Guest essay by Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times
The war on climate change has produced many dubious “innovations.” Intermittent wind and solar energy sources, carbon markets that buy and sell “hot air,” and biofuels that burn food as we drive are just a few examples. But carbon capture and storage is the Edsel of energy policies.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS), also called carbon capture and sequestration, is promoted by President Obama, the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for coal-fired power plants. In September, the EPA proposed a limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 emissions per megawatt-hour of electricity produced, a regulation that would effectively ban construction of new coal plants without CCS.
Coal is the world’s fastest growing hydrocarbon fuel. Increased use of coal by developing nations boosted coal use from 24.6 percent of the world’s primary energy supply in 1973 to 28.8 percent in 2011. Wind and solar remain less than one percent of the global energy supply. Proponents of the theory of man-made warming realize that world use of coal will remain strong for decades, so they insist that coal plants use CCS to limit CO2 emissions.
CCS requires capturing of carbon dioxide, a normal waste product from the combustion of fuel, transporting CO2 by pipeline, and then storing it underground. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says, “CCS technology is feasible and it’s available.”
Carbon capture is feasible, but it’s very expensive. The DOE estimates that CCS increases coal-fired electricity cost by 70 percent. This does not include the additional cost of building pipelines to transport the carbon dioxide and the cost of establishing reservoirs to store the CO2 underground.
An example is Southern Company’s planned coal-fired plant with CCS in Kemper County, Mississippi, which is scheduled to begin operations in 2014. With recent cost overruns, the Southern Company now estimates a $4.7 billion price tag for the 582-megawatt plant. This exceeds the price of a comparable nuclear plant and is almost five times the price of a gas-fired plant.
The DOE pledged $270 million in funding for the Kemper County plant along with a federal tax credit of $133 million. Mississippi customers will be socked with a $2.88 billion electricity rate increase to support the plant.
Nine US plants currently capture CO2 as part of normal industrial processes, such as natural gas or chemical refining and fertilizer production. All nine facilities sell CO2 to the petroleum industry for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), a process which pumps CO2 into the ground. The Kemper County plant will also provide CO2 for EOR. Another ten US projects are underway to capture CO2 and most of these projects are subsidized with federal money.
Ford spent $350 million on the Edsel, the most famous car failure in history. But CCS is a much bigger financial boondoggle. From 2008 through 2012, governments committed to spend more than $22 billion on CCS projects. The United States leads the way with a commitment of more than $5 billion.
Despite support by US and world governments, carbon capture is not headed for success. A report released by the Global CCS Institute this month shows that international investment in CCS is now in decline. During the last year, the number of large-scale CCS projects declined from 75 to 65. Five projects were cancelled and seven were put on hold, with only three new projects added. The institute reports that private organizations are not investing in CCS.
The number of CCS projects in Europe has declined from 21 to 15, where no new project has entered commercial operation since 2008. The Global CCS Institute states that an “urgent policy response is required” for success. In other words, governments must impose carbon taxes and provide big subsidies for CCS.
Would carbon capture really have a measureable effect on global warming? CO2 emissions from power plants total less than one percent of the carbon dioxide that naturally enters the atmosphere each year from the oceans, the biosphere, and other natural sources. If the world fully implements CCS, it’s unlikely that we could detect a change in global temperatures.
But, worse than this, if the theory of dangerous man-made global warming is false, CCS becomes an expensive solution to a non-problem. When the dust of history settles and the ideology of Climatism fades away, failed CCS projects will be remembered as the Edsel of energy policies.
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Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Earle Williams says:
October 16, 2013 at 7:50 am
Phil.,
Please reread the paragraph you quoted and identify the hyperbole. Are you of the opinion that $2.8 billion is more than $22 billion? Is 22 not considered to be much bigger than 2.8? Help me out here.
Gladly, the OP compared the cost of a single US company with the global budget for ECS, when compared with the entire US commitment it’s less than a factor of two difference.
So yes that’s hyperbole!
Frequently missed or conveniently ignored is the fact that there is a signifcant energy efficiency hit from CO2 capture and sequestration from a low pressure low concentration gas stream such as the stack of a conventional power generation plant.
Based on all the studies and the work I have done on this at concept at best it will be a 40% reduction of available usable power and, dependent on the applied technology, could be as high as 60% for a given energy input for a typical power generation facility.
In essence we would burn through available coal/Oil/Gas at about twice the rate for the same available usable power should this be implemented. This would be a “crime against humanity” as far as I’m concerned.
The only place that the capture of CO2 may make economic sense is in the capture of high concentration CO2 streams, e.g the back end of an old technology methane/steam reformer unit, and where there is a nearby end use in EOR. Even then theadditional resource energy produced by EOR needs to be compared to the energy input to the overall scheme. e.g. the Wayburn field in Canada which uses CO2 pipelined from a US facility.
solutions, solutions, solutions… Capture the CO2, Liquify it, and pump it through pipes that are in the deep ocean water hot spots. Isn’t the missing heat supposed to be in the lower oceans somewhere magically beneath the unwarming surface? Any way, pump the liquified CO2 through pipes in the warmer level of the lower ocean and cool it off like AC
oops, forgot the “/sarc”
Supplemental to some of the above in video form.
Now, who knows why certain flavors of mentos can make diet coke go crazy when dropped into the bottle?
A- chemical reaction
B -electrolysis type reaction
C- their micro-physical shape
Good luck 😉
Kelvin Vaughan says:
October 16, 2013 at 4:38 am
You can’t store CO2 as it’s temperature will rise, it will get extremely hot and melt its container! If you don’t believe me just look at the IPCC graphs. Keep doubling it from 200 parts per million to 1 million parts per million.
Not to worry. They will just pump the CO2 underground. Al Gore tells us it is ‘millions of degrees down there’ so nobody will ever notice.
OssQss says:
October 16, 2013 at 10:31 am
Some our best people are working on this important problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_Coke_and_Mentos_eruption
I like the comparison of the reaction in various soda pop concoctions, showing Diet Coke the most violent.
Bryan A:
Your post at October 16, 2013 at 10:28 am says in total
In the 1980s the UK’s Coal research Establishment was tasked with investigating technical methods for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Clearly, the entire idea of CCS is daft, but I suggested the best option for what we were tasked to investigate would be to freeze the CO2 to form solid blocks of ‘dry ice’ which should be dumped in deep ocean. The CO2 would melt but at the temperature and pressure at the bottom of the deep ocean it would form pools of liquid CO2.
In our studies of this technically feasible (but completely ridiculous) idea we submerged a block of ‘dry ice’ in a water tank to discern if it would be likely to survive while sinking to the ocean bottom. The block survived for weeks because its surface obtained an insulating layer of water ice. Since then, several others have investigated this stupid idea.
So, your deliberately sarcastic suggestion illustrates that it is not possible to ridicule CCS because CCS is ridiculous. And something like whatever suggestion one makes as an attempt to ridicule CCS has probably already been investigated for real.
Richard
If carbon sequestration is really useful and helpful, why would you do something stupid like expend all of the energy it takes to filter out and compress CO2 and then stuff it down an abandoned oil well (the most common suggestion and most commonly implemented appoach) in the hopes it will never leak back out when you can do something really cheap like stop recycling paper and just bury it?
Easy and inexpensive collection and transportation, no fear it will ever “escape” and it’s EASILY and cheaply replacable by growing more trees. The sun does all the work of taking the carbon out of the air and into the tree and we get to use it for benefit then help the rest of the way into the ground when we’re done with it.
But that makes too much sense and people can’t tax it at insane levels or make insane fortunes out of it, so what am I thinking?
I was just flipping through channels and The Weather Channel was doing a spot about someplace in California (Mesa?) that is taking Carbon from the air to make plastic. I didn’t catch the whole thing but the guy they were interviewing claimed that the process can stop the dreaded Global Climate Change. (I looked for a quick link to it but failed.)
CAGW was seemingly pulled out of thin air. Now the solution to it can be seemingly pulled out of thin air!
(I wonder if Al Gore is an investor?)
The “innovations” just keep coming:
Paradigm Shift Urgently Needed In Agriculture
UN Agencies Call for an End to Industrial Agriculture & Food System
Dr. Mae Wan Ho
“A rising chorus from UN agencies on how food security, poverty, gender inequality and climate change can all be addressed by a radical transformation of our agriculture and food system”
Now why not control the temperature of the earth by controlling the atmosphere by shutting down the agricultural sectors. What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe we could build a BIG tube and pump it into outer space? Can I get a grant to research that?
more soylent green!:
At October 16, 2013 at 11:14 am you suggest
Don’t forget to point out in your grant application that insertion of communications satellites into the pipe would pump them up to orbit so you would get launch fuel for free like windmills get wind energy for free.
/I add this was a sarc in case any warmunists are reading because they may not understand/
Richard
More planet saving “innovations”: use an unelected, unaccountable government agency to institute a cow tax, penalizing dairy and cattle farms enough to put many of them out of business:
(2010) House and Senate conferees on the appropriations bill funding U.S. EPA for fiscal 2010 approved an amendment yesterday to block agency efforts to require Clean Air Act permits for greenhouse gases emitted by livestock.
The amendment was agreed to last night as part of the $32.2-billion House–Senate conference package to fund EPA, the Interior Department and the Forest Service for fiscal 2010.”
Little airheaded queenies out of the Youtube cyberghettos know that you are smart enough to live without cows, dairy, inexpensive electricity, transportation, and agriculture. So get with the new paradigm.
Zeke says:
October 16, 2013 at 11:14 am
I’m afraid to even inquire what their revolutionary ideas might be. No doubt “obesity” will be another problem their ideas will “address”; it usually declines in times a mass starvation.
Dr. Bob says:
October 16, 2013 at 8:22 am
“There are several good reasons for CCS…”
I 100% disagree. When it comes to using CO2 to generate a combustible hydrocarbon fuel, it is a really stupid idea unless a small increase in CO2 concentration really will lead to CAGW. There is no physical evidence for that as we all know.
Thus, when it comes to energy, CO2 is nothing more than a dead battery, there is no useable energy to be gotten by combustion. You have to recharge this “battery” by converting it back into a hydrocarbon, and it takes MORE energy to get it “recharged” back into its hydrocarbon state than you will ever get out by re-combusting it back into CO2 again. Thus no matter what process, or what catalyst you use, using CO2 as a fuel precursor is an utter complete waste of money so long as you have ample supplies of oil and/or hydrocarbon available.
Now that one can absolutely conclude that conversion of CO2 to hdyrocarbons for energy use is currently economically stupid, there is NO market for the gigatons of CO2 produced every year. The relatively small (compared to the amount produced) market for CO2 negates any benefit to be gained by CCS on a large scale.
In addition, storing CO2 underground is expensive AND dangerous in the amounts being anticipated. Imagine, billions of train cars of CO2 being pumped into the ground under populated areas every year. One big leak caused by an earth quake or something else, potentially millions of people and animals could die.
In the absence of CAGW, the only effect CCS has is to increase the cost of energy and put lifes and property at risk. There are NO good reasons for CCS period.
.
I\m not sure the Edsel is a good analogy.
The biggest problems with the Edsel were styling and a then-new but now common advertising method. In fact, it was a great car, and every innovation put into it was eventually adopted into later vehicles. It was, in a way, the basis of car safety and ergonomic features that we take for granted now.
In other words, the $350 million development was NOT wasted, it all went into next generation models.
CCS, on the other hand, has few if any redeeming features. It is an attempt to use ancient technology (ie. bury your problems in the ground) to accomplish a dubious goal. The dangers are greatly understated by its proponents, and the benefits are about zero.
Don’t forget that by sequestering CO2 you also are sequestering the O2 which was resident in the atmosphere to begin with. I’m not convinced that this is a wise idea. While the mass of the O2 sequestered would be small in comparison to the mass of the atmosphere, so are the effects of butterfly wing flaps over the Himalayas.
Is there a technology that captures co2 from cars?
Obama is ripe for impeachment, next subject please.
Thank you Steve, Anthony, and other contributors to this topic. Some of us here in South Africa are quite bemused by our government’s apparent commitment to CCS, biofuels and carbon taxes. We have spent a lot of public money to identify locations where CCS might be feasible – they are apparently mainly on the coast, and are very far from the inland coal-fired power stations that underpin our economy, and the astronomical costs of implementing something like CCS are quite scandalous in a country with serious poverty and unemployment figures such as we have here.
Biofuel policies were proposed by government and opened for public comment several years ago. They got a serious beating from the Botanical Society of South Africa (we call it BotSoc for short) that emphasised our shortage of good agricultural land, our regular drought cycles, and the dubious claims of reducing our fossil fuel imports. There were also concerns about diverting food crops for biofuels, and the whole proposal was comprehensively demolished by BotSoc.
But government has now put it back on the agenda, and is proposing legislation to make biofuel blending with petroleum and diesel mandatory. Now government here also proposes a ‘carbon tax’ to be implemented in 2015. But perhaps we should encourage this as it might lead to a change of government – as happened in Australia!
As a general observation, the South African government and its various departments seem to be trying to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, but they are too easily influenced and overwhelmed by vociferous CAGW climate activists from the local arms of WWF, Greenpeace and EarthLife Africa. We also have some very enthusiastic Al Gore-trained activists, who offer their services to give public lectures on how CAGW is resulting in floods, droughts, tornados, malaria, heat-waves and even snow on Table Mountain in Cape Town, a rare event but one that happened quite recently as a cold front from Antarctica reached the Cape. Nothing untoward about that!
Government policy here seems to be driven by an artful agenda of activists who have on the one hand infiltrated government departments, and on the other push an apparently populist citizen agenda that claims to represent ‘civil society’. And so you will find statements in official South African government policy documents that ‘climate change’ is real, and ‘happening’, and there is proof of this, and we must lead by example and we will reduce our GHG emissions by 34% below business as usual IF we get some money from the rest of the world to achieve this lofty ambition!
The truth is that the President of South Africa made these astonishing commitments in Copenhagen, at the biggest and grandest climatefest of all time, attended by the biggest and grandest collection of Heads of State ever! Since then, the collapse of UNFCC COPs has been spectacular, and the IPCC is in a fatal inverted tail-spin trying to fly AR5 with broken rudder cables.
The South African government is trying to implement climate policy based on AR3 and the Hockey Stick and the misguided hubris of Copenhagen. We need some new pilots who can fly us out of this deadly spiral.
Those of you that make such thoughtful contributions to WUWT are the Salt of the Earth! And Anthony, please keep up your good work in keeping this wonderful site alive. We do appreciate your dedication to the cause.
Long ago in 1979 a few of us from South Africa flew into LA, then caught the Greyhound to Santa Barbara to attend the first ever international conference on vultures (would you believe that!? – of course you do – the California Condor!) and then we drove a big Dodge van up the coast to San Francisco – amazing! We went back again to a bird conference in Sacramento a couple of years later. ‘Climate Change’ was not even on the agenda in those days!
The world is small, and our lives are short. May we make the best use of the time we have.
Best wishes
John
Why not just plant more trees instead of perpetuating this eco-financial fraud? More trees would also mean more habitat for birds and animals instead of burying co2. Vegetations is already responding as shown here.
Co2 is not plant food. It’s a toxin of the highest order. We must act now to capture and reduce co2 in the air from it’s very dangerous 400ppm.
Jimbo says:
October 16, 2013 at 3:37 pm
CACA advocates are reduced to claiming that while CO2 does increase plant growth, the resulting more bountiful crops are lower in nutritive value. This is actually true for a few crops, but just barely so, & the effect of more food far outweighs the slight reduction. But most crops not only grow more luxuriantly but produce higher nutritional content as a result of improved CO2 levels.
IMO the range of 500 to 800 ppm of dry air would be a good target for the world.
I’m suprised that many power plants don’t have acres of greenhouses around them. The hot water, carbon dioxide, and excess power at night could be used to grow a lot of food.