Eric Worrall writes: Carbon Capture and Storage, the most terrifying technology in the green arsenal of deadly stupidity, has once again reared its ugliness on The Conversation.
![CCS_DP[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/ccs_dp1.jpg)
According to Howard J. Herzog, Senior Research Engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
“Pumping CO2 underground can help fight climate change. Why is it stuck in second gear?
To deploy CCS on the scale required is a monumental task. We need to store billions of tons of CO2 annually. However, this is the level of effort needed to address climate change. Similar efforts will be needed with other climate mitigation technologies, such as renewables, nuclear and efficiency. There is no silver bullet; we need them all.
As of now, however, CCS is used very little, nowhere near the scale required to make a meaningful dent in emissions. Why? The reasons have less to do with technology maturity and more to do with government policies and the commercial incentives they create.”
Herzog makes no mention of potential risks of concentrating large quantities of CO2. Why do I think CCS is so terrifying? The reason I am frightened of CCS is, the world has already experienced what happens if a large quantity of CO2 is abruptly released.
In Africa, in 1986, an abrupt release of an estimated 100,000 – 300,000 tons of CO2 killed 2,500 people up to 25km (15.5 miles) from the source of the release.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos#1986_disaster
Concentrating large quantities CO2 in one place is dangerous. A similar release to the Lake Nyos disaster, near a major city, however unlikely, however elaborate the safety precautions, could potentially kill millions of people. The CCS concept involves the concentration of billions of tons of CO2 per annum in thousands of locations near major industrial centres. Can anyone imagine nobody will ever make just one mistake, with an operation on that scale? Just one release of a minute fraction of this concentrated CO2 could be as devastating, in terms of loss of life, as the detonation of a small nuclear bomb.
I suggest there is a very good reason CCS is “stuck in the slow lane”. The reason, in my opinion, is that it is total lunacy.
Yeah, CCS could kill some people.
But geoengineering the atmosphere will kill ALL THE PEOPLE.
Greentards accept the loss of BIRDS in pursuit of the sacraments of solar and wind power generation, losing mere humans for CCS means nothing to them.
The Conversation is crack-pottery reduced to click-bait. Imagine barroom drunken blather presented as falsifiable.
Just leave mother nature alone, if the greens want to contribute to, let’s say lessening the use of fossil fuels, give them shovels, rakes etc, and let them plow a few thousand acres ready for planting in a month or two and live on the same rations as the third world population they are trying to “save”.
Splendid article and entertaining and enlightening comments. I am particularly enthused by Paul Westhaver’s salt mine storage and furniture factory! My faith in Human Intelligence restored I shall cancel my subscription to S.E.T.I.
Global coal prices had been declining for about 100 years up until about the year 2000. Obviously..with the price of coal headed towards zero CCS was attractive. Unlimited free coal + CCS was still ‘cheap electricity’.
Unfortunately…humanity is quite clever…we use the cheapest resource closest to market first. The ‘cheap coal’ in close proximity to markets has been burned…and the price of coal has been rising in fits and starts since about 2000.
With a cost curve headed upward on coal extraction costs it doesn’t take a rocket scientists to see that electricity from coal is going to be ‘pricey’ in the future…even without CCS.
I would note that the price of Peabody coal stock…one of the worlds largest coal producers has fallen from a high of $80+ to $5.50 this week.
‘Real Money’ has already concluded that coal will not be powering our future (20-50 years out).
falling stock prices point to declining prices for coal in the future. high prices aren’t the obstacle to burning coal. A barrel of oil is roughly 5.8 million but. A short ton of 8800 btu thermal coal is 17.6 million btu. roughly 3 barrels of oil, for $11.55.
Average weekly coal commodity spot prices
(dollars per short ton)
Powder River Basin
8,800 Btu (per pound),
0.8 SO2
$11.55
http://www.eia.gov/coal/news_markets/
Prices have bean rising because of government intervention.
Not to mention China’s monthly coal-fired power plant additions.
I believe the Belgians have a CCS plant and get lots of co2 from it, then they sell the nutritious gas to gardeners, for use in their greenhouses. After that, I suppose the co2 is released into the atmosphere…a true anthroplogical greenhouse effect.
There are 5,000 coal fired power plants around the world, each producing an average of 3 Megatons of CO2 each year. This is the bulk of human emissions (half).
If we are going to eventually reduce emissions (and we would need to cut emissions by about 50% in order to stabilize CO2 at let’s say 560 ppm in 40 years), you are going to need to tackle the emissions from coal power plants.
Some type of storage system, or shut down the coal electricity system or don’t reduce emissions, those are your choices.
nature removes 1/2 the CO2 produced by humans each year, regardless of how much we produce. all the theories that suggested this ratio would change over time have been shown by observation to be wrong.
now consider the facts. nature removes 1/2 the CO2 produced by humans each year, regardless of how much we produce. what sort of mechanism can produce that sort of effect?
think of the bathtub model. you are pouring water in, and half of this is draining out. now increase the amount you are pouring in, and the amount draining out has increased by half the change in input. the drain is not responding to the total amount of water in the bathtub, it is responding to the amount pouring in.
thus, the bathtub model cannot be correct, because the output of a bathtub responds to the total volume in the bathtub (pressure caused by depth of water). bathtub outputs do not respond linearly to the input rate.
A better model is what I call the scuba tank model. I once went diving in mexico with a faulty pressure regulator. a tourist special, it could only supply air so fast. it was enough air if I was swimming slowly, but not enough if I was swimming fast. I needed to slow down to match the supply of air I was receiving. When I was breathing I didn’t consume all the O2 in the air, only a portion. Due to chemistry this fraction was not significantly different, regardless of my speed. Had their been a surplus of oxygen I could have breathed as fast I wanted, and the fraction of O2 consumed would have decreased. Or if I had stopped the fraction would have changed, however I was swimming as fast as my supply would allow, to keep up with my diving buddy.
This is the model we are seeing in nature. Nature is consuming a fraction of human produced CO2, and this fraction remains constant due to chemistry. Regardless of how much we produce nature consumes the same fraction. We don’t see a change in the ratio because CO2 is in short supply from Nature’s point of view, just like my experience with the SCUBA tank. Nature can’t slow down, because of competitive pressure, so there is no opportunity to reduce the fraction of CO2 consumed.
The removal rate of CO2 gone up five-fold since 1960.
http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/files/2014/12/Fig.-2.jpg
Nature is absorbing about half of our emissions each year, as you note, but that is probably a fluke. The natural rate of net absorption is probably related to how much excess CO2 there is the atmosphere compared to the equilibrium level that would exist in the current Earth arrangement of land plants and ocean temperatures etc. Not to our emissions each year, but how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere.
That long-term equilbrium level is 270, or 280 ppm CO2. We have be around that level for 24 million years now (give or take a drawdown during an ice age).
In 40 years, the natural rate of absorption will rise from its current 2 ppm of CO2 each year to about 3 ppm each year. This is based on how much extra CO2 there is the atmosphere compared to equilibrium.
We wiil be emitting about 6 ppm each year in the business as usual environment. If we cut our emission by half from that level (which is lower than today’s 4 ppm per year but not Zero as the environs think), the CO2 level will then stabilize at about 560 ppm. Emissions 3 ppm each year and natural absorption rate 3 ppm each year.
At several points in your post you use the word “equilibrium”. That is a dubious word in this context. At the very least, it ought to be “dynamic equilibrium”. At many points in the earth’s history, CO2 levels have been FAR higher. How then did we recently arrive at 280ppm?
The reason, pretty clearly, is that plants suck hard on the atmosphere, and fix all the CO2 they can grab. That CO2 is then sequestered until the hydrocarbons decompose, for whatever reason, back to CO2 and H20. It is worth noting that plants basically shutdown altogether when the CO2 level drops to 180ppm. At that point, the costs of sucking on the atmosphere to try to acquire the very rare molecules, become so prohibitive that plants cannot survive. That fact is the principal one that explains the specific pre-industrial 280ppm level.
What happens then, if the CO2 level doubles? It is really indisputable that plant growth will sharply accelerate. There are thousands of excellent studies that demonstrate this fact. Plants originally evolved when CO2 was far more plentiful, and have now become fantastic experts at the CO2 extraction process.
… CO2 levels have been FAR higher. How then did we recently arrive at 280ppm?
The most likely explanation is that 24 million years ago when CO2 fell to 280 ppm for perhaps the very first time, this is when C4 grasses became widespread (having just evolved in the few million years leading up to that date). C4 grasses are more efficient at using CO2 in more conditions than C3 plants, trees and bushes (mostly dryer conditions) so their evolution resulted in a lower overall CO2 equilibrium level on Earth (because even dryer places now had vegetation cover).
During the ice ages when there is very low CO2, C4 grasses become the dominant vegetation because they do not need to keep their Stomata as open as C3 plants, and they don’t lose as much water through evapotranspiration. Hence, in the dryer, lower CO2 conditions of the ice ages, C4 grassland becomes the dominant vegetation and the C3 plants, trees and bushes die-back. The Amazon rain-forest declines by two-thirds, for example.
The Earth started drying out about 8 million years ago and C4 grass pollen expanded significantly in the geologic record. This lead to the very first savanna regions, yes that’s true, and the first grass herbivores. There wasn’t any before this. It also caused one of the 50 different species of Apes in the trees at the time to come down and spend more time moving through the small savannas to the next group of trees, slowly developing up-right walking on two legs and dexterous arms and hands which lead to us. The ice ages resulted in the savanna taking over most of the planet which meant that one of the up-right walking animals which recently started making hand axes and became a fast runner and had lots of new prey given the grass herbivores and had just developed a new way of cooling off in the mid-day heat, “sweating” and lost his body hair to help with the cooling provided by the sweating, well he became king of the day-time savanna which led directly to us, He could slowly jog down animals in the mid-day heat until they collapsed due to heat exhaustion. The other animals have to pant to cool off. No other animal has anywhere near the ability to cool off by sweating as us.
So thank the C4 grasses, the drying out of the climate which accelerated in the ice ages for the emergence of an upright walking, sweaty, hairless, tool-maker with a big brain who is now in charge.
Bill Illis
the C3 plants, trees and bushes die-back. The Amazon rain-forest declines by two-thirds, for example.
________________________________________
So the strap-line to your saga is: … “Save the rainforests – burn more coal…..”
Do you think GreenPeace will pick up on it?
Bill Illis
March 13, 2015 at 11:36 am
Bill,
That is an insightful historical perspective!
Mac
I wrote a longer post several days ago on another board which I think some will find interesting, especially if you are into human evolution.
————————–
The Earth’s climate started drying out about 8 million years ago. (From 24 to 8 million years ago, precipitation was much higher and temperatures were warmer and the entire land surface was one big forest – Antarctica excepted).
10 million years ago, there was 50 different species of Apes in this big forest world.
At 8 million years ago, pollen from Grasses started to appear in much, much greater numbers in the geologic record and we started to see some savanna appearing. One of those Ape species started to spend more time on the ground moving through the small savanna regions to the next group of trees.
Upright walking slowly developed. More dexterous arms and hands developed.
The climate continued drying out and larger savanna regions appeared.
By 2.5 million years ago, stone tools appeared. Useless devices without dexterous arms and hands.
During the periodic ice ages which started then, the savannas became vast areas covering most of the continents because there was less precipitation and CO2 levels were so low that C3 plants, trees and bushes can only grow where there is very high precipitation regions. The Amazon rainforest, for example, declines by two-thirds during an ice age.
C4 grasses, however, don’t have a problem with lower CO2 levels until there is extremely low precipitation levels. The C4 grasses then become the dominant vegetation during the ice ages. C4 grasses only evolved about 24 million years ago when CO2 levels fell below 280 ppm for perhaps the very first time. Almost certainly because of the lower CO2 levels and/or the newly evolved C4 grasses created a new equilibrium level of lower CO2. There were C3 grasses before this time but basically no C4 grasses.
A new species niche develops, the grass herbivores. Before there was extensive grassland, there wasn’t any grass herbivores.
By 1.8 million years ago, with Homo Erectus and the newly invented hand axe, a bigger brain to be able to think our way through problems, new grassland herbivores, the Homo species began to exploit an entirely new niche. The savanna during the middle of the day. At this time of day, almost all other animals are hunkered down in whatever shade is available, panting, trying to cool off.
Home Erectus, with upright walking, a bigger brain, the new hand axe, wooden spears, the ability to run on two legs efficiently and the next new evolutionary tool “sweating”, Home Erectus became king of the day-time savanna. We and Homo Erectus sweat more than any other animal. The horse is the next closest species in this ability, but far, far lower in their ability to use sweating to cool-off in this method than us. Even Chimpanzees do not compare.
We lost out body hair to help with the cooling provided by sweating and we exploited this super-cooling-off ability so that we could jog down animals in the midday heat until they had to stop because panting does not cool off a body as much. Trying to hide under a tree while suffering heat exhaustion, they were easy prey for the new king of the day-time savanna. The lions stayed away because we had new weapons and they were still trying to pant and cool off in the midday heat. The hand axe can cut up a kill very fast and we could get out of there fast anyway.
Home Erectus was successful enough in exploiting this new niche and these new abilities, that he moved out of the African savanna and spread to most of the old world.
Some fire and coal and another 1 million years of more evolutionary advances and a hairless, sweaty, upright walking tool maker with a big brain is in charge.
Without the evolution of C4 grasses and the lowering of CO2 levels 24 million years ago, the drying out of the climate starting 8 million years ago and accelerating during the ice ages, there would still be 50 different species of Apes in the trees and no humans.
Bill,
To make your living like that, you also need a lot of melanin in your naked skin.
When your distant descendants migrate to temperate climes, they need to shed that melanin in order to maximize vitamin production, and learn how to stay warm with fire and animal skins.
Let’s continue the storyline.
Homo Erectus spreads to most of the old world, in very short order 1.8 million years ago.
Over time, Home Erectus evolves into the Neanderthals in Europe (by about 400,000 years ago), and the Denisovians in northern Asia by about the same time. As noted by Catherine, these new sub-species were probably lighter skin colour in order to maintain Vitamin D levels and to do away with the increased melanin needed for the mid-day sun in Africa.
In Africa, Home Erectus continued slowly modernizing. At some point, control of fire was developed, let’s say 1.0 million years ago. This was inherited by the later Neanderthals and Denisovians.
Some type of clothing needed to be invented by the early Homo Erectus and the later Neanderthal because the niche we originally exploited is at a temperature of 32C in the mid-day African savanna and 0C in the mid-day in ice-age Europe is just too cold for a hairless early Homo Erectus or Neanderthal. Even today, room temperature of 22C assumes we are wearing clothes. If not, we are a “hot” or even “too hot for other animals” adapted species.
Language is still an open question at this point. Obviously, 3 or 4 Homo Erectus or Neanderthal or Denisovians hunting together would need to be able to communicate in some manner, so one would have to assume it is something less than modern Homo Sapien capabilities but still existing nonetheless.
These Homo species ate meat almost exclusively. Even though the new hand-axe is still just as good for digging out roots and the young and females would obviously be doing some “gathering” in this lifestyle, meat was the most important part of the diet (according to the analysis of almost all fossil teeth).
In Africa, Homo Erectus slowly modernized eventually becoming a sub-group called Archaic Homo Sapiens.
At some point about 250,000 years ago, a group of Archaic Homo Sapiens in southern Africa became isolated from the gene-flow of other African species. These Homo species eventually became the fully modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens. They lived on the coast of South Africa eating seafood as a first for the species line or from the deserts of Namibia but are the fathers and mothers of ALL of us today. The bush people of southern Africa are the closest living relatives of these people.
By 80,000 years ago, this new isolated group of Homo Sapien Sapien started acting “modern” in that decorative shells were made, orchure was used in burials etc. Stone tools became much more advanced and the hand-axe was gone. Spears were now made of finely tuned stone-points.
These people were even more successful and displaced the other Archaic Homo Sapiens in Africa. By 70,000 years ago, they moved into the Middle-East and then southern Asia by 50,000 years ago. Europe by 40,000 years ago, North America by 13,000 years ago.
Still a sweaty, hairless tool-maker at this time, but now with fully modern language, eventually bows and arrow and atlatl spearthrowers and better clothes. Eventually, agriculture and eventually coal-fired steam and eventually smart-phones. Still an African savanna during the mid-day adapted smart species arising because of C4 grassland.
Bill Illis,
Your response to my post was a very good one. I’ve been thinking about it for the past day, and it occurs that maybe you could write piece for submission to wattsupwiththat under its own sub-head.
Since the mid 90s, I’ve been very concerned that AGW research had become politically driven, rather than scientifically driven. My number 1 piece of evidence that this had happened, was the amazing absence of CO2 fertilization as a principal topic in the debate. It is just overwhelmingly clear that increased CO2 makes the planet a greener, more verdant, more productive place yet all we heard about was that we were going to burn up in a desert. One could go years without seeing CO2 fertilization acknowledged in the MSM as a positive change.
Perhaps we have now reached a point where we can go on offense. Your post places CO2 fertilization in a much broader context than is ordinarily seen. By emphasizing that CO2 levels actually have greatly altered the mix of plants and the evolutionary process in the not too distant past, the key role of CO2 fertilization on the biosphere becomes real in a new and deeper way.
Anyway, good job on the post.
Here is another explanation for the drawdown of CO2 by C4 Grasses. A picture is worth a thousand words. They are very effective Carbon sinks.
http://esask.uregina.ca/management/app/assets/img/enc2/selectedbig/51F187F4-1560-95DA-43DFADB7FF2FC811.jpg
Each acre of grassland sinks 0.3 tons of Carbon each year. Use that factoid when someone is trying to talk about methane emissions from Cattle. The pasture they feed on is sinking far more Carbon each year than the methane emissions count up to. Why is there so much farmland in the North American prairies and the Russian steppes. Because the soil left-over from 10,000 years of grassland is Carbon nutrient rich. Grassland is sinking about one-sixth of the total that natural processes are absorbing each year.
TYoke: “Plants originally evolved when CO2 was far more plentiful, and have now become fantastic experts at the CO2 extraction process.”
After “stabilize at about 560 ppm”. The progress socialist greenies will be “ringing the bell” about “Killer Tomatoes”.
Why would we want to reduce CO2 emissions?
There is no health reason, no scientific reason and no economic reason.
Looks like another crackpot technology.
If you look at the ethanol project in the US, corn is grown then turned into ethanol. If you look at the entire process, the energy contained in one gallon of ethanol is very close to the energy consumed to make it. Without subsidies from the US government, the whole process would be uneconomic.
Who want’s to bet that this Carbon Storage technology will be subsidized?
Experience in California has shown that we need to be very careful of green technology.
Many years ago, California decided that it needed to reduce car emissions. They mandated the addition of a then known carcinogenic additive – MTBE. However, since this was green technology, and not the Tobacco Industry, they were given a pass.
The results were catastrophic. Fish died in Lake Tahoe, the Santa Monica water supply was contaminated so that the wells had to be shut down. The formaldehyde pollutants produced when gasoline containing this additive was burnt caused some people to get asthma. and the bottom line was that since cars running on this gasoline got 2-3 miles per gallon less the reduction in pollution was not achieved. The only people who benefited were the Oil Refineries who were able to charge more for their gas.
“Beware of Green Gods bearing gifts”.
By the way, if they are so certain that none of the storage reservoirs will leak, we can also use them to store radioactive waste from nuclear reactors.
Wald D: “….them to store radioactive waste from nuclear reactors.”
Here in the U.S. we have a place to store radioactive waste that is not being utilized which electric users have paid for through a tax. You can thank Harry Reed and his green friends.
It should be simply stuck – second gear is already too fast. I have not read all the comments, but I have seldom seen anyone discuss the economics of this idiocy. To get the CO2 underground, one must: 1) Retrieve the exhaust from a plant’s flue stack, 2) scrub/clean the exhaust (remove all sulfur, NOX, SOX, oxygen; fully dehydrate to remove H20, etc.) 3) compress the CO2 from atmospheric pressure to the point that it becomes efficiently transportable by pipeline (min 1500 psig), 4) build a high-pressure pipeline to the sequestration plant, 4) Inject the liquid (a mile?) underground. The power and facilities required for all this is hugely expensive. This URL explains many of the requirements: http://www.netl.doe.gov/File%20Library/Research/Coal/ewr/co2/42650-Southwest-Research-compression–Moore–mar09.pdf
A quick web search of pipeline transportation of CO2 reveals a lot of misunderstanding and over-simplification (and reinventing of the wheel) of the process. The oil industry has been injecting CO2 for decades for enhanced oil recovery, but few seem to ask their engineers how it is done.
Walt D: Regarding MTBE, you mentioned that the “… only people who benefited were the Oil Refineries who were able to charge more for their gas.”
Refineries charged more for gasoline to recover the cost of manufacturing/purchasing, storing, and injecting MTBE into fuel. They may have “charged more,” but profits did not increase.
MTBE was mandated in the whole country, by the way – and when it was discovered that it was soluble in water, and entering the water supply via leaking service station tanks, etc, the oil companies had to pay for clean-up, mitigation, etc., even though it was essentially mandated by the EPA. (EPAdid not mandate MTBE, they mandated “oxygenation” of gasoline. At the time, though, MTBE was the only know viable gasoline oxygenator.)
*sigh* This is like debating the best way to attach a cheese grater to your TV set.
I ask again: Why are we even trying to do it?
I have a cheese grator on my tv and you know its not a very good place for it.
http://www.lolquacio.us/lolquacious/lols/0709/c922208f6582db1fe6428e12e2b9941148b06ead.jpg
Sorry, Meant to put an image, not a link in italics…..
http://www.lolquacio.us/lolquacious/lols/0709/c922208f6582db1fe6428e12e2b9941148b06ead.jpg
Joe,
That wins image of the week! Now I can’t get that out of my mind!
Would that be similar to a “Salad Shooter” on your keyboard. Of course with dressing. 😉
Even with free shipping and handling there may be need for pause.
Lethally dangerous and enormously expensive? Of course, Howard Herzog doesn’t see those issues as a problem. After all, they are an effective Dark Green means to an end.
Of course the Green groups will be right on board with CCS as it fulfills the primary requirement straight out of the Green environmental solution playbook .
1) Does it inconvenience or endanger humans…..Yes/No ……………..If Yes approved
2) Is it beneficial to the environment ………Yes/No ………………………………Who cares ? see 1)
Only stupid [snip] will hide the CO2 from plants.. do we want growing desserts? lower gelds in grain?
When all the world’s oxygen (the clue is the O2 bit of CO2) is safely squeezed underground the problem will be solved. No more nasty polluting, breeding, consuming humans.
No more life at all.
Gaia starts from scratch
Don’t be ridiculous. We can save half the oxygen and produce CO instead of CO2 by incomplete combustion.
I like it!
Here’s a great page on air composition: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-composition-d_212.html
I don’t quite follow the attitude here. CO2 is by no means very dangerous thing pumped in a deep container; there is no way you could release it really fast. As long the weight of the stone above it is much higher than the pressure of the gas, and the way out is small enough to limit a possible uncontrolled leak.
However, I would not pump it underground, because that requires lot of work (in terms of Joules). I’d pump it to the ocean. The only very good thing in mines and similar is that it is possible to let the gas out if it proves that we need it anyway.
Eric’s worries – with respect – they sound too much the usual eco-scares used by green antilibertarian people.
Into the ocean? Pray tell how you would get it there? Hundreds of kilometres of pipelines with the associated infrastructure of pumps etc. to keep it going? I would love to have the contract for that.
I haven’t mentioned the specialised pumps that would have to pump to the bottom of the ocean to keep the CO2 there.
It’s possible but in the realms of Scifi.
Big cost, no bennifit, sounds like something we should do.
Lets get together Bob and form a consortium. We can ask Greenpeace and WWF (for some reason I think of them as the World Wrestling Federation) for funding, they get millions from idiots. We can pay ourselves millions and produce nothing.
CSS is great stuff – you can experiment in real time with it here.
Oh wait, nevermind.
I think Mr Herzog has been reading too many science fiction books. The only way to sequester CO2 permanently is to convert it to a carbonate. It can be done. Good luck finding an energy source to do it . I am sure I could calculate the energy to do that, but I frankly, couldn’t be bothered.
Yes, converting CO2 into carbonates would need huge amounts of calcium or sodium oxide. How to make calcium oxide? Industrial process produces it by heating limestone at a high temperature. Ca CO3 + heat = CaO + CO2.
It is highly laughable that one will release as much CO2 in the atmosphere as one wants to capture
Yikes, 10 seconds on Google and: “Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery”
In my first year as a power plant engineer (1979), a consortium of several mid size oil companies approached Texas Electric to put a CO2 scrubber facility on the Morgan Creek plant unit 6 (500MW) boiler. Being a gas fired unit, the process was much simpler than doing it on a coal fired unit. The CO2 was to be used in a tertiary recovery project in several oil fields in West Texas, and we were not the only plant to be used. CO2 injection for enhanced recovery was fairly new at that point and CO2 supplies were limited. We were going to be paid for the CO2 we generated, the local EPA folks were happy, and even a few envirowhackos were somewhat happy. We got as far as contracting an AE firm to begin design of the equipment and the consortium had landmen negotiating pipeline routes.
Then, Murphy intervened. The really deep natural gas drilling projects, I think the ones in the Anadarko Basin, started completing, and the huge production volumes of raw gas they were generating had a large percentage of CO2 in them. Much more than the traditional sources did. As the equipment and methods for separating this out were well developed, and much cheaper than separating it from a power plant boiler exhaust, the consortium backed out of the project and it was cancelled.
I may have missed the post here but nowhere do I see any numbers detailing how much space is needed to store this CO2.
A rough estimate of the volume would be about twice the volume of the coal (assuming high grade coal = pure carbon one C, and CO2 is one C and 2 O), The local coal fired power plant has a pile of coal larger than a big city mall. Several time a week a train of rail-cars almost a mile long replaces the coal that was burnt. That means that to sequester the CO2 it would take two trains over a mile long for each one that was burnt if it was converted into “dry-ice” or liquid CO2. even the abandoned coal mines would not provide sufficient space to store all of the CO2. Further, the massive volume of this material would inevitably cause all of the disaster scenarios described above. The idea is beyond ridiculous, it is insane!
That why we should do it
I’m not a Senior Research Engineer, but it took me 30 seconds of Google research to find out why we never got into 3rd gear:
http://ccwa.org.au/content/carbon-capture-storage
I didn’t even bother googling. I just needed an IQ above 90 and being out of my teens
Is it true that 97% of climate alarmists have a sub-97 IQ?
[No. But half of all self-selected climate scientists have an IQ below the average climate scientist. .mod]
How about this for an answer?: The CAGW fanatics and fear mongers don’t push for any real solutions because that is not what they care about. In fact they don’t really believe their scare stories any more than skeptics. If they did they could have started pushing nuclear and geothermal power years ago and the problem would already be hugely reduced.
Instead they block effective solutions and promote the things that cannot possibly work like wind generation which can never handle base load.
Bingo! The actual goal is not to solve environmental problems, it is to make people feel guilty and be on the moral defensive. The rest of us should be deferring to the environmentally righteous among us. They deserve status and power because they are MORALLY superior to the rest of us.
Actual solutions would be nothing but a problem for them. Why would we need them, if the environmental problems disappeared?
Sanctimony sells.
No. Just, no. The stupidity, the utter insanity of CCS lies not with the possible, very real dangers of it, but rather with the fact that it has absolutely zero environmental benefit, and the huge amount of money used to accomplish such massive stupidity is wasted.
Since all sequestered CO2 will eventually leak back into the atmosphere, if not now, later, why not just pretend to pump it into the ground and let it leak out. The entire enterprise is a waste of money so why not do it in a simple manner and just burn the money? This is all crony capitalism and all these efforts will fail while millions and billions of dollars just disappear.
CO2 is plant food and we need more not less, as the planet cools and our food supply diminishes. Not only will CCS have NO EFFECT on atmospheric CO2, it has all the dangers described above.
CCS is a political agenda and has nothing to do with real science or real needs for our world or people.