Guest essay by Eric Worrall
If you thought the planned Canadian $50 / ton for carbon will be painful, a study published in Nature explores optimal carbon sequestration technologies at various much higher carbon price points. It concludes conventional carbon sequestration – burying CO2 in a disused gas well – offers poor returns below $1000 / ton. Below $400 / ton your only hope of making profit is to burn biomass to ash (and claim the carbon you burn is renewable). But at $400 / ton, Biochar – burying residual charcoal after volatiles are extracted and burned – is the technology of choice.
Optimal bioenergy power generation for climate change mitigation with or without carbon sequestration
Restricting global warming below 2 °C to avoid catastrophic climate change will require atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Current integrated assessment models (IAMs) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios assume that CDR within the energy sector would be delivered using bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Although bioenergy-biochar systems (BEBCS) can also deliver CDR, they are not included in any IPCC scenario. Here we show that despite BECCS offering twice the carbon sequestration and bioenergy per unit biomass, BEBCS may allow earlier deployment of CDR at lower carbon prices when long-term improvements in soil fertility offset biochar production costs. At carbon prices above $1,000 Mg−1 C, BECCS is most frequently (P>0.45, calculated as the fraction of Monte Carlo simulations in which BECCS is the most cost effective) the most economic biomass technology for climate-change mitigation. At carbon prices below $1,000 Mg−1 C, BEBCS is the most cost-effective technology only where biochar significantly improves agricultural yields, with pure bioenergy systems being otherwise preferred.
Read more: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13160
Can you imagine a world where carbon is priced above $1000 / ton? People would be selling the bodies of their dead relatives to help cover funeral costs. No home would be able to afford heating, unless your rooftop solar array was having a good day. Yet this is the world government policy planners are embracing as a future goal.
Environmental planners are well aware that double digit carbon pricing, say the Canadian $50 / ton, isn’t really going to make that much difference. People will simply swallow the pain and keep driving their cars.
But $50 / ton creates acceptance of the new tax, just as the original small income tax in Britain, to pay for British intervention in France, acclimatised people to the concept of paying part of their income to the government.
In America’s case, paying for the Civil War was the original excuse for an income tax – until the 16th Amendment enshrined the right to gather the new income tax into the American Constitution.
At $400 / ton, or $1000 / ton, or more, which is where carbon pricing is heading if greens get their way, the pain really kicks in. People would have to give up home heating and driving. Everything will become hideously expensive. The modern world will be swept aside, and replaced by the destitution and hardship our ancestors experienced.
But by then, we’ll probably have a new amendment to the US constitution, and the painful new Carbon tax will be with us for always.
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Adding Charcoal to soil is now well known. The scam is saying its “biochar” and demanding 20 times the price along with of course fake credentials.
Sorry, wrong quoting above, it should be:
Burning one gallon of gasoline produces 8.9 kg CO2, which is similar to 2.4 Kg carbon.
$1000/ton will then increase the price by $2.4/gallon.
It will certainly be expensive, but the claim above is after all a bit of exaggeration.
Jan
Is that a US gallon, or an Imperial gallon?
Hi, Jim
it is a US gallon (3.785 liter)
Jan
Jan – thanks. Have to keep our gallons straight!
A carbon price of $400/ton add $0.97 /gallon to the price of gasoline
Jan
A gallon of Petrol only weighs 3.57 kg, so impossible to make 8.9 kg of co2
Not that it matters, but you need to add the weight of the oxygen taken from the air to burn the gas, which then forms CO2. Maybe they should tax the oxygen used instead.
A US gallon of petrol weigh about 2.9 kg
When that is burnt, it combines with about 10 kg of oxygen form the air, giving a total of 12.9 kg mass.
The exhaust from a clean combustion will then consist of 8.9 kg CO2, and 4 kg water (H2O).
Jan
Grey Lensman
Let’s say that petrol hydrocarbon is 70% C, 30% H. 0.70 * 3.57 = 2.50 kg C
One kg C = 3.67 kg CO2 per chemical stoichiometry.
2.50 * 3.67= 9.17 kg CO2.
Not exact, but you get the idea. Most people don’t.
For instance 400 ppm by volume of CO2 in the atmosphere = 400 * 2.12 = 848 Gt of carbon in the 46,713 Gt biospheric carbon cycle, 1.8%. FF’s share, 160 Gt or 0.34%. Not so threatening after all. IPCC Figure 6.1 & Table 6.1
I noticed nobody questioned whether a few people writing an article in nature have the means to estimate costs for carbon sequestration technology. The last time I worked on the subject I supervised a small team which worked with a larger team made up 32 individuals working for contractors and consultants. The total budget was $3 million usd, and we had the benefit of several billion USD of previous efforts which gave us huge databases and actual costs and performance. The end result was a preliminary cost estimate to generate steam and electricity and sequester the co2. And in hindsight we were wrong.
In other words, anything published in Nature about the subject will simply be useless, because these outfits lack the financial and engineering muscle to get semi accurate figures.
TASS news agency reporting:
“Russia does not plan to ratify Paris Agreement on climate earlier than 2020”
http://tass.com/politics/909540
Why char the biomass? Commercial landfills go dry after a few years which stops methanogenic activity, effectively ending associated carbon loss.
Wonder when the greenies will start paying landfill operators for such carbon sequestration?
I know it’s been said before, but this is a carbon planet. This is the ultimate scam.
It takes about 62 mcf of natural gas to generate 1 ton of carbon. At the current wellhead price of $3/mcf, 62 mcf is worth $186. This means that a meaningful carbon tax would have to be at least $400/ton, possibly $1,000/ton. At a retail price of $10/mcf, 62 mcf would cost consumers $620. Tack on’ a meaningful carbon tax and the cost of 62 mcf would skyrocket to $1,020 to $1,620. A prohibitively expensive tax on energy which will have no measurable effect on the climate. Keep this in mind when you pay your gas, electricity, heating oil and/or gas station bills… and when you vote.
Sequestering carbon looks to be very profitable. Take CO2. Collect payment. Open valve. Job done. Who would ever know.
It isn’t like toxic chemicals where if you just dump them someone is going to notice. If this ever does become an industry I predict it will be absolutely riddled with cheats and frauds.
Statements like this show a disregard for or unawareness of the concept of marginalism in microeconomic theory:
“People will simply swallow the pain and keep driving their cars.”
There is a vast literature out there on the effects of incremental increases in price, tax, minimum wage, and the complex interaction of inflation, money supply, demand curve shape, stickiness, psychological effects and bias, etc., that influence consumer behavior and which aggregate micro behavior into macro effects. This author chooses to handwave it all away in the midst of an analysis of economic policy? I think I will wait for a better effort.
Until we have safe, clean / hygienic, convenient and inexpensive mass transit, we’ll keep driving our cars. Taxing the fuel addresses on of those four concerns.
Sorry, “on” should, of course, be “one”.
There is overwhelming evidence that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the oceans is not dangerously high – it is dangerously low, too low for the continued survival of life on Earth.
Therefore, CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/07/01/celebrate-weve-finally-hit-a-climate-tipping-point/comment-page-1/#comment-2249552
I dunno. We could always try burying godzillions of tons of unread Nature publications.
Economically efficient burial of availability. Can’t make such silliness up.
Current price for prime steel billet is $200-500 / metric ton. US-produced steel runs about 2.9 tons of carbon emitted for each ton of steel; China/India-produced steel is 3.2 – 3.9 tons of carbon for each ton of steel (China produces more steel than the next 9 large producer countries combined). Let’s just assume 3.0 tons of carbon for each ton of steel for simplicity. At $400/ton carbon cost, that adds $1200 to the price of each ton of steel — effectively quadrupling the cost of steel.
The world produces approximately 1.6 billion metric tons of steel each year. At $1200 carbon cost per ton, that makes roughly $1.92 Trillion (1.92E12 USD) of extra cost on annual steel production. Do you think the world economy will notice?
Steel is the single most useful material developed in the history of civilization. Modern life depends on it in thousands of ways. There are no words to express how stupid it would be to quadruple the effective cost of steel.
A typical Rankine cycle (i.e. steam) coal fired power plant produces about 2,200 pounds of CO2 per MWh depending on fuel composition and heat rate. Because one pound of carbon produces 3.67 pounds of CO2, divide 2,200 by 3.67 to get carbon: 600 lb C/MWh. The CPP goal for coal is 1,300 lb CO2/MWh.
A typical Rankine cycle natural gas power plant produces about 1,200 pounds of CO2 per MWh depending on fuel composition and heat rate or 327 lb C/MWh.
A typical simple Brayton cycle (i.e. hot gas) combustion turbine produces about 1,300 pounds of CO2 per MWh or 354 lb C/MWh.
A typical combined cycle natural gas fired power plant, (Brayton hot gas & Rankine steam) produces about 650 pounds of CO2 per MWh depending on fuel composition and heat rate or 177 lb C/MWh.
EPA’s Clean Power Plan specifies performance standards that the states must meet (making the states the bad guys avoids the perception of overweaning Federalism) by 2030. For individual EGUs: coal – 1,305 lb CO2/MWh, NG – 771 lb CO2/MWh.
BTW renewable generation, i.e. hydro, wind, and solar, in service prior to 2012 do not count towards this performance standard calculation. Bet the hydro, wind, and solar industries thought this a great idea.
If the CO2 tax is $50 per ton of C then that would add 600/2000 * $50 = $15 / MWh to the operating cost of the coal fired power plant. Most coal plants currently produce at about $25 to $30 per MWh. The average grid clearing price is on the order of $35 / MWh.
So carbon taxes would increase electricity rates substantially compared to current production costs. Comparable taxes and cost increases would apply to the gasoline carbon in your car and the NG carbon for hot water and furnace.
$50 $400 $1,000
lb C / MWh Ton C / MWh $/MWh per $/ton CO2
Coal, actual 599 0.30 $15 $120 $300
Coal, CPP goal 354 0.18 $9 $71 $177
NG Stm & CCPP 327 0.16 $8 $65 $163
NG CCPP, actual 177 0.09 $4 $35 $89
No, at that price level, if no one else, the Chinese would develop cheap &. safe generation IV nuclear reactors, not only for electricity generation but for driving chemical plants as well and sell them to the world. They would get extremely rich on that business, still, home heating and driving would remain affordable and the (post)modern world would be maintained. That’s how a politically distorted market is supposed to work.
Unfortunately that also means the CPC (Communist Party of China) would gain overwhelming power over everyone, including these world government policy planners. Is that what they are striving for? Or are they just tired of life &. and fed up with constitutional democracy?