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
When it comes to coal, etc., skip the worry about CO2 – if we only focused on cleaning up the toxic and dangerous emissions, it could be done. Trying to scrub the CO2 out of the emissions is not achievable, nor as this article points out, approachable financially.
I’m reminded of a section in that infamous NYT’s piece on Freeman Dyson:
Hansen sounds like Elmer Gantry — way over the top with Hellfire and brimstone; Dyson sounds eminently reasonable. Strange that he’s such a committed Democrat when there’s not a single Democrat who will listen to him any more. Sadly, in a few more years they won’t have to.
As a recently retired petroleum engineer for a major oil company and worked in enhanced oil recovery for almost all of my 34 years, it amazes me that so many apparently well educated and putatively intelligent people continue to pursue the ridiculously expensive and hopelessly uneconomic idea of CCS — it’s almost as if someone is PAYING them to chase this fantasy — oh, wait, never mind…
If any of these “scientists” ever bothered to talk to an engineer for ten, maybe twenty minutes, they would realize just how impractical the whole thing is — but then, they wouldn’t have a “job,” would they?
If any of these “scientists” were really serious about “saving the planet from CO2 emissions, they’d be protesting for MORE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS — the fact that they are almost uniformly against nuclear power reveals just how unserious that are about CO2.
Here is a CCS project that has a history of problems.
Lots of subsidies and cost over runs with significant operational problems.
Anyone have latest update
http://www.energyandpolicy.org/southern-company-kemper-scandal-carbon-capture-storage-ccs-will-never-work/
News link, click
The big news today is that the Mississippi Power lignite plant in Kemper County — flagship of American CCS and the plant upon which the EPA justified its 2016 New Source Performance Standards drastically restricting CO2 emissions — is giving up on CCS. After heroically spending $7.5 billion over 7 years on a 582 MW plant (more per MW than a nuclear plant), they are now resigned to operating it as a $1.billion-equivalent combined-cycle natural gas plant. It is not because the technology did not work — after typical FOAK startup complications they have been stably operating one of the two gasifier and clean-up loops for months. Rather, it is because there are now no longer any technical challenges left to distract from facing cold economic reality. It turns out that intentionally increasing the complexity and reducing the thermal efficiency of a fossil fuel plant in order to capture CO2 is tantamount to increasing its fuel cost from $2/mmBTU to $20/mmBTU (my approximations). It is politically impossible to pass on to ratepayers a tenfold increase in cost no matter how virtuous one believes the cause to be, in this case a 65% carbon reduction.
And CO2 gas injection into water-flooded underground formations should not be considered true sequestration, especially when used for enhanced oil recovery. Gas injected into oil fields has many potential paths back to the surface, and large surface pipelines can also leak. The risk of such leaks is ever present because CO2 and water form an acid that attacks pipes, concrete, and rock formations. Compressed CO2 is not harmless if released, but is heavier than air and will form an anoxic surface bubble or stream that will hug the ground, flow downhill, collect in lowlands, and silently and invisibly suffocate everything in its path. So far, only animal kills have been recorded in the USA, but the first insurance risk studies have already been done.
So if we were to just pump the CO2 into the nearest large corn field, corn would grow much faster and during the daylight hours almost none of it would escape. Studies have shown that on calm days, corn fields stop photosynthesis by 1PM due to lack of CO2. Imagine how fast corn would grow if it were allowed to keep going all day!
I am an Air Quality Control Engineer that has worked on coal fired plants my entire career. I worked on several DOE sponsored studies and can remember when we started having to calculate the CO2 produced by the reaction of calcium carbonate (limestone) with sulfur dioxide in scrubbers. It is so minuscule compared to the enormous quantity generated by the combustion of coal in the boiler. As time went on I realized that this was a method of getting the industry to become familiar with CO2 as being an emission, and ultimately a pollutant.
Worked on studies and analyses of new coal fired power plants with CCS that would have turbines built with steam extraction streams to send for CO2 sequestration. The flow of steam was significant and squashed the power plant efficiency. That by itself should had stopped the studies. But we continued to see how it would compare to alternative sources of electricity.
I helped investigate freezing the removed CO2 from coal fired power plants in missile shaped tanks, shipping the tanks out to the deep ocean, and dumping the frozen shaped CO2 into the ocean. We had to put weights on the front of the missile to make sure it sunk. What could go wrong?
To deep inject the CO2 you compress it to 1000 to 3000 psi, pipe it to the storage/injection site, and then inject it into deep formations. Think about the power required to compress tons of CO2 to those pressures. Then pipe it for miles and sometimes more miles under high compression. What could go wrong?
To remove the CO2 you had to take out almost all other impurities in the flue gas from the coal fired boilers. Example would be sulfur dioxide. The current removal of sulfur dioxide by scrubbers is 95%. That is reasonably achieved and is environmentally acceptable. You would need to remove 99.8% or higher to remove the CO2 from that same gas. The reason is reagent contamination. The reagent utilized to remove CO2 is very expensive, but can be recycled when removing CO2, so not much is lost. Add impurities to the gas and the reagent cannot be recycled as easily. So now you have to spend more money and use more power to increase the removal efficiencies of pollutants to meet the demands of the CCS.
The complications go on and on.
GGrubbs – interesting about the extraction of CO2 from flue gas. I imagine once we recognize CO2 has value, nations will want to extract and sell ‘the base of the food chain’. It will be sold to commercial greenhouses to amplify the partial pressure of Carbon Dioxide to enhance plant production through photosynthesis. … I never saw this coming, but this means CO2 actually would be a |Greenhouse Gas|.
If carbon dioxide is captured underground in significant quantities, within a few generations we will digging it back up again.
Interesting point about digging up CO2 in the future. The industry has done such a great job removing sulfur dioxide from the gas generated by coal fired power plants that there is a shortage of sulfur in soils throughout the U.S. Farmers are buying excess gypsum generated from the removal of sulfur dioxide from coal fired power plants and spreading it on their fields. Think about that, we are spending money and using energy to remove sulfur dioxide from the gas, converting it to gypsum (a useful product in wallboard manufacturing), and selling the excess gypsum back to the farmers to spread it on their fields.
It would be so much more efficient to just allow the power plants to emit a bit more sulfur in the gas. That won’t happen, the environmentalists would go crazy. It is a crazy world.
Denbury Resources is digging it up today http://www.denbury.com/operations/gulf-coast-region/co2-sources-and-pipelines/default.aspx . Amazing that some people are paying to pull CO2 from the ground while others are simultaneously paying to put in back in.
No expense and no effort can be spared in destroying coal, oil and gas technologies (esp. the auto industry), so that the pet investments and other worthless products can be introduced to replace them. It is a shame that these young people emerging from universities are ignorant of the fact that they have just been weaponized in order to take down an industry. But they do get the false ethical moxie of saving the planet from abundantly naturally occurring compounds such as NO2 and benzene; CO2, N2O, CH4…
They aren’t paying too much for those degrees, are they?
The statement “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” shows total lack of knowledge of this professor on the subject.
First of all it is already working for gas, combustion gases from coal fired plants. The waste gas generated by natural gas combustion produces less CO2 on a BTU basis as compared to coal, is a cleaner emission so clean up of the gas would be minimal, and because of these facts it is easier to remove the CO2.
No it is not already working for gas. The newer requirements for emissions reductions will force gas plants to make updates that will increase costs for every one. And there is no reason for these CO2 regulations in the first place, so it is just another game regulators are playing to see who can destroy people’s purchasing power fastest and make shortages a reality soonest.
ref: I will give the relevant passage from the pdf below.
Good point Zeke. I should have said technically can work on gas. But the regulators will not be happy with whatever removal can be obtained. The sulfur dioxide removal started at 70% in the early 80s, when that was achieved it kept going up to where it is now at 95%. The last coal fired power plant to obtain permits for construction in the U.S. was 99%. This was impossible to obtain just due to the reliability of the equipment and the variability of sulfur in the coal. The client had to agree to it to get the permits. The plant was never built, environmentalists killed it.
garywgrubbs says, “But the regulators will not be happy with whatever removal can be obtained. The sulfur dioxide removal started at 70% in the early 80s, when that was achieved it kept going up to where it is now at 95%. The last coal fired power plant to obtain permits for construction in the U.S. was 99%.”
Yes sir, that is exactly the process we are trapped in. The EU and the EPA continually raise standards.In
turn, the expense of removing ubiquitous, benign gases from emissions has and will result in creating extremely high prices and shortages. So young people with degrees should not deceive themselves into thinking that they are doing anyone a service by introducing extremely expensive rube goldberg devices to attach to power plants and cars. They are instead brothers to great destroyers.
Graduates from universities should be warned that they are now the tools being used to put cars and reliable power out of reach for more people.
Or how about if every one just admits openly that they want to take what the inventors of the 18th-20th centuries created for every day use by ordinary people, and turn them all — one by one– into luxury items? We can quit playing these games with molecules from human activity, because that is endless..That is the scientific paradigm shift to the Anthropocene Age they are forcing, top down, on the rest of us.
To reinforce what Zeke stated: I used sulfur dioxide as an example of ratcheting down of emission limits. Particulates are regulated to 99.8% removal. That was achieved and then PM10 became the issue. Those cannot be removed by standard particulate collection devices, they are aerosols. So more expensive equipment required. NOx was regulated at 70%, now 90%. SO3 is not an issue but it turned the plume for the stacks blue so it became an opacity issue. More equipment and reagents. Then mercury became the next air pollutant. More equipment and reagents. All of this equipment costs money to build, operate and maintain and added to the cost of electricity.
The EPA is currently forcing all coal fired plants to cease utilizing ponds to store bottom ash, even lined ponds. Dry disposal is possible and being done but more expensive. The next area that is being regulated is the waste water from plants. These system are extremely expensive to build and operate. Some of the limits are so low that they cannot be measured, but that does not stop the EPA.
The Netherlands does not need a report to tell them that CCS is expensive. Two Dutch energy companies just withdrew from a big CCS pilot-project near Rotterdam. According to one of the companies, the project is no longer viable.
Original article in Dutch: http://www.telegraaf.nl/dft/nieuws_dft/28491570/__Energiebedrijven_willen_toch_geen_CO2_opslaan__.html
Google translate version:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=nl&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraaf.nl%2Fdft%2Fnieuws_dft%2F28491570%2F__Energiebedrijven_willen_toch_geen_CO2_opslaan__.html&edit-text=
Carbon capture?
Grow some trees.
Russ George has an extremely cheap way to remove carbon dioxide that feeds people and restores the oceans. It seems like a criminal conspiracy that we are not iron seeding the oceans at this point.
You would be spending money on a scheme with unknown long-term consequences to solve a wholly fictitious problem. Iron fertilization doesn’t suddenly make sense because CCS doesn’t.
Follow the money.
“In 2009, DOE greatly increased its funding for CCS
by allocating approximately $3.38 billion in funding”
DOE memo from 2013
http://tinyurl.com/ydzbr3ov
That is one big cash trough.