Eminent energy economist warns that carbon capture and storage will never be viable
CCS would make renewables and nuclear energy look cheap
That is the stark message of Professor Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh and a former adviser to the World Bank. In a new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Hughes says that claims that costs will fall quickly are unlikely to be borne out in practice and even if they are, the total investment required makes CCS little more than a utopian dream.
And as Professor Hughes explains:
“We have spent countless millions trying to get carbon capture to work for coal-fired power stations. But in the future coal will mostly be used in the developing world, where CCS is going to be too expensive. Everyone else is moving to gas, for which CSS isn’t yet an option.”
And even if the technology can be made to work for gas, it would come at a price that “would make renewables and nuclear look cheap”.
This is in part because of a lack of joined up policy, as Professor Hughes explains:
“Successive governments haven’t thought their policies through. The focus on renewables is making CCS – already a marginal technology – even less viable. A coherent strategy could reduce carbon emissions at a fraction of the current cost by switching to gas with the option to install CCS if/when it makes economic sense.”
Full paper (pdf) — The Bottomless Pit: The Economics Of Carbon Capture and Storage
I bet he’s not popular with my old geology lecturer from Strathclyde Uni who is now Professor of CCS in Edinburgh, Professor Stuart Haszeldine…
Prof Haszeldine has his snout deep into the CCS trough. Without the trough, he would be without a job.
I Googled Prof of CCS to get his name, and was shocked to find that CCS, despite being something that doesn’t exist, is now a major employer, several centres at UK and AUS universities. The good Prof is the go-to person for the BBC to get an unbiased and balanced view of the subject. Take some comfort from the fact that you are not funding this non-subject solely from your taxes … you also pay for it when filling-up your car, as several oil companies are “investing” in it.
Most CCS funding is spent on people who do nothing not actually doing the CCS. So it is a rent seekers paradise. Academics (the educated) will look into CCS for 500,000 years if allowed. This does not mean a version of CCS is unworthy. Its the management of the task that is very bad and corrupt. the corruption is usually Government mandated by the educated.
Fortunately the EPA have removed the US money. Collapse of rent seekers is imminent.
In Australia we are still in green mode with two states now claimant (bankrupt) excluding NT. For the United States and Australia to have bankrupt states considering they occupy the richest places on earth this takes true talent. Neither are reliant on any one thing. The commonality appears to be “making things” is bad, making money out of money is good.
Schemes that store CO2 and reuse it to do things are successful. CO2 is a valuable industrial gas. Low cost storage and recycling can be achieved using spent oil and gas reservoirs. There is now 4,000 km of CO2 pipelines in Texas. It is used for enhanced oil recovery. It could be used for many other things.
New methods for producing hydrogen are about to hit the market that combined with CO2, (exothermic reaction), can be used to make methane at US$2.83/GJ or sub US$3/mmBtu. No, this does not sequester the CO2 but it should make Qatar and all the shale gas producers VERY nervous. It won’t do electric cars much good if hydrogen fuel cells can be refilled anywhere at a lower cost vs gasoline or diesel and it does not produce 8 years of CO2 vs gasoline cars.
Despite spending US$440 Billion dollars shale producers are yet to produce a net dollar of profit. That is not to say some of them have not done well. Its just the net position looks like a ponzi scheme. They all need an oil price over US$60 per barrel and this is not going to happen for several years. Expect more share sales and loans and fairy stories about oil and gas price increases coming soon.
Lastly, there are labs working on anti-matter based energy production. There is a sustained positron reaction using high energy lasers to do the start up on very thin wafers at relatively low temperatures. I guess no-one read the quantum doctrine manual. They are too busy doing it to worry over “the educated” saying it is impossible. The downside is that for the first time we will have enough potential energy at a single location to destroy our planet.
Allow plants utilizing photosynthesis to capture the carbon. How about that for a utopian dream come true, and it won’t cost a nice nickel.
won’t cost us a nickel. Damned autocorrect
Well, I don’t know about that. There’s seeds to buy, potting soil, gardening tools, Miracle-Gro®… 😉
Kudzu.
Just don’t let it escape.
@ATheoK
I’ve driven through the South. Waaaaaay too late for that.
I don’t want to live anywhere close to a carbon capture operation. Carbon escape is what worries me.
Carbon escape won’t hurt you – although it would look pretty odd to see lumps of coal running away from the dump site. Carbon dioxide escape, on the other hand ….
Monna M I think what Trebla was thinking of was “Lake Nyos Suffocated Over 1,746 People in a Single Night” Google Lake Nyos in the Cameroon for further info on this escape of a huge pocket of CO2
@harrow
Monna M was being arch.
I have the same nightmare with energy storage.
I’ve seen a Galaxy Note 7 burn up with that tiny lithium battery .. imagine that, 6 or 7 orders of magnitude larger.
When the history of “climate change and how we tried to spend our way out of it” is written by our utterly incredulous future generations, I predict that, of all the insanity proposed or enacted, the whole issue of CCS (and its attendant burying of the “pollution” in distant oil wells and similar), will rank only alongside the notion of felling virgin forests, turning them into wood chips then burning them in power stations up to thousands of miles away (the “Drax solution”).
Our future historians will simply be unable to comprehend how such insane policies could have been thought of, leave alone implemented – not least because of their net overall “carbon emissions” and the small matter of the ludicrous overall cost of energy that these wonderful solutions result in.
People are like sheep and lemmings. They go mad in herds, following blindly over the cliff.
(Sigh…..) The suicide of the Lemmings is a Disney HOAX. It’s phony news. Doesn’t happen. Didn’t ever happen. It’s like believing that Tinkerbell will live if you really really believe and really really clap your hands really really hard. Do you believe in Peter Pan? Do you believe CNN and the Trump/Russia story? The Lemmings do not commit suicide, Tinkerbell will not live, and the CNN/Trump/Russia story is made up to enhance CNN’s ratings (and damage President Trump).
“The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers. The epic “lemming migration” was staged using careful editing, tight camera angles and a few dozen lemmings running on snow covered lazy-Susan style turntable.”
http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=56
But they were trying to save the planet. Doesn’t that count for something?
Ian, My sentiments, exactly.
Hopefully in the near future the scales will fall off everyone’s eyes and people will suddenly see how we are vigorously trashing nature and humans in the name of saving them both from the mythical dragon of catastrophic climate change.. It amazes me how so-called humanitarians and environmentalists have made global warming alarmism their transcendent single cause and thereby become willing to sacrifice all other progress in their fields at the feet of this false god. Just 10 years ago it was a cardinal sin to put a chainsaw to a tree or use a paper grocery bag on the Pacific coast, but today it is considered “green” and “sustainable” to turn all of our old-growth forests of diverse species and habitats into intensively-cultivated mono-cultures of GMO corn or non-native pulpwood to feed into gas tanks or furnaces. And the actions actually taken in the name of saving us from climate Armageddon, when scrutinized, are found to be actually increasing GHG emissions — the EPA’s corn ethanol fuel blending fiasco is the poster child of this. The likes of Google are even underwriting such misguided ventures as CoolPlanet whose bright idea is to burn trees into “bio-char” and thereby release much of their perfectly and naturally sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere.
According to Skeptical Science – renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels for electricity generation –
Though I am perplexed on how someone who doesnt grasp elementary math, science and economics, somehow possesses the superior intellectual capacity to ascertain the validity of AGW
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516306875
https://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=73&&n=3774
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Tuesday, to the delight of rural America, that the Trump administration is moving to rescind the Obama era’s “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) regulatory rule. http://www.breitbart.com/california/2017/06/28/trump-epa-to-dump-wotus-control-over-247-million-acres-of-farmland/
Molten Salt Reactors will be cheaper than coal plant in the next 10-15 years.
Doubtful. Maybe in 50 years.
Right about the time fusion becomes practical.
If one group – electricity vendors – burn a fuel that produces something as valuable as CO2 and profits thereby, and then, at the expense of the electricity-using public, withholds that CO2 from being freely available to the public for other uses, they should be sued.
Farmers require CO2 to be freely available to all. It means the poorest in the world will be able to grow food more productively without assistance. Preventing access to this resource as a deliberate act, even to the extend of taxing, directly or indirectly, the public in order to keep it from those eventual users as a conscious act, is unjust.
With global CO2 at near-historic lows, the living biomass upon which nearly all life forms depend are struggling to survive with yields well down on their historical norms. At present CO2 concentration is less than 20% of its historical average.
Fossil fuels are a common treasure of humanity. It is wrong for some individuals or groups to profit from their exploitation and then withhold the residual benefits of that use from the rest of the population.
You really sound like a socialist 😉
Set CO2 Free!
Do it for the Plants!
Do it for a greener Environment!
Do it for the Children!
(Whew… that’s a tall soapbox to step down from, but I feel soooo virtuous!)
97% of WUWT posters could have made Prof Hughes statement.
There is only one non CO2 producing source (save facility construction, mining and ore processing contributions) we have right now that will ever work on a large scale and that is nuclear. But it is what it is.
Hoover Dam?
Hoover Dam produces about the same power as a two reactor nuclear plant and there are a couple of other large Hydro plants in the US. But a little hard to build Hoover Dams across the US due to, well, you know. And Hoover Dam’s output was down as the reservoir behind it started dropping in 2012.
The only thing in the universe that isn’t nuclear powered is human civilization.
Indeed?
Are you telling us Wharfplank, that all of that lime based cement, used to construct Hoover Dam was found somewhere without carbon dioxide emissions involved?
If that is indeed the case then CCS is doing it’s job which is to make panels and pinwheels attractive by comparison.
You have, of course, hit the nail squarely on the head. If Hillarybeast had been elected, we’d find ourselves surrounded by folks trying to make CCS the norm for all fossil-fueled power plant to the extent that John Q. Public would think of it as an integral and necessary part of any fossil plant. Now that you’ve artificially jacked up the capital and operating costs for a coal plant, of course the bird chopper looks like an attractive alternative.
Those panels and pinwheels would best be used to pump water back up to the “Hoover Dam” lake – when the sun doth shine and the wind doth blow.
CCS is based on fear of a dangerous greening of Africa.
I’ve always kind of wondered…
Why not PIPE the effluent stream of a coal / oil / gas powered generating station to a rainforest? OK, sure, the power plant needs to be near a rainforest. Clearly it’d be impractical otherwise. But hey… those rainforests are veritable sponges for CO₂. You get plant cover, tree growth. A kind of living sequestration.
Or, if we’re able to abstract the idea entirely, isn’t present-day CO₂ venting-to-the-atmosphere simply the same idea globally? Plants take up CO₂. Who knew.
FeSO₄ (ferrous sulfate) is a cheap-as-shipping-allows byproduct of TiO₂ (titanium dioxide, the white pigment) manufacture. Mountains of it has accumulated. Some is used for agriculture (makes plants dark green if they have enough nitrogen and phosphate). But most sits in mountains. All around the globe. Sprinkling it on “blue desert” ocean surface causes HUGE blooms of phytoplankton. Which do their thing, get eaten by bigger critters, most of which falls to the sea floor. Sequestration!
Is the “problem” really that hard to address?
GoatGuy
Algal blooms also cause problems, but perhaps they can be diffused.
They have tried that experiment of feeding algae with iron by dropping it into the ocean.. Turns out the algae don’t behave as expected. They hang up in mid ocean and don’t drop down to the bottom.
Sequestering large amounts of CO2 is a terrible idea. It does extensive good in the biosphere.
My own solution is to pipe the flue gas into a large greenhouse complex, with CO2 levels over 100 times normal plants will grow fast and the heat will enable all year round crop production. Granted there are problems: people will need oxygen masks to work in the greenhouses and there will be cooling problems in the summer.
Still it should make serous amounts of money from the crops and capture a large proportion of the CO2.
Do you have any idea of the temperature of the flue gas from a power plant>
about 45C
In winter greenhouses lose heat fast, all one needs to do spread out the injection of flue gas, so that it mixes with the atmosphere inside the greenhouse and the temperature will stay plant friendly. Additional cooling will be required in summer, as I indicated in my first post.
Old news, but one should never give up hope. I’m sure there were plenty of grumblings that nuclear energy couldn’t be harnessed or that man would never set foot on the Moon. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atmosphere-really-work/
There are still people saying we didn’t actually set foot on the moon…
There are still people saying that renewable energy has a part to play.
Since cost has never been in the Green play book ever, it is only a side issue for the rational to ponder.
“Even when costs have fallen to NOAK levels – sometime after 2040 – the average
cost of reducing CO2 emissions by fitting CCS to coal or gas plants will be at least
$120 per tCO2 for baseload plants and may be $160–200 per tCO2 at plants operating
with load factors of 60% or even 50% for gas plants.”
Nonsense. The Mitsubishi system in Texas costs somewhere in the $40-50/ton range. And pays for itself by producing more oil.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/01/11/nrg-energy-ceo-carbon-capture-is-very-challenging-at-50-oil/#5c9ef9ce5b22
Regarding using CO2 to revive oil fields, why not just compress and pump the power plant exhaust without bothering to separate the CO2 since with modern computer controlled combustion, the exhaust is mostly CO2 and water anyway. The cost of using power plant exhaust to revive an oil field should be 0, unless you want to remove the water, which is relatively inexpensive.
Just injecting flue gas into oilfields is an interesting idea.
You have to be certain not to inject any oxygen, that could form an explosive mixture with the natural gas. You would probably have to make the power plant slightly under supplied with air to ensure that all the oxygen was combined with carbon. That would make the plant slightly less efficient, but the extra cost would be tiny compared to to CCS.
Flue gas contains large amounts of nitrogen, but that should not damage the well field. It would however increase the volume of gas so the well field has to be large enough to need it.
@vboring
First, that concept is only notionally useful if you happen to have an oil field handy. Not gonna work for most plants. Second, selling the CO2 only reduces your cost from “mindbogglingly astronomical” to “pointlessly expensive”. Call me when you knock down the last $50/ton.
Hey, you want to capture carbon…have at it and plant a god damn tree. Has any serious research demonstrated the deleterious effects of 400ppm of CO2 ? No – I thought so
The only way CCS makes sense is if the CO2 is used for tertiary recovery projects in old oil fields.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/18/clean-coal-carbon-capture-and-enhanced-oil-recovery/
It’s also used to keep apples fresh.
But pursuing the idea of using any kind of carbon capture scheme for the purpose of controlling the climate is an undeniable indication of insanity, poor judgement, broken policy and a complete lack of common sense. The fact that this even sees the light of day is testament to how irreconcilably broken climate science has become.
Exactly.
That a) provides a place to put the CO2 and b) pays for the process.
(Germany abandoned CCS when nobody wanted to be on top of the rocks they proposed to pump the CO2 into)
Proving that despite Green Mania, some Germans maintain a sense of self-preservation.
I wish I could do dumb . Their are so many well remunerated careers if only someone can bring themselves to be dumb .
+1
It is high time for some career coach to write a book on this neglected strategy.
Opens the doors to EPA, NREL, Google Ventures, ACORE, BIO, RFA . . .
How about “Dumbness for Dummies?”.
My impression is that all geoengineering schemes including CCS, were merely sops, for those concerned about warming, about also concerned about costs of mitigation. It was made to look like a feasible, middle step. But it was all just a ploy, and a way to get people onboard the Climate Bandwagon.
Not sure about this. Why would people who fail to critically contemplate the evidence on global warming be any more critical toward all these phony mitigation strategies?
Palmer’s all-encompassing theory of academic aspiration maintains that academia actively selects for people with an uncritical mindset. It goes as follows:
1. People seek jobs that make them happy.
2. You are happy in a job if you think you are doing good work.
3. In academia, good work means producing good ideas and pursuing them.
4. You will consider your idea good if it stands up to your own criticism.
5. Lots of ideas will stand up to your criticism if
a) you have lots of brilliant ideas (rare), or
b) you have poor critical faculties (very common). Therefore,
6. Academia contains a few brilliant minds and a lot of people with poor critical thinking.
Now, the situation according to 6. is bad enough, but for things to really go south, the people with poor critical thinking must get together on a bandwagon all by themselves, to the exclusion of the brilliant ones. This has certainly happened in climate science, but not only there – I could name other fields suffering from the very same effect.
The problem, Michael, is that the “brilliant” climate scientists are silent in the face of exaggeration and outright lies by their politically astute brethren.
Dave, I think “silenced” would be more accurate than “silent,”
ALL of the Climate Change activities are about creating a strong cadre of supporters for the progressive movement in the STEM fields. They already have captured the education fields, the media, and all of the soft sciences, so the hard STEM disciplines are the last ones to be targeted. Even hard-nosed businessmen have capitulated, because they have been convinced that they can make some money from it. The engineers are most resistant to progressive blathering, so it will take a gigantic piling-on of the “consensus” to force the hard STEM people to finally give up.
I first heard about CCS from a colleague whom I had considered an expert on climate science, when I had asked him if global warming was really going to be as bad as advertised. When he referred to CCS in his reply, I thought “that’s absurd.” Being fobbed off with this bit of obvious nonsense got me started on my way to skepticism.
Ending all government funding of CCS related activity has no down side.
CCS is a non starter. To capture, compress and transport the CO2 takes anywhere between 30 to 50% of the power plant output. That in itself would make almost any other source of power more affordable. That does not even deal with the equipment costs, reagent required to remove the CO2, maintenance on the systems or the cost to store the CO2.
GWG..
Agree 100% unless you have a economic beneficial use for the CO2, like pumping it into an oil well which might offset the massive cost and use of more fossil fuels. Compression is very costly as well as the capture.
BTW they are sequestering more Oxygen than Carbon which is not a good idea.
Lets stop the subsidies for a bad idea.
Less think this through. The power of being want to capture at its source and pipe CO2 to the storage site, right. They could save a lot of money to allow the CO2 escape to the atmosphere, then suck it out of the atmosphere and pump it into storage at the site. No need for hoods and miles of piping. But then the power companies couldn’t charge the oil companies for the CO2. I believe the whole idea was for oil companies to use CO2 in their fracking process.
Well, I think he’s wrong about one thing – coal mostly won’t be in the developing world because the developing world won’t be building coal plant (even with Chinese money).
They’ll go straight to solar instead.
So much for Griff’s claim
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutters-coal-plants-china-and-japan-are-building-them/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/coal-renaissance-poor-developing-countries-hampering-emissions-targets-1509572
oh Griff, you are such a card!
D’OH!
Largest Coal Consuming Countries Increase Appetite In First 5 Months Of 2017
Coal mining in the United States, India, and China – the world’s three biggest coal consumers – has increased in 2017, reversing a downward trend in the use of carbon-heavy fossil fuel in recent years, according to the Associated Press.
Coal production through May is up by 6 percent, or 121 million tons for the trio year-over-year. The most dramatic change came in the United States, which saw a 19 percent rise in mining over the first five months of 2017, figures from the U.S. Department of Energy show.
And while coal mining has picked up in 2017 in the US, coal consumption “will continue to increase, mainly driven by Asian countries,” Xizhou Zhou, of IHS Markit in Beijing, said. “We’re seeing a recovery starting this year and an increase until the mid-2020s before you see coal plateau globally.”
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Largest-Coal-Consuming-Countries-Increase-Appetite-In-First-5-Months-of-2017.html
India built 87GW of coal plants in the past 5 years and currently has 132 coal plants comprising 50 GW under construction. Coal currently provides 82% of India’s electricity. India’s latent electric power demand to achieve USA quality of life is a factor of 12 times current demand.
China has 389 coal plants comprising 205 GW under construction. This will increase its coal generation capacity from 900 GW to 1,100 GW. China’s coal mine production in April of 2017 was 10% higher than April of 2016. China’s latent electric power demand is a factor of 5.
Africa has more than 100 coal plants comprising 47 GW in planning or construction. South Africa is currently building one of the world’s largest plants, a 4.8 GW coal plant that will burn 16 MT of coal per year. Africa’s latent electric power demand is a factor of 23.
India and China have formed their own global finance bank to bypass the IMF and World Bank and are funding construction of more than 100 coal plants in Asia and Africa.
Coal today provides 40% of the world’s electricity, 70% of the world’s steel, and 90% of the world’d concrete. Coal was the number one source of energy for the G20 in 2016. Coal is still king and its use is going to continue to increase through at least 2050.
What *are* they worried about? The ocean(s) capture carbon dioxide because it dissolves in rainwater (have we heard from ‘Henry’ recently) and when it falls into the ocean directly or washes down rivers into the ocean, It Does Not Come Back.
Well, yes it does, some tiny part gets puffed out of a Vesuvius millions of years down the line but hardly staistickitistcally snigficnikant. Unless you live near Lake Fartalot. Or a vegetarian possibly
So the atmosphere is going to be sucked clean of CO2 (as long as it keeps raining) and where will we be then?
No plants. no animals, no people, no problem.
Neat huh?
The important clue here is- Why are the stomata (CO2 intakes) on plant’s leaves, on the UNDERSIDE of the leaves?