From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie
Britain must invest £30bn in a network of massive air cleansing systems designed to strip CO2 from the atmosphere if it is to reach net zero, a government-funded report has warned.
The “direct air carbon capture systems” would remove up to 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year and then pump it into disused oil and gas reservoirs under the North Sea or Irish Sea.
Without such a scheme the UK will never reach its target of net zero emissions by 2050, according to the report by Energy Systems Catapult, a government-funded body that promotes innovation.
It also warns that direct capture will be essential if the UK is to maintain an aviation industry, because aircraft are unlikely ever to run entirely on sustainable fuels.
“Beyond 2040 we see few options to abate remaining emissions so use of direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) will be required,” it said.
“Direct air capture would collect 38-48 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2050. This technology appears to be essential to meeting net zero in all our scenarios and yet remains unproven at scale.”
Direct air capture plants would need to be built along the UK’s east coast, from East Anglia to Aberdeen, so that the CO2 captured could be pumped to storage sites under the North Sea, the study said.
The Climate Change Committee, which advises the Government, has described direct air capture as “a necessity, not an option”, for the UK to meet its net zero targets.
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere was essential in helping the UK achieve energy security and independence.
The spokesman added: “The UK has one of the greatest CO2 storage potentials of any country in the world, with the North Sea having the potential to hold an estimated 78 billion tonnes. We are tapping into this potential by investing £20bn in carbon capture and storage, driving economic growth and supporting up to 50,000 jobs.
“We are also investing up to £100m in research and innovation for greenhouse gas removal technologies such as Direct Air Capture.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/28/britain-30bn-strip-co2-atmosphere-hit-net-zero
If the Government has any backbone, it would throw this report in the bin, and assure the public it will not under any circumstances waste taxpayers’ money on green virtue signalling.
After all, if aviation emissions cannot be eliminated, this means the rest of the world will be in the same position, so why should we pay for something which will make no difference?
And as the report admits, they have no idea how or whether this daft idea will actually work. So they also have no idea of its cost – it might be £30bn, or it might be £300bn.
No sane government, (which would rule out one with Ed Miliband in charge!) should even contemplate going down this avenue.
Quite where DESNZ gets the idea that “removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere was essential in helping the UK achieve energy security and independence” is a mystery! Indeed, these carbon capture devices won’t run on moonshine – they will need energy, and lots of it, in turn reducing our energy security.
And as one commenter points out, the report does no come from a “promoter of innovation”, but a govt funded climate change advocacy group:
Bright idea: if CO2 is a so-called “greenhouse gas” why not pump the captured gas into lots of greenhouses so it can help grow food while being converted into oxygen rather than storing it in subterranean caverns? Fixed it!
Wood from trees, an idea whose time has come.
Another fine example of people who can’t see the wood for the carbon dioxide.
Commercial green houses have been doing that for years.
Google search on “CO2 Generators for greenhouses”
But that was to make plants grow.
This would be to “Save the Planet”!
The whole problem with this …is that CO2 is not a problem.
How does WUWT convince the MSM (main stream media) of this?
This should be the main focus of WUWT in my opinion.
Even Fox news thinks CO2 is a problem …it’s not.
I don’t know about Newsmax …
They would but the cost of electricity is so high they would not be able to afford to send it there.
What a complete and utter waste of time, money … that they really don’t have
China’s, India, etc etc emissions absolutely dwarf any piddling amount of CO2 the UK could ever hope to capture.
These people are totally certifiable.. loony-bin fodder, zero-rational thought process.. !!
And no, spending money on useless projects that produce absolutely nothing…
… and benefit absolutely no-one except a few climate scammers…
… will not promote economic growth
Actually it is a brilliant idea, if you can find politicians who are stupid enough. Make legal mandates, totally outside of popular support. Get the development for those mandates legislated upon the backs of the captive working class, then step in and harvest all the absurd financial incentives. All they need to do is promote the insanity, then watch politicians and activists squirm and jump until they are ripe for plucking.
“Expert”: Definition Ex = has been Spert = drip under pressure
“if aviation emissions cannot be eliminated”
Dubai is currently building a massive new airport hub….
… they certainly don’t think aviation will diminish an any way whatsoever.
A glimpse inside Dubai’s futuristic new airport, set to be the biggest on Earth (telegraph.co.uk)
air travel is taking off
In the mean time, India increased their coal production by 10% last year.
Coal India Ltd Increased Coal Output By 10% Last Year | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT (wordpress.com)
Quick…. send Greta, and the Stinkies to India to complain. 😉
I think it’s pretty much official now that the Germans are way out in front on the insanity stakes…
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/30/germanys-disastrous-embrace-of-gender-self-id/
But we have plenty of problems here, nonetheless. If only the weather was as predictable.
“massive air cleansing systems designed to strip CO2 from the atmosphere”
To what level? They never seem to say. The idiotic Grauniad has a graphic on its environment page that states:
The most important number of the climate crisis: 422.1 (ppm) source – NOAA
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/environment
The graphic claims 350ppm is the safe level, I guess they got that one from McKibben & Co. In essence, the idea of net zero is a quasi magical belief that a zero change in climate is somehow achievable; a state of utopic stasis.
If there is a such a thing as a climate criminal, then there are quite a few to be found on the Climate Change Committee. I’d say Deben would be a firm(geddit?) favourite.
“Whom the Gods would destroy, first they make mad…” (Shakespeare).
They’re doing a pretty good job of it thus far
What’s the scientific basis for 350 ppm?
Net zero
I have no idea – pulled out of the… air?
48 million tonnes for £30bn+ is an utterly ludicrous waste of money given that last year China alone emitted 11.4 billion tonnes and is expected to continue emitting even more. Additional carbon dioxide has huge benefits for greening the planet, which in turn moderate warming, and is not a significant factor in directly controlling climate.
Story tip: End of the road for the Scottish Green party?
“When the Scottish National Party (SNP) cabinet brought their power-sharing agreement with the Scottish Greens to an end last week, ministers reportedly cheered and thumped the table with their fists.”
…
At first, Britain’s liberal-left elites were so delighted at seeing the first Greens in government in the UK that they didn’t notice their swivel-eyed insanity whenever the scent of puberty blockers wafted near their nostrils.
…
Green-backed policies were proving consistently disastrous.
…
In the end, it was the Greens’ reaction to the Cass Review into children’s gender clinics that was the final straw for the SNP. Harvie simply refused to accept its conclusions. A couple of weeks ago, he told BBC Scotland that there were ‘far too many criticisms’ of the report from trans activists for him to accept it as a ‘valid scientific document’.
…
The Greens may have finally revealed how crackpot they are on gender. But we now need to start treating other Green policies with the objectivity and rigour with which the Cass Review treated the NHS’s gender-identity services for children.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/29/the-lunacy-of-the-scottish-greens/
Oh yes, they thought of the children. But not as any normal person might. Thanks to their gender madness, the eco madness is now up for discussion.
In 2021, the following song was sung by a gay men’s choir from San Francisco sang a song which contained this verse:.
We’re coming for them.
We’re coming for your children.
The gay agenda is coming home.
The gay agenda is here.
Trans is about erasing gay people
Worst of all, compared to a lot of the rest of the net-zero lunacy, the idea of direct carbon capture is almost sensible.
Yes, but – as I suggested (tongue in cheek) above – why not do something useful with it?
Breweries welcome deliveries of CO2. The cheaper the better.
Hmmm … I rarely drink hard liquor but I wonder what carbonated scotch would taste like?
Pretty much any homebrewer with a cold/counterpressure bottling system should be able to try something like that, but I’m not sure how well something 80+ proof would hold the carbonation.
If I had the equipment I would try it..
Add soda….
Sacrilege!
I like your thinking, Strativarius.
Surely you aren’t serious
The word “almost” is doing some heavy carrying.
Didn’t the Labour Party recently ditch a commitment to spending £28 billion on promoting Net Zero. Surely unlikely they would then take up a scheme costing at least £30 billion. If you don’t have the money, you don’t have the money.
This is government we are talking about – if you don’t have the money, conjure it up.
Or just print it.
They “print” money by guaranteeing the bank loans to their hare-brained projects… and put it on their books as an “asset”. The only limit they can reach is the point at which the banks lose faith that the loan guarantee is collectible…
“If the Government has any backbone”
It has none. Nor is there evidence for it having any intelligence. And intelligence is equally absent from the party likely to be in government later this year.
From the article: “A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero”
You mean they actually have a department with this name?
These Climate Alarmists are comedians!
I thought the term “Net Zero” was losing its appeal lately.
After the CO2 scrubbers remove all of the UK’s CO2 output, they can start on removing the CO2 output of China and India and the rest of the developing world. The UK can leave their CO2 scrubbers in place as the Chinese and Indian CO2 will come to them.
Climate Change Madness! It has obviously driven British politicans insane.
Thought experiment: if you pull 48 Gigatons out of the atmosphere, 47.999 Gigatons will outgas from the ocean.to replace it. I guess the “expert” has one of those new social-psychological engineering degrees that’s all the rage these days
From the article: ““Beyond 2040 we see few options to abate remaining emissions so use of direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) will be required,” it said.”
There is at least one very good option; Nuclear electricity generation. Nuclear power plants don’t generate CO2, just reliable energy.
Isn’t that what you want? Reliable energy and no CO2? Nuclear power plants are your answer. Too bad the politicians are too stupid/conflicted to see it.
Tom Abbott:
Nuclear is the answer only IF CO2 actually causes warming. And it does NOT
“the” answer, perhaps not – but wouldn’t more nuclear supplying the grid with electricity free up more “fossil fuels” for other uses?
Tony_G:
The issue was that nuclear would eliminate CO2, which is blamed for causing global warming. My comment was that CO2 does NOT cause any warming, warming will continue even if CO2 levels are reduced to those of the 1960’s.
Burl, I understand. I was asking a tangential question.
If all of these anti-reality lunatics stopped breathing, that would go some way to fulfilling their fantasy.
What utter lunacy – given that NetZero has already been shown (many times) to be a nonsense. Not only that – even if you do believe it – only Indian and Chinese emissions are sufficient to affect the growth of world levels of CO2. Some of that money should be spent ensuring that temperature and related historical records in the UK can never be manipulated
File under, Fiction. Science Fiction.
Actually, no . . . there is no science fiction—let alone science—whatsoever associated with the musings of humans being “able to strip CO2 out of Earth’s atmosphere”.
Only £30bn to strip CO2 from the world’s atmosphere? . . . wow, what a deal!
Or did Energy Systems Catapult, that “government-funded body”, instead simplistically imagine that air that is over the UK always remains over the UK???
Such foolishness.
The amount of CO2 you can strip out of the atmosphere is only limited by how much you can spend….and remember that the money does not “disappear”. It merely leaves the pockets of taxpayers and is reassigned to the pockets of those deemed worthy by the government.
I get your point . . . and will add that, in reality, there is no requirement for “those deemed worth by the government” to actually prove they have accomplished anything for the monies received . . . anything at all.
Come over to my place in October and you’re welcome to rake up all the acorns from my property, which will be about three 55 gallon trash drums. That’s enough for an entire forest of oak trees. And that is just one year. Imagine to how much CO2 those trees would sequester. Instead, the housing development across the street from me clear cut 25 acres of trees and ground them into mulch. That mulch will be chewed up by bugs which will become green house gases. At the very least the could’ve burned those trees at a facility which could make electricity.
There is no such thing as “green growth”. It might be 30 billion + operational costs + 50.000 jobs which are all a cost that add zero wealth. A problem is that politicians no longer understand to difference between expenses, something that cost money and investments, something to give you a return. All these costs must be paid by someone and you get nothing in return. Wait, you have carbon credits, an economy made off selling air. They tried to leech tax payer money for a similar project over here. To catch the CO2 emisisons from 2 gas powerplants you need to buidl a third. I don’t understand how so many people in such a short time became so dumb.
50,000 jobs to produce nothing … socialist economic development writ large. We can’t afford the economic de-growth of the industrial policies of Leftist governments.
In order to remove 48 million tonnes/yr of CO2 from the air, which contains about 0.042% CO2 by volume, about 61.4 trillion cubic meters of air would have to be processed per year, or about 1.95 million cubic meters per second (68.7 million cubic feet per second). This is equivalent to a cube of air 410 ft on a side forced into a CO2 removal machine every second.
This air doesn’t just enter a CO2 removal machine by itself–it would have to be blown or sucked into the machines by huge fans, which would require some kind of power source. Would the power source for the fans result in more CO2 emissions than the CO2 removed?
CO2 can be separated from air by adsorption on a selective solid adsorbent (commonly called a molecular sieve), but then the CO2 must be desorbed by heating, which produces a gas stream of concentrated CO2.
In order to bury this CO2 under the sea, this gas must be compressed (not “pumped”) to about 1100 psi, which also requires lots of power. Compressing a gas requires far more energy than pumping the same mass of liquid to the same pressure.
Petroleum production companies frequently inject concentrated pressurized CO2 into partially depleted oil wells for “enhanced oil recovery”, but the injected CO2 always comes back to the surface, and needs to be separated from the recovered crude oil.
How do the supporters of this plan know that the “disused oil reservoirs” under the North Sea are airtight, and won’t leak CO2 back to the bottom of the sea, and then into the ocean?
Richard Bassett is correct: this is just plain stupid.
There is no chance that the Keeling curve will be checked, whether it’s natural or Asian power stations. So let’s get used to higher rates of beneficial CO2. Why spend a fortune storing Chinese CO2?
This is why we have to quit or reduce the arguments that have failed (temperature or economics) and attack the crux of the matter: biology confusion. Carbon dioxide is the gas of LIFE, including animal life. Attempts to cut it are attempts to destroy FOOD for people and all other living things (except some bacteria). As to temperature, we DO need to raise awareness that geology researched temperature optimums last century and found that currents temps are cold. There is more life and more biodiversity with more warmth.
We are clearly being directed by greater minds than we can appreciate.
“Cleansing”? It’s almost as though they think CO2 is dirty.
/s
Like I said before the UK needs to get rid of the Climate Change Committee now. They have caused enough trouble.
I’ve been trying to think of an example to show how ignorant the net zero scam is. Let us say experts in the US have determined that automobiles emit an unnamed substance. It is determined that we must lower this emission. Experts select the Chevrolet division of General Motors to lower emissions. No other manufacturer in the US or the world need try. After a year Chevrolet has lowered their emissions of this substance quite a little. But as one would expect overall emissions have increased. Experts congratulate Chevrolet but inform them that they haven’t done enough, they must double down and reduce emissions much more or face fines because the concentration hasn’t gone down. Chevrolet lowers emissions even more but realizes it still can’t meet the quota so the only alternative is to sell fewer Chevrolets. It doesn’t sell enough Chevrolets to stay in business so naturally goes out of business. Chevrolet now emits zero, the other companies continue business as usual and even pick up more sales because they don’t have to compete with Chevrolet.
That my friends is what the government calls success.
I’m not a betting person, but the odds of reaching Net Zero 2050 are about as good as the odds of me, a 5-foot-6, 135-lbs. senior, of winning a gold medal in the decathlon at this summer’s Olympics. As countries realize the impossibilities of reaching Net Zero, they will either curtail hopes of doing so or abandon them completely, so why worry about it?