An updated proposal to store CO2 on Antarctica
Story submitted by John Tillman
Story body: In 1995 two Japanese scientists suggested storing carbon dioxide in Antarctic ice caves. Now three scientists at Purdue have published a more elaborate and detailed proposal along these lines, advocating 446 deposition plants, supported by sixteen wind farms, on the icy, katabatic blast-swept continent.
This dry snow reservoir could come in very handy in the future. When climate cools again, and atmospheric carbon dioxide returns to the oceans whence it came, humanity might replenish our supply, without needing to burn more wood or fossil fuels (which we could be doing anyway, to keep warm, unless nuclear or alternative technologies have replaced carbon-based energy).
CO2 Snow Deposition in Antarctica to Curtail Anthropogenic Global Warming
Ernest Agee, Andrea Orton, and John Rogers Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
Abstract
A scientific plan is presented that proposes the construction of carbon dioxide (CO2) deposition plants in the Antarctic for removing CO2 gas from Earth’s atmosphere. The Antarctic continent offers the best environment on Earth for CO2 deposition at 1 bar of pressure and temperatures closest to that required for terrestrial air CO2 “snow” deposition—133 K. This plan consists of several components, including 1) air chemistry and CO2 snow deposition, 2) the deposition plant and a closed-loop liquid nitrogen refrigeration cycle, 3) the mass storage landfill, 4) power plant requirements, 5) prevention of dry ice sublimation, and 6) disposal (or use) of thermal waste. Calculations demonstrate that this project is worthy of consideration, whereby 446 deposition plants supported by sixteen 1200-MW wind farms can remove 1 billion tons (1012 kg) of carbon (1 GtC) annually (a reduction of 0.5 ppmv), which can be stored in an equivalent “landfill” volume of 2 km × 2 km × 160 m (insulated to prevent dry ice sublimation). The individual deposition plant, with a 100 m × 100 m × 100 m refrigeration chamber, would produce approximately 0.4 m of CO2 snow per day. The solid CO2 would be excavated into a 380 m × 380 m × 10 m insulated landfill, which would allow 1 yr of storage amounting to 2.24 × 10−3 GtC. Demonstrated success of a prototype system in the Antarctic would be followed by a complete installation of all 446 plants for CO2 snow deposition and storage (amounting to 1 billion tons annually), with wind farms positioned in favorable coastal regions with katabatic wind currents.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1?af=R&
===============================================================
From Anthony:
1 billion tons annually is what the proposal would store. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it?
From the Global Carbon Project:
CO2 emissions from fossil fuels burning and cement production increased by 3% in 2011, with a total of 9.5±0.5 PgC emitted to the atmosphere (34.7 billion tonnes of CO2). These emissions were the highest in human history and 54% higher than in 1990 (the Kyoto Protocol reference year). In 2011, coal burning was responsible for 43% of the total emissions, oil 34%, gas 18%, and cement 5%.
CO2 emissions from fossil fuels burning and cement production are projected to increase by 2.6% in 2012, to a record high of 9.7±0.5 PgC (35.6 billion tonnes of CO2).
CO2 emissions from fossil fuel and other industrial processes are calculated by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center of the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For the period 1959 to 2009 the calculations were based on United Nations Energy Statistics and cement data from the US Geological Survey, and for the years 2010 and 2011 the calculations were based on BP energy data.
Uncertainty of the global fossil fuel CO2 is estimated at ±5% (±1 sigma bounds based on the 10% at ±2 sigma bounds published by Andres et al. 2012).
Uncertainty of emissions from individual countries can be larger.
The 2012 projection of 2.6% growth is based on the world GDP projection of 3.3% made by the International Monetary Fund and our estimate of improvements in the fossil intensity of the economy of 0.7%.
Source: http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/12/hl-full.htm#FFandCement
So, with 35.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted in 2012 (estimated) and China still going like gangbusters, does anybody really think the 1 billion ton sequestration proposal is going to make even a dent?
![dotchinaco2new-blog480[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/dotchinaco2new-blog4801.jpg?quality=83)
Dear Bog. I just realized that I missed their proposed method to power this… this… Rube Goldberg/Mad magazine scheme: wind power farms. Wind gennies in the Antarctic. I’m afraid to check what sort of service life and output they project. Now they’ll have to increase the number of sequestration plants compensate for the increased China CO2 emission from building all those wind gennies.
I had to double-check the pub date to be sure this wasn’t meant for April 1st release.
“So, with 35.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted in 2012 (estimated) and China still going like gangbusters, does anybody really think the 1 billion ton sequestration proposal is going to make even a dent?”
Anthony, you silly goose, you forget that only about half of human CO2 emissions are actually showing up in the atmosphere (the rest is apparently sequestered for us by Gaia, blessings be upon her). So with nearly 18 gigatonnes already taken care of, 1 gigatonne per year of Antarctic storage will put a MUCH bigger dent in the remaining 18 gig– Oh.
Never mind. 🙂
Speaking of Antarctica… there is a paper out which seems to try and ‘deny’ the ‘consensus’ position on the CO2 lag.
Anyone else seen this?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6123/1060.full
(I do not have a subscription)
I suspect a smaller number of more efficient plants would be possible with a more concentrated supply of CO2 from, say, the new clean coal process described in this recent post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/20/now-what-is-death-train-hansen-going-to-do-clean-coal-process-developed-to-extract-energy-without-burning-or-co2/
Antarctica seems like a good place to sequester CO2, if CO2 sequestration was deemed worth doing, which is, of course, a very big “if”.
One more:
The AMS kindly included the lead author’s (Agee) email address. I’ve sent an… inquiry. Among other questions (like what drugs they’re on) I suggested:
You want to sequester CO2? You like silly projects? Try this: dig canals across the Sahara for irrigation (in keeping with the ridiculous theme, you could blast the canals with kiloton nukes, an oldie-but-goodie). Repurpose the world’s oil supertankers to haul sewage to the desert for fertilizer. Plant a few billion pine trees. Kick back with whatever drug it is that you clearly enjoy.
What I could find in quick searches on the authors:
Dr. Ernest Agee
Agee’s research has focused on the fluid dynamics of thermal convection, atmospheric manifestations of Benard-Rayleigh convection and climatic change. Lots of engineering experience there.[/sarc]
John A. Rogers
Founder Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a professor of chemistry, but clearly not a real world engineer.
Andrea Orton is listed as being with the Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University, so I guess she’s another atmospheric sciences type.
My immediate inclination was to bang my head on the desk a few times, but that’ll just smash up my desk and I’ll get splinters in my face…
Has ANYONE in power JUST ONCE said, “Oh, you’ll need billions for that, okay, in that case, show us the evidence.”
Looks like I picked a bad week for giving up caffeine…
These proposals are spring up like daises. There is a clown called, Baglin who had an article in the UK Institute of Physics magazine recently telling us how he could cool the Earth by polluting the atmosphere with ‘sulphur based compounds'(err, no details given of the compounds). Apparently this is ‘geo – engineering’ .
Maybe he would use mustard gas – that is sulphur based. You would definitely feel cooler after a lungful of it.
Unbelievable that the IoP publishes this garbage.
*Bobbing up and down in my seat, waving a hand in the air.*
Pick me! Pick me! I know! I Maybe if we moved alllll the wind farms to the Antarctic… oh never mind (looked promising there for a moment).
Recently I had the idea to produce massive amounts of Ice Cream in the Siberian winter, then store it underground in permafrost and deliver to the entire world year-round using the TransSib.
“thermal waste” … will it be the new ugliest word of the year, just like “CO2 pollution”?
This is an idea promoted by the Rothschild banking family back in the 1980s. Somewhere on the net is an audio recording of one of the Rothschilds talking about it in a lecture.
Years ago I was interested in the efforts of the international bankers in creating the CAGW religion back in the 1980s. I can’t remember a link to that one lecture amongst all the stuff I watch and listened to years ago.
36Billion tonnes pa. is pure hype. This apparent large mass of CO2 produced annually by us is but 3% of the total annual budget for CO2. Get REAL.
CO2 IS NOT A PROBLEM!
Why doesn’t anyone ever suggest using the method mother Gaia has traditionally used to sequester carbon? That is by depositing organics at the bottom of anoxic basins. All we have to do is to dump organic waste into the Black Sea, which is anoxic (and dead, except for a few bacteria) below the surface layer.
That way we would also be doing any future civilizations a useful service by creating sourcerock for gas- and oilfields of the future (most of our oil today, comes from black shales deposited during the Mid-Cretaceous about 100 million years ago, when much of the deep ocean was anoxic).
I suggest we just sequester these three “scientists”, Moe, Larry, and Curly, in an Antarctic cave.
Why doesn’t anyone ever suggest using the method mother Gaia has traditionally used to sequester carbon?
The people financing the CAGW scare and its ideas are the banking dynasties. They already have total control over the world economy, and have nothing better to do than cook up far fetched ideas of tightening their control. They already have control over carbon with the western fossil fuel industry, and other carbon intensive industries but they are aware of something wrong with their current practice. By selling fossil fuel and having it burnt, they are setting free carbon to be used by the biosphere. That bad principles for a banker. They prefer to loan stuff out to get it back with interest.
With every molecule of CO2 created from industry, civilization is creating a inherently richer, more independent biosphere. Bankers don’t like independence, they prefer dependance on bank loans. They are scared that if modern industry continues to pump out CO2, then by the 22nd century the atmosphere could have 500-600ppm CO2 and plant food would spring up much more freely and people would be less dependent on bank loans for food.
There is far too much carbon in the biosphere for bankers to monopolize it, but they play with the idea of halting anymore net release into the atmos. This is motivation for clean coal and other such carbon neutral technology.
This antarctic stash of carbon is just one of the more dumber ideas due to the Rothschild bankers losing their grip on reality thinking they can stash and control biosphere carbon like they did with gold. Even if they worked on it for centuries, they couldn’t stash enough to effect carbon in the atmosphere much. They would need to stash trillions of tons of carbon before the biosphere would notice. It’s just not practical.
One part carbon and two parts oxygen… i suggest we sue them for the unreplaceable oxygen they steal.
I sometimes think, such proposal research, are only funded and published, in order to provoke realists and skeptics, into a state of constant astonishment and wild-eyed dismay. Maybe they think it diverts us from focusing, on what, their other hand is doing?! GK
meemoe_uk says: (March 4, 2013 at 4:40 am)
Why doesn’t anyone ever suggest using the method mother Gaia has traditionally used to sequester carbon?
Uh, where’s the money in that?
🙂
Didn’t we go over this, and decide that it was a waste of time, a couple of years ago?
The issue being that the vapor pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere is so low* that the sublimation of the CO2 would quickly rise to the point where it was going back into the atmosphere as fast as we could take it out. Yes, even at Antarctic temperatures. The clue here is that there’s no CO2 snow in Antartica.
Mike.
* Which brings up the same question again: why is CO2 such a problem when there’s so little of it?
While these Mann-trained scientists are up there, they might want to validate these observations:
>>Milwaukee Journal, 9/3/49. International Falls, Minn.-(U.P.) – Hot debate raged Saturday over whether the aurora borealis, or northern lights, can be blinked on and off and made to change shape by waving a sheet at them. …
>>[Henry] Munro, an advertising salesman here, reported that he and four friends made the northern lights assume the shape of an inverted “V’ by flapping a bed sheet at the phenomenon.
>>The Eskimos maintain that herds of deer near the north pole make the lights shimmy by stamping on the frozen ground. …
>>”The Eskimos should know,” one partisan remarked. “After all, they’re closer to the problem.” …
>>Munro said he and his friends stole away from their homes at midnight and flapped a large sheet at the lights.
>>”We tried it twice and it worked both times. The lights were nothing but a dull glow at first, but after five minutes of flapping they took on the shape we wanted,” Munro said. …
>>Their wives kept hollering from upstairs windows: “Cut out that foolishness and get back to bed.”
Science fiction, not science. And an academic consideration, not an actual consideration.
The sort of thing that might be valuable on Mars for local fuel production.
This proposal is rediculus when compared to the natural sequestrating ability of the cold Antarctic circumpolar current. It sucks up CO2 as fast as it is being delivered. What were they thinking?
Costings please.
Wouldn’t it be far cheaper and beneficial to the Earth to simply plant fast growing trees.
I messed up my paragraph. Here it is again – corrected.
Would those wind turbines work in the Southern winter? Don’t they need conventional power to get going? How do you “landfill” as they say? These and many, many other questions will require answering. I bet it would be easier to send a man and woman over to Mars and back. Oh, wait…..