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.
Michael Singleton says: October 16, 2013 at 10:23 am
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.
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Actually we looked at this a few years ago – the nearly-pure CO2 stream from a large hydrogen plant.
Just compressing it and getting it to our plant gate cost about $150 per tonne.
Then there was the added cost of pipelining it elsewhere and stuffing it into the ground.
Regards, Allan
Where are the Warmists defending this idiotic paper? Too embarrassing is it? What has this paper told me that’s worth knowing? Nothing. What an utter waste of funding.
The problem with climate science funding is too much funding. I investigated the problem some time back here. If we cut back on funding we might get more real insights instead of publishing captain obvious crap.
OMG the 97% natural CO2 is just as misleading as the 97% consensus.
Sorry, my last comment was meant for the Climate Craziness of the Week. Oooops! 🙁 I think I’ll check out of this thread. Tara.
I stumbled upon something recently. Found out Lawrence Berkeley’s been staffing up some sort of sequestration effort since at least 2011. Not only staffing up but buying equipment (borehole stuff, etc). Looks like this facet of sequestration has not been impacted by the other sequestration.
Would carbon capture really have a measureable effect on global warming http://www.climal.com/carbon-offsetting.php
Ok, I’ll try again. Why not?
Don’t mix arguments.
First, if CO2 is not a problem, and the country and world never decide to stabilize CO2 levels, then CCS is a non-issue. So, “CO2 is not a problem” is a non-response to the question, “if we DO decide, for whatever reason, to stabilize CO2 levels, is CCS useful?”
Secondly, if we ever do decide to stabilize CO2 levels, the industrialized world will have to reduce NET CO2 emissions by ~80% and the developing world by ~15%. The question about the cost of CCS is not how it compares to the cost of reducing emissions by 1 unit from current levels, but to the the cost of reducing by 1 unit AFTER we’ve already reduced by 50% or more. That number is not predictable beyond a high likelyhood of being very much higher than the 70% cost increases this article discusses.
Thirdly, actually capturing and sequestering a lot of CO2 is a very different proposition from sponsoring research, offering prizes, and otherwise making it a major goal to get as good at it as possible. The main methods available or being researched now include biochar, artificial coal, capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground (probably a bad idea), capturing CO2 and pumping it into formations of volcanic rock, where it may mineralize in as little as 50 years, finding chemical reactions that are scalable and cheap and mimic nature in binding CO2 in a stable, mineral-like solid that can be used in land fills. The point, of course, is that none of these is good enough, and we can almost certainly do better. How much better? I can’t imagine a good reason for not spending a few billion to find out.
Peter George,
What is “artificial coal”??
You end by saying, “I can’t imagine a good reason for not spending a few billion to find out.”
Are you not aware that more than one hundred billion dollars has been spent since 2001, trying to find evidence — any verifiable, testable evidence showing that human CO2 emissions — is the cause of global warming?
After more than $100 BILLION, don’t you think there would have been some evidence uncovered — if in fact CO2 emissions cause warming?
But NO such measurable scientific evidence has been found. None. Therefore, there is zero justification for the wild-eyed Chicken Little proposal to ‘sequester’ CO2. Of all the insane alarmist ideas, that one is by far the most lunatic. Have you ever heard the words “cost/benefit analysis”? Apparently not.
Alcheson, right. And beside raising the cost each process mentioned here, they will, in the end, cause us to burn what energy we have at a much higher rate for the same end result… running the world out of energy even faster than needed. From a physics standpoint, so many of these “ideas” are simply insane.
Sometimes you have to waste due to transport distances involved and such but that should be the only case to waste needlessly what we have on this Earth for future generations
Allan MacRea at 4.28,
Similar experience for me, capture from a CataCarb unit, essentially water vapour and CO2 with trace H2, would have cost in 1987 somewhere between $80-90/ tonne, dehydrated and compressed at the battery limit, pipeline and injection facilties not included. Preliminary estimate level only, with expected escalation through project implementation likely very close to your number.
And that right there is their game plan in a nutshell – make it so prohibitively expensive that their insane Windmill and Solar plans look more favorable. Meanwhile their fellow red/green collaborators, the anti-Nuke kooks have successfully attacked nuke plants in the same manner with wild success. And still other collaborators are hard at work attacking natural gas. These uber-Luddite green communists will never let up.
So what we should do is play the same game. Starting with Windmills, we should demand stringent requirements, including an enormous fan-guard encapsulating each and every rotor. It should look just like any other household fan …
http://www.permatron.com/media/50041/fan-guard-filter-motor-cutout_284x223.jpg
Naturally the mesh would have to be very small to keep bats and tiny birds out. Obviously this would radically impact the efficiency of the airflow, and ultimately increase costs enormously. Too bad. Since they don’t mind impacting Coal, Gas, and Nuke efficiency and costs, let them suffer as well. This is the entire problem really, like all leftists the greens are never held responsible for their actions and even expect to operate under a different, double standard. This is how you defeat them.
PeterGeorge:
I am replying to your post at October 16, 2013 at 7:13 pm.
I do not know what you mean by “artificial coal” but I am aware of some options for carbon capture and sequestration which you mention. Indeed, you do not mention the cheapest option for CCS and, as I explain in my post in this thread at October 16, 2013 at 10:50 am, I was the originator of that idea (i.e. transport CO2 as ‘dry ice’ to deep ocean where it will form pools of liquid CO2 which will only slowly dissolve into the deep ocean water that already contains almost all the CO2 involved in the carbon cycle). This link jumps to my post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/16/carbon-capture-and-storage-the-edsel-of-energy-policies/#comment-1449971
But, as I say in that post, the entire idea of CCS is daft.
Your post says you do not understand why it is daft so I will list some of the reasons.
CCS increases energy costs by several fold for no benefit.
CCS provides risks for no benefit.
CCS increases environmental damage for no benefit.
CCS prevents affordable electricity supply to the poor for no benefit.
In the unlikely event that AGW becomes a discernible effect that has potential problems then consideration of CCS may then possibly be warranted. But unless and until that happens CCS is plain daft.
Richard
OOPS!
I wrote
I do not know what you mean by “artificial coal” but I am aware of some options for carbon capture and sequestration which you mention.
but I intended to write
I do not know what you mean by “artificial coal” but I am aware of some options for carbon capture and sequestration which you don’t mention.
Sorry.
Richard
Significant – fast reductions in CO2 are achievable only through application of CCS.
They will never be here decide renewable energy sources.
Also currently, there is no sufficiently effective methods of chemical and biological CCS.
On the website of UNIDO few years ago it was written:
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that carbon capture and storage, trapping the carbon dioxide before it escapes from the smokestack and PUMPING IT UNDERGROUND, will likely be a KEY TECHNOLOGY […] solution for mitigating climate change, along with a variety of other options. STATOIL is an international energy company and is currently involved in three large CCS projects, one of which is the Sleipner platform field in the North Sea. There, CO2 is prevented from seeping into the atmosphere by an 800 meter thick cap rock above a storage location. Yumkella and Special Adviser to the Director-General Ole Lundby were able to visit the Sleipner platform to receive in-depth information on the CCS storage facility. “If we’re going to continue to use coal we’re going to have to have some way of reducing the carbon dioxide.” … for our – the European taxpayers – money is this -“ecologically” pumped oil. It has a significantly reduced the cost of geo-sequestration …
http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9040837&contentId=7074218:
“BP has been involved in CCS for more than 10 years, focusing on a continuing programme of research and technology development, as well as full-scale projects such as In Salah, Algeria [!], one of the few operating industrial-scale C02 storage facilities in the world.”
“While the renewables sector continues to grow, these technologies are unable to provide base-load, large-scale generation at the necessary scale to meet increasing demand for energy. CCS is therefore seen as a CRITICAL TECHNOLOGY for reducing emissions until other, non-fossil-fuel-based alternatives reach the necessary scale.”
… but it’s still nothing …:
“Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the only technology available to mitigate emissions from large-scale fossil fuel use. The technology at each step of the process has been in use for many decades. But before the process can be widely adopted it must be demonstrated end-to-end. SHELL is involved in a number of demonstration projects around the world, but GOVERNMENT SUPPORT [and thus also here – taxpayers …] IS NEEDED […] to allow CCS to become financially viable and widespread.”
“Once injection operations are at full capacity in 2015, 3-4 million tonnes a year of naturally occurring CO 2 produced with the natural gas will be captured and injected into a deep sandstone formation around 2.5 kilometres beneath the island. Chevron is leading the Gorgon project, with Shell and ExxonMobil as partners. Gorgon is the world’s largest CCS project.”
“In September 2012 Shell and partners made the final decision to begin construction, with $865 million [!] in funding from the governments […] of Alberta and Canada to support the project.”
( http://www.shell.com/global/environment-society/environment/climate-change/ccs/shell-ccs.html).
“… 800 meter thick cap rock above …” “… 2.5 kilometres beneath …” – is nothing compared to the extreme movement of the rock mass occurring once every few hundred – few thousand years (even after hundreds years can arise here – rapid – demineralization CO2) …
Whosoever therefore now mainly “earns” on CCS and who “loses”?
And that’s why I – for many years, protesting against the nonsense in the alarmist version of the AGW theory …
Anyone else think the front of the Edsel looks like that painting – ‘The Scream’..?
Which is what I want to do every time politicians bang on about Carbon Capture and Storage – how stupid an idea is that..??
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Dr. Bob says:
October 16, 2013 at 8:22 am
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Any reasonable engineer working w/economics will reject the CCS as prohibitively expensive & unproven & choose natural gas as the energy source for new plants. That’s exactly what was intended…