in chem No till at all I believe in ploughing the material in with oxygen ablet o get into the soil to assist the good bacteria, health rich and plant material rich soils dont blow away as easily and allow deep retention of any moisture. hard paked no till soils create hard pan and run off issues.
and the Idiotic comment re its safe to pile green waste.
sheesh! the nitrogen/chlorophyll etc run off is large, it would cause havoc in artesian and ground water in no time.
send him back to school!