Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Looks like Planet of the Humans might be having an impact on policy; The Australian Government has broadened the scope of activities which can qualify for carbon credits, diverting cash away from renewables.
Fossil fuel industry applauds Coalition climate measures that support carbon capture and storage
Adam Morton Environment editor @adamlmorton
Wed 20 May 2020 03.30 AESTEnvironmentalists say the Morrison government is directing emissions reduction funding to polluting companies
Fossil fuel industry groups and companies have applauded new climate change measures proposed by the Morrison government, including support for carbon capture and storage developments.
The government has agreed to 21 of 26 recommendations made by an expert panel review headed by the former gas industry executive and business council president Grant King, who was asked to come up with new ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at low cost.
Recommendations included paying big industrial companies to keep their emissions below an agreed limit, and allowing the government’s main climate policy, the $2.5bn emissions reduction fund, to support carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects.
Angus Taylor, the energy and emissions reduction minister, said the government agreed in-principle that two publicly owned clean energy agencies, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, would be given a “technology neutral remit” – a proposal that has been interpreted as allowing more funding for projects that do not involve renewable energy.
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The plan to include CCS in the emissions reduction fund follows oil and gas giant Santos saying access to carbon credits or a similar revenue stream would be critical if it was to invest in a joint CCS project with BHP in South Australia. The Moomba CCS project, in SA’s remote north-east, is promised to capture 1.7m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year released during gas processing.
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Richie Merzian, from thinktank the Australia Institute, said the changes backed by the government would increase fossil fuel industries’ access to a limited pool of funding for climate action, and criticised the lack of process behind the review.
He said King’s four-person expert panel was commissioned in October without public visibility, run without public consultation, and its report was held back by the government until it was ready to also release its response.
“Australians have a right to be frustrated by this, not just because of the support for fossil fuels, but by the appalling process,” Merzian said. “We should wake up to the fact that this is happening at a much larger scale with the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission, which will involve the investment of hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/20/fossil-fuel-industry-applauds-coalition-climate-measures-that-support-carbon-capture-and-storage
I have no problem with carbon capture, other than the waste of providing any kind of carbon credits, as long as it stays remote. I’m very concerned about the risk when people propose putting large concentrations of CO2 next to large concentrations of humans; a sudden large release of CO2 could cause high rates of death over tens of square miles.
What I find really interesting is this rule change might pave the way for Aussie nuclear power. The availability of gigawatts of reliable green nuclear energy would make any renewable energy investment a tough sell. All we need is someone brave enough to take on the bureaucrats and big green, to make it happen.
It is not just the green activists who are enraged, if you read the press statements and correspondence from the office of Angus Tayloy and the PM you will know that they are captured by greens and are prepared to waste billions on projects that amount to moonshine. Sorry I mentioned moonshine, it might give them ideas!
The deeply embedded opposition to nuclear energy is a result of the communist-inspired and organized movement decades ago that started with Ban the Bomb in the 1950s. Success in Australia was complete, as described by the late John Grover. http://www.the-rathouse.com/2011/Grover-Power.html
Hey Rafe – The Guardian helpfully identifies the 6 reasons why Malcolm Turnbull’s pumped hydro is a scam.
Primary among them is “it will cost billions while delivering a fraction of the energy”.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/21/nsw-has-approved-snowy-20-here-are-six-reasons-why-thats-a-bad-move
Yet – they still endorse and promote solar panels and wind farms.
Another example of the adage – you can take a person to the optometrist, but you can’t make them wear glasses.
CCS is the most insane waste of our natural resources ever conceived by man. It’s sad that a govt. which seems basically opposed to this kind of “green crap” still feels they have to play along and are just making it less bad.
What exactly is a carbon credit? Is it effectively yet another tax on Australian working people which will be picked up and copied elsewhere? The recently , devastatingly, impoverished people of the UK , subject to a Govt whose green lunacy is almost offscale, wonder and worry.
Rafe,
John Grover and I worked for Peko-Wallsend Limited in the 1975-80 time span when he wrote his book. We had many days of joint discussion. He was from that old-fashioned group that insisted on finding and telling the truth.
We never did unearth the critical, key people behind global nuclear opposition. To this day I have no idea why Australia persists with its negative government policies. My unsupported private view is that some major incentives were paid to high level pollies at the time, PM level not excluded, and that later pollies who know about the illegal deals shut up about them because the reputation of pollies is low enough already. But I have no evidence, just a theoritical construct incorporating some powerful influence that overcame even simple logic and economic analysis. John Grover would not have approved of my speculation, had he still been alive.
Geoff S
Geoff Sherrington it is a pleasure to hear about the great defender of civilisation John Grover OBE. I had the privilege of editing and promoting “Struggle for Power”. My email is michael@michaeldarby.net. John would be horrified by Carbon Capture and Storage.
Richie Merzian, lobbyist, PR, Green, and now Climate and Energy Director at Australia Institute. No science and engineering qualifications needed.
If I were an Aussie taxpayer, I’d be outraged, at the pointless, ridiculous waste of money. CCS just is an equal-opportunity enrager that way.
It’s not a waste of money if you are on the receiving end. I wonder how many pollies are involved in this sc@m?
try 15.3mil to yet more solarfarms in vic
while the OEM want controls on pv systems to turn em off during hot days due to instability they create
Andrew is an utter dork.
Im planing on trying to find ALL the dud CCS systems and costs and fails to send to the PM
investing a cent is too much.
ditto the abject fails for the solar towers like ivanah
the Pt Ausgust etup is halted at part made and up for sale already
as is a riverland solar farm just completed.
hmm?
I understand where you’re coming from Oz, Keon in NSW is supposed to be on our side but he’s so left he may as well be a greenie. And the gullible public don’t even know the extent of renewables in Australia, they just keep complaining that the government is doing nothing! If only that were true.
They should have dumped the whole idea of carbon credits
It is meaningless , pointless virtue signalling
And CCS, shurly, they have to be joking ! WAFWOTAM !
That’s great! Could someone get money to extinguish a burning coal seam?
Eric,
“I’m very concerned about the risk when people propose putting large concentrations of CO2 next to large concentrations of humans; a sudden large release of CO2 could cause high rates of death over tens of square miles.”
Sounds like you are more ‘enraged’ than any of the activists they managed to quote.
I’m not keen on the the quantities of CO2 which a serious CCS scheme would capture being processed or stored anywhere near lots of people. Given what happened with Lake Nyos surely safety of CO2 handling is something we can agree must be taken seriously.
Hi Eric, I’m no fan of urinating perfectly good money and effort up a carbon (dioxide) mitigation virtue signal wall of any sort, but there’s no more need to get one’s knickers in a twist over imagined risks of asphyxiating thousands of people with a CCS scheme than there is in getting one’s knickers in a twist over gullible warming.
Lake Nyos is not a relevant analogy to a CCS misadventure, not with respect to leaks from the injection wells or from the storage complex. The worst outcome CCS fukcup would be a leakage from the intermediate/temporary storage (which would be a tank farm where liquid CO2 would be accumulated prior to injection down the well or wells), but if people can live near oil refineries or tank farms, gas works, industrial gas factories, grid scale lithium batteries, etc, then living near a tank farm part filled with CO2 is nothing to lose sleep over; BOC gases aren’t required to locate their Australian factories or stockpiles in remote areas, and you can buy bottled hydrogen from those guys.
CCS is a big oil work-for-the-dole-scheme (getting money from the gumment to look busy doing work that didn’t need doing), but it means CCS is planned and executed in accordance with big oil safety and design criteria; meaning double barriers and monitoring of those barriers, and compared to safely exectuting say a large natural gas production project, handling volumes of inert gas is a low risk activity which by being engineered to oilfield standards is over-engineered. It wouldn’t be stretching the truth much to observe that about the worst outcome from a CCS fukcup is reputational damage for the operator and since CCS is a new game in town and an attention seeking green-wash at that, there is more than normal attention to the risks, however low their likelyhood may be.
I don’t worry about a CCS incident, I especially don’t pretend it would look even remotely like Lake Nyos; I worry about the waste of tax revenue on utterly pointless work-for-the-dole virtue signals when that OPM could be more gainfully be spent on a fleet of new HELE or nuclear power stations.
It’s the scale which bothers me. Lake Nyos released 100k to 1m tons of CO2, there were deaths up to 15 miles from the point of release.
The lower end of this estimate represents a few weeks backlog from a single large coal plant.
Huge incentives not to vent CO2, so someone greedy somewhere will let storage pressure climb into the red zone rather than turn a big profit into a loss.
If CCS is attempted at scale a large accident is IMO inevitable.
CCS to store CO2 is useless
Using CO2 as industrial KY for “depleted” conventional wells, that is something I can get behind.
I was working on this with a couple companies here in AB until the recent head on into covid wall.
Hope to see that come back
Hi Eric,
As opined previously, the biggest risk of ‘large’ release would be if the temporary above ground storage went totally balls-up; something like the Buncefield/Hemel Hempstead fire. Except involving a non-flammable gas.
Once the CO2 is injected into geological storage, the worst possibility is exceeding the fracture pressure of the caprock which would result in Out Of Zone Injection. To do that, the injected CO2 would have to be confined in order for its pressure to climb into a red zone in a particular location, but you select as storage complexes geological formations that are large in volume and highly permeable so the CO2 can disperse from the injection well as rapidly as possible and so there is a large ‘tank’ to fill.
If perchance the caprock was breached, the CO2 has then to find it’s way to surface, passing through shallower impermeable formations (which act as secondary caprocks) and shallower permeable formations (which act as baffles, in effect becoming secondary storage formations). By the time any leaked CO2 reaches surface, there is no large venting of CO2, there is mouse flatulence.
Lake Nyos’ large outgassing occured because the lake’s stratified water was disturbed and rapidly overturned. The deep water carried a large a concentration of dissolved CO2 (from decomposing biomass) that rapidly outgassed at ambient pressure/temperature when brought to the surface. Chalk and cheese.
The well(s) and storage complex of a CCS field are typically monitored to determine where the CO2 plume is dispersing underground and if that CO2 accumulation moves into shallower formations, it can be observed by technologies like 4-D seismic.
If anyone gets greedy, incurring a leakage due to bodgey injection practice that created dangerous formation pressure is not a way to keep turning a big profit, it’s the surest way to create a big loss because if the storage complex begins leaking, the operator would have no option* but to permanently stop his injection and permanently plug any injection or observation wells. They also wear the resulting loss of ruputation when the next bidding round comes along.
*Making the very reasonable assuption that a national regulator is demanding frequent update on the performance of the CCS project.
So I don’t reckon CCS is such a bogeyman as far as risk is concerned, I wouldn’t be anymore concerned about a CCS project in my neighbourhood than a plan to develope a gas field in my neighbourhood (which I’d be quite comfortable with). I’d be more concerned if the council approved a windfarm in my neighbourhood.
None of which makes the colossal WOFTAM of CCS excusable, especially since the operator of such a parasite industry only makes a ‘profit’ because the gumment is paying him OPM taken from me at tax time (if the business model is a direct government payment per tonne of CO2 stored), or by levying such a catastrophically high carbon (dioxide) tax on atmospheric emissions that industry pays him to inject their captured CO2 and those industries then charge me catastrophically more for the steel, cement or energy used in producing what ever I buy. And all that money flying around in circles delivers precisely nothing more beneficial than maybe placating the Turdberg and her ilk into shutting their petulent cakeholes for a while.
At least when I pay through the arse for intermittent electricity from subsidy miners foisting yesterday’s technology on the grid today and maybe tomorrow, I do at lest get some over-priced electro-motive force in return.
CO2 has blown up from the ground before, luckily at remote places.
CO2 to is great in small concentrations, just like H2O is fine in reasonable quantities. But when a dam bursts, it can have serious consequences.
The risk of a “sudden” large release is not very high but with high severity, certainly location is an important consideration. CO2 can k*ll via asphyxiation and liquefied, it’s under high pressure, but it’s not particularly toxic, difficult to handle or flammable. It’s pretty good for carbonating some of my favorite beverages.
Industrial sodastream
Nick mocks someone for being more concerned about risking people’s lives than others who are concerned that they won’t get more of our tax dollars.
That’s all you need to know about greenie agenda, right there.
No, I’m mocking the tabloid headlining. There were some criticisms of process; no-one sounded particularly enraged. But this is a typical response here – firstly claim that activists are enraged (good); then get stuck into whatever they are enraged about (because it sounds like science).
In fact the likelihood of sudden escape of CO2 from a deeply buried location is extremely remote. Plenty of asphyxiating gases have been down there for many millions of years without causing trouble (except for miners).
No, Nick, you are better than this.
Asphyxiating gases have indeed been down there for millions of years.
They have survived natural geological disruptive processes and so we can class them as safe.
If we now inject such gases into underground cavities, our protection from asphyxiation is not from endurance through geological time, but reliance on our present (and scant) engineering knowledge.
You cannot equate the tested safety of ancient deposits with the modelled safety of new, modern experiments in waste gas burial. Logic fail there, Nick. Geoff S
Geoff,
” reliance on our present (and scant) engineering knowledge”
It isn’t that scant. There will be seismograms etc. And there are plenty of locations to choose from, including ones near no habitation (even at sea).
But here we go again. The heading was mocking activists for being ‘enraged’ by a CCS proposal. Are we for it or against?
Nick, how much research went into whether or not renewables would be a reliable, or even a viable source of energy that would be cheap to consumers and be suitable to power homes without shutting down let alone industry?
This industry has flooded the market globally and it was never thought through. It is costly, unreliable and there hasn’t even been a recycling program properly figured out, most of it’s going to landfill! There is nothing clean or green about it!
Nick, Nick, Nick. There you go again.
We don’t have to be for it or against it to take note of the hypocrisy of you climate alarmists.
Similar to the release of a corona virus. just saying.
Nick, you are better than this.
No he is not. !
“Are we for it or against?”
CCS is a totally unnecessary, potentially highly dangerous, costly exercise with basically zero merit except virtue seeking
Any logical person would be against it.
Nick once again demonstrates that he never actually bothers to study any of the things he comments on.
Yes, CO2 has been under the ground for millions (billions actually) of years. However this scheme has absolutely nothing in common with natural storage.
Natural storage of CO2 has it locked in small low pressure pockets, with few and very tiny vents allowing it back to the surface.
This scheme has millions times more CO2, at very high pressure with a inches across vent which could allow most of that CO2 to escape in a matter of hours.
PS, every year bison and other animals are killed in Yellowstone when they wander into clouds of CO2 gas.
“…Sounds like you are more ‘enraged’ than any of the activists they managed to quote…”
Likewise.
What’s wrong with releasing the gas back into the atmosphere, where it can be incorporated by photosynthesis into green plants again?
Reduce CO2 emissions from combusted natural gas. = Increased natural gas energy efficiency is accomplished with the technology of Condensing Flue Gas Heat Recovery. Recover the heat energy and utilize it and vent into the atmosphere instead cool exhaust, reducing the effects of global warming. For every 253,000 Kcal of energy recovered out of the combusted natural gas exhaust and the recovered energy is utilized, 53 Kg of CO2 will not be put into the atmosphere. Does AU like water? In every 253,000 Kcal of combusted natural gas are 19 liters of distilled water. http://www.SidelSystems.com
Reduced CO2 emissions from combusted coal. The technology is called Carbon Capture Utilization. No CCS
The technology starts out doing Direct Air CO2 Recovery on thousands of hectares of agricultural land. This is so we can create our Sorbent. With this sorbent the Sidel CCU System will Absorb over 90% of the CO2 out of the combusted coal exhaust. The CO2 gets transformed into good paying full time jobs and money.
The Sidel CCU System requires no steam from the power plant and only a minimal amount of electricity.
http://www.SidelGlobal.com
Australia is rich in fossil fuels. We want to help make Australia Energy Wise and keep the Australian people powered 24/7/365 affordably.
Yeah and not be buried under millions of hectares of the hated wind and solar renewables.
Hi Sid,
As your website implies, there are ‘good paying full time jobs and money’ in CO2 emissions reduction primarily because governments and virtue signalling customers think there is reputational value in a low carbon footprint. Interest in this gullible warming scam is already waning among consumers (who are often also voters), the UN MyWorld survey was indicative in that respect, so it’s a matter of time before gullible warming’s fashion cache is lost politically at as well. Once politicians realise gullible warming is not a vote winner, the pool of OPM needed to give an illusory business case to CO2 mitigation subsidy mining will dry up. On top of the public loss of interest, the over-reaction to Kung Flu is bleeding western economies white and demonstrably impacting the availability of OPM for needless virtue signalling.
So are you blokes making hay while the sun still shines, or able to show a real-world business case (in the absence of CO2 credits) based on recovered heat, synthetic limestone (when natural limestone is not scarce), biofuel (at a time when real oil is cheap) and fertiliser (which would appear to by high in one limiting nutrient, C, that’s freely available in thin air, but low in the other two, P and N)?
“Gullible warming”
+1000
And another +1k from me. And Mrs N who thought that was the best description she’s come across!
The availability of gigawatts of reliable green nuclear energy.
Such a wonderful phrase.
I’m all for carbon capture and storage.
My only question is, do the credits for a ton of carbon exceed the cost of a ton of coal?
If so, open up the storage facility! I have trucks and trainloads of the stuff to store!
And the best part? If we need energy at some point down the road, we can take it our of storage and burn it!
Oh… they meant CO2… sorry for getting excited.
Please explain the need to store CO2.
Simple. Starting in a few years, we will need all that CO2 and more. As you know, the CO2 will be used to produce gargantuan quantities of Dry Ice! This Dry Ice will be the only thing which can save us from the tremendous heat waves caused by Global Warming. Without it, Global Warming will overwhelm the entire population of the planet. The human race will be reduced to a handful of breeding pairs in Antarctica. Our fate would be truly sad and pathetic.
With adequate supplies of Dry Ice, we will all keep our cool, and the future is bright. Global Warming will be a challenge, but not a particularly difficult one.
..and beer will remain chilled, as it needs to for a properly functioning civilisation
Melvyn, in actual fact we don’t need to store CO2.
CO2 is not causing any issues that are going to destroy the planet.
Around the time of the first ‘Earth Day’ the climate change movement started to take hold, there was nothing to substantiate it but if someone says “the planet is warming and if we don’t do something about then it will cease to exist by 2100”, then you have to do the right thing, don’t you?
No one knew what ‘the right thing’ was so they had to come up with something to account for the rising temperatures, which in fact weren’t actually rising but it was a good story and it got people worked up. They looked at what was happening in the atmosphere and noted that CO2 was increasing, of course it has in past millennia too buts let’s not spoil a good story. Excellent, CO2 was labeled the new demon, it’s increasing and we must stop it rising at all costs! But, but, what about the benefits? Shhh!
Some rich person found out about this new technology that could convert the wind and sun into electricity and saw a new way for him to become even more rich. Or maybe it was him who invented the whole CO2 story because he found this new technology..hmm. They hadn’t had a chance to test it properly on a small scale and work out if it was a viable industry, but who cares, it made power that was free! Free power from the wind and the sun, the ultimate marketing tool. Sells itself really, who wouldn’t want free power. And while it’s producing this free power it doesn’t produce the demon CO2!
This is how it was marketed. Free power and no CO2! Remember, CO2 was never a problem in the first place, and the temperatures are barely rising at all let alone at dangerous levels. Well didn’t the people get sucked in! Free power while saving the planet, what could be more virtuous than that?
What they didn’t mention was how these wind and solar renewables came about. They didn’t say that many additional mines are needed to source the necessary materials to build this infrastructure. They didn’t mention how much more toxic the processes are to mine these materials or the damage to the ecology and the risks to humans and animals. They don’t mention the additional machinery necessary for every step, up to installation and that they are made and then operate on fossil fuels. Mines, transport, manufacturing, shipping all create massive amounts of CO2. The renewables themselves could not be built without fossil fuels. Recycling, if they ever get it up and running will create CO2! Liars and hypocrites!
On top of all that they are so weather dependent, (too much and they have to be shut down, too little and they don’t work at all), and so lacking in output that they have to be propped up by fossil fuels! They are not even fit for purpose, I wonder if anyone has sought a refund on this basis?
Of course the gullible people of the now very strong CAGW movement don’t want to know anything about the true picture of renewables, they are still rallied by the idealism of free energy from the wind and sun and that we must have 100% renewables ASAP and save the planet. And of course we know who’s promoting all this don’t we, remember that rich man, well he’s very rich now and so are his buddies. They’ve got used to watching their riches grow and they don’t want to see it end, no matters the consequences.
Politics has become so entrenched in science now that unless you kowtow to the political leaders (who want to be seen as supportive of the people saving the world) then as a scientist you are ostracised. So the scientists who like to get their paycheck go along with the lie and the truth about CO2 is not made public.
Some politicians are trying to resist the push for renewables, but they want to keep peace with the the CAGW movement to hedge their bets. So they bury, sorry, store the demon CO2.
So there you go Melvyn, no we don’t really need to store CO2. Sorry you asked?
If you haven’t already seen Planet of the Humans, I strongly recommend that you do.
Here’s the link.
https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE
We started to develop this Carbon Capture Utilization System in 2010 When we realized what the obummer administration wanted to do to the coal mining industry. They wanted to take all these communities and put them out of work. We took it to the US Department of Energy, to the Clean Coal Division in 2014. We were rejected because it went against the administrations plans. They didn’t want to see a Clean Coal Solution. They were spending Billions on CCUS (Kemper County) because they knew that CCS was so expensive that when it was applied the government would have to fund it, and they could then control the Utility. Subsidies.
We were blessed. We were able to find and develop this CCU System. This process has been in use in another industry for another purpose for over 60 years. The CO2 is turned into other saleable products. With the money made from these products we plan to repay the Utility 100% of it’s investment to put up our Sidel Carbon Capture Utilization System.
We developed this CCU System to be a Win-Win for all, and maybe even for the environment, depending on what you believe about the effects of CO2 and hot exhaust being vented into the atmosphere.
Thanks Sid, I can clock up another lesson learned. I have to say that I honestly thought they were simply storing the CO2 to appease the pushers of renewable energy. Like I’ve said before, we’re all ignorant until we learn.
I have no problem with coal usage, I bought a small acreage in a coal mine region. I don’t believe it causes near the pollution and toxic waste as renewables but if CCU can reduce what is perceived as a CO2 problem and create a business then all the better.
Both coal and nuclear energy have come a long way as sources of power, I’d rather see money spent on any improvements that could be made to the existing technology. Renewables were never thought through and will never be justifiable, yet the greedy bastards keep pushing them through. They don’t care squat diddly for the environment.
Irony is the CAGW gullibles think that all they have to do is bury the large amounts of waste from renewables that cannot be recycled. Bet they can’t come up with a useful solution to that problem.
Baby steps. We need to dehydrate the economy in order to mitigate the progress of [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling… warming… change (i.e. chaos or “evolution”).
Save a bird. Whack a wind turbine.
Don’t be green, keep Gaia green, not Green, clear the photovoltaic farms.
Save the seals, walruses, and other tasty treats. Divest from WWF and other environmentalist bigots.
Go carbon neutral, abort… cannibalize a baby, without a voice to protest, denied arms for self-defense? Get Planned. #WickedSolution
This is not Carbon Capture and Storage. https://youtu.be/RQRQ7S92_lo
We turn the CO2 into good paying full time jobs and money.
We want the power plants to be profitable. We want to keep electricity costs down.
This was designed to Win for Everyone.
Where is your process operating and providing good paying full time jobs? How much do you pay operators and techs and how many do you have?
Sid’s process is entirely theoretical, but as soon as he can line up enough suc^H^H^H investors he’ll demonstrate how much profit he will be able to make.
As an Australian taxpayer, I am outraged at the pointless, ridiculous waste of money caused by re-emergence of Carbon Capture and Storage. CCS is just an ecological Ponzi Scheme directing money to Elite Cronies from productive society.
Thankfully the USA has been immune (so far) to the various carbon capture/credit/trading/taxing schemes. Al Gore’s carbon offset trading company had a few elite investors (Obama was one) at start up but was a total failure. If you go as far back as the Kyoto protocol there just isn’t any support. Kyoto resulted in 100% of Congress voting it down, a rarity. Attempts by several Left/one party states to tax carbon have yet to gain any traction. It’s the true silent majority when it comes to Climate Change edicts. All the MSM propaganda being pushed out about CC and it’s still last on the list of things people worry about in America. Trump pushed it even further back in people’s minds and is actively going about dismantling the government intervention initiated by Obama to help kick start the zero carbon narrative. God bless America.
The irony of course is that even though the US never ratified Kyoto, its switch to gas meant it was the only country to meet its Kyoto “commitments”!
Rafe,
John Grover and I worked for Peko-Wallsend Limited in the 1975-80 time span when he wrote his book. We had many days of joint discussion. He was from that old-fashioned group that insisted on finding and telling the truth.
We never did unearth the critical, key people behind global nuclear opposition. To this day I have no idea why Australia persists with its negative government policies. My unsupported private view is that some major incentives were paid to high level pollies at the time, PM level not excluded, and that later pollies who know about the illegal deals shut up about them because the reputation of pollies is low enough already. But I have no evidence, just a theoritical construct incorporating some powerful influence that overcame even simple logic and economic analysis. John Grover would not have approved of my speculation, had he still been alive.
Geoff S
Geoff what if you put a comment on this post and that will give me your email so we can get in touch and talk some more about these things. http://catallaxyfiles.com/2020/05/19/the-problem-with-electric-cars-again-they-use-electricity/
I really can’t believe that with their economies in smoking ruins, and future generations pole-axed by taxes to service mountains of sovereign debt, countries like Australia and Canada are still faffing around with “cunning plans” to stop the climate from changing.
Truly, we are in an age of unreason.
That’s because 60% of Canadians self identify as neurologically delayed, and they elected and re-elected a ninny clown as PM.
I’m so ashamed of my country
Pat,
You’re so ashamed?
In Canada, you at least have the good sense to beneficially turn some of your uranium into electro-motive force. Australia is about the 3rd largest exporter of uranium but still too shit scared to actually use it at home. We’re in competition with Qatar for the top spot in terms of LNG export, but have gas shortages (and correpsonding high prices) on the east coast (where most of the people live) and now import LNG. We are the largest exporter of coal and the only time a coal power station makes news is when yet another one is being prematurely demolished.
It’s enough to drive a man to drink.
Erny, I was hopeful that Scott Morrison would push back the green technology when he took over from Turnbull, given that Turnbull was as green as they come and infiltrated the ‘Party’.
I know that the Labor Party are pretty much the Greens Party now anyway so if Shorten had won the last election then I think I would have left the country!
I don’t think that Scott Morrison realises even now that his ‘quiet Australians’ voted for him because they want nothing to do with renewables! There is very little money to be made in Australia by Australian’s and our taxpayer subsidies are going overseas too. All for nothing! The economy is being destroyed and all we will be left with is toxic waste!
Scott Morrison must stop subsidising wind and solar renewables!
Sidel systems were talking about recovering heat from exhaust gasses, condencing the water from exhaust gasses and improved total system efficiency.
CCS is costly, uses more energy and no guarantee CO2 will stay where you put it.
Some plantation forest schemes sold CO2 credits based on 20+ years of growth but went bust before realisation. Trees lacked water, changed land usage or lost from fire.
If you can extract just CO2 and water (clean) from fossil fuel power generation then pipe it to large greenhouses. Greenhouse with 2000 to 4000ppm CO2 is more efficient and still workable.
Small nuclear reactors offer smaller upfront costs, smaller risks but don’t have the economy of scale seen by larger reactors. Molten salt Thorium reactors offer many benefits over traditional water cooled uranium reactors (high pressure water increases risk of explosions). New tech is costly but better for long term.
Renewables should get less incentives, must pay for grid connections and to mitigate their own intermittent supply. If renewables are so great then they don’t need huge incentives.
If Wind+Solar replaces coal, natural gas usage increases to cover at least 60% of the coal reduction. You can use your neighbours power generation but if they copy you and run out of hydro/nuclear/geothermal you all collapse together. Or, the costs greatly increase to mitigate.
If someone says the solution is simple, don’t trust their Primary school level understanding. The devils in the detail. If they work for gas companies is it any wonder they promote gas as a solution? Likewise for those businessmen/scientists who promote wind, solar, batteries or biomass.
Anybody that supports carbon capture shouldn’t be allowed to eat! They can drink water (as long as it isn’t carbonated) but everything else is forbidden!
“Australia Enrages Activists…” Good! I hope they blow a gasket, in their farcical rage!
As an Australian I find that all this carbon dioxide nonsense stupid.
We have a small population vast land forests and agriculture that make us a carbon dioxide sink.
Exactly. Australia is ALREADY “carbon” neutral!
Is the goal of CCS to limit CO2 concentration increase ? Seriously ?
Why waste billions dollars trying to do something which only effect (hopefully, not even measurable) would be to curb vegetation and thus to penalize ourselves ?
Why waste billions dollars trying to do something that Nature is doing for free and from which all being on Earth benefits since billions years ?
Utter nonsense, even worse than the green energy scam.
Billions of dollars in redistributive change.
It amuses me that, whilst the greens insist it’s entirely safe to sequester C02 underground, it’s entirely unsafe to liberate Gas by frakking.
The ‘carbon’ economy will probably be with us for as long as humans are alive on the good Earth, and CO2 will be the longterm feedstock. If we do CCS, then the key is to ensure it pays for itself and most definitely isn’t subsidized, and isn’t just pumped underground, especially if it is just going to leak back out and/or harm people. Unless it is pumped back into deep oil producing basins to produce more oil and gas, then all the better since is proving some value and paying for itself. That CO2 is unlikely to escape since it comes from an oil and gas deep field, and if it did, it is in a rural area and won’t all come back up at once like Lake Kivu in the Congo, where it ‘burped’ out of the depths of the lake. I would think that be low risk from that point of view, and will slowly consolidate into the rock over time. And it paid for itself in producing more gas and oil. Win-Win, if it pays its own way.
If tapping the exhaust of coal/FF powered power plant CCS for CO2 and could be made into something useful, and pay for itself, then that would make perfectly good sense. But if it is solely being sold as changing the climate, then it is bogus science. IMHO, we should be aiming for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, to at least 560 ppmv over preindustrial civilization. There should be a 560.org website promoting this. But if the world is going to tear itself to pieces over this stupidity, and we could make something commercial from it that benefits us at no net cost to us, then we should explore clean coal/FF with CCS making a CO2 feedstock that can be used to manufacture 1001 things.
Carbon fibre and many carbon based products can be made from CO2. I was reading about some airports putting carbon fibre mixed into the asphalt and when applying a high amp low voltage current, it warmed the asphalt runway enough to keep runways clear of ice and snow in winter, making take-offs and landings that much safer in winter weather, where the wheels touch down. While that probably wouldn’t be a practical solution for streets and highways, I would feel a little better landing in a blizzard if I know the half mile of runway was clear of ice and was dry. Carbon fibre has sufficient electrical conductivity to do such.
There are probably thousands of products that can be made out of CO2/carbon compounds, not including synthetic fuel which we really don’t need yet because we have an abundance of cheaper FF and coal. Some day we might in the long term future. But if carbon fibre is going to become a highly used product in our future advanced world, and if the source of it could be paid for out of existing fossil fuel power plants with no subsidy from the consumer or tax payer, then we could be onto something. Economics should dictate how this all pans out, since could be a win-win with more carbon fibre and CO2 derived products in our high tech world. Including building many GW of more coal and NG generation which we have 100’s of years of supplies if we count coal.
Just like the movie The Graduate had plastic (from oil) being the future, I think there is a huge future for carbon fibre, graphene and a multitude of products that will be made from it. If the CO2/carbon feedstock paid for itself out of the exhaust of say a new fleet of coal operated electrical infrastructure generating plants, then why not? Would solve a lot of problems and provide a whole lot of new solutions and opportunities for centuries to come. Including low carbon electricity, because the carbon became a useful saleable feedstock that paid for its own CCS installation and then made useful carbon products such as high tech carbon fibre and carbon derived products. We are a carbon based life/world and that will never go away. If coal and FF didn’t exist , we would need to invent it. That should get the world excited about burning coal again, because we still have a lot of coal left for centuries. Would also win over the environmental movement that is so opposed to coal and fossil fuel usage and development the world over. It should be something to be studied more to see if it is economic at this point.
I like the way Adam Morton thinks.
But if CO2 does not cause global warming … how does it cause climate change?
There is no need to cut emissions
Howard, there is no need to cut emissions.