From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie
Who would have guessed we have a £22bn black hole?
The government has pledged nearly £22bn for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production.
It said the funding for two “carbon capture clusters” on Merseyside and Teesside, promised over the next 25 years, would create thousands of jobs, attract private investment and help the UK meet climate goals.
Sir Keir Starmer, due to visit the North West on Friday with Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to confirm the projects, said the move would “reignite our industrial heartlands” and “kickstart growth”.
But some green campaigners have said the investment would “extend the life of planet-heating oil and gas production”.
Up to £21.7bn will subsidise three projects on Teesside and Merseyside to support the development of the clusters, including the infrastructure to transport and store carbon.
It will also support two transport and storage networks carrying captured carbon to deep geological storage in Liverpool Bay and the North Sea.
The government said the move would give industry confidence to invest in the UK, attracting £8bn of private investment, directly creating 4,000 jobs and supporting 50,000 in the long term.
It will also help remove 8.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year, officials said.
The projects are expected to start storing captured carbon from 2028.
Although much of the money will only start flowing after carbon capture operations begin, billions will have to be spent in the next few years, building the infrastructure needed. Yet nobody in the world has yet proven that carbon capture can work commercially at scale. So we could end up chucking billions down the drain.
And only 8.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide will end up being captured a year. The UK’s total emissions total 327 million tonnes, so wasting £22 billion of our money will barely make a dent.
To make matters worse, carbon capture projects don’t capture all of the carbon dioxide, so the saving will likely be even less than claimed. Then there are the upstream emissions to take account of – using natural gas from, say Qatar, involves methane emissions at the well heads, pipeline losses and emissions resulting from liquifying and transporting the stuff. When these are taken into account, net emission savings will be tiny or non-existent. The government is only concerned about emissions that appear on the UK’s balance sheet.
Of course the admission that the UK will still need natural gas makes a nonsense of Miliband’s desire to shut down North Sea gas as soon as possible.
As for who will pay for all of this, Sky News say that the funding is to come from a mixture of Treasury money and energy bills, but the government has been coy about the split so far. Almost certainly though, while the initial infrastructure will be paid for out of taxation, the ongoing costs will be subsidised via Contracts for Difference and added to bills.
What is certain though is that producing electricity using carbon capture is more expensive than not using carbon capture, not least because the process itself wastes a lot of energy. Similarly hydrogen produced from gas with carbon capture is much more expensive than just using the gas itself in the first place. All of this inefficiency will add to energy bills.
It is hard to think of a more stupid waste of public money.
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re: “It is hard to think of a more stupid waste of public money.”
Is/would Fusion research (for a fusion reactor) be a contender in this category too?
But we’re just twenty to thirty years and untold trillions away from a miraculous Fusion future.
It may well prove to be realizable.
re: “It may well prove to be realizable.”
Heh.
You probably don’t know this, but Dr. Randell Mills has had actual results (self-sustaining reaction, more power out than power in) with his Hydrino-based device than the Fusion folks with their billions of tax-payer supplied dollars/Euros … There has been a veritable blackout on progress let alone news on Dr. Mills work here. See also “Electron paramagnetic resonance proof …” https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/126823930/1_s2.0_S0360319922022406_main.pdf
Take the win!
The fossil fuel companies will be delighted by this. They’ll use it to claim that CC&S reduces the urgency to lower emissions and will slow down their efforts to do so (maximising profits for as long as possible).
The UK public is effectively forking out so that polluters can continue to pollute and make profits for longer. It’s a win-win for the fossil fuel industry. I thought Homewood and co would love that.
The UK public is effectively forking out billions and wasting it all on unreliables
That’s really daft.
Innumeracy rules!
All that wasted CO2 that the planet’s plant life could use.
CO2 is not pollution, so your comment is as usual, that of a moron.
EVERYTHING in your pitiful existence is there because of fossil fuels.
EVERYTHING you do, supports the fossil fuel industry.
Just remember that.
We should release during the daytime the captured CO2 into crops of corn and wheat and into vineyards and orchards.
We essentially do.
The idea is to increase the concentration of CO2 to a level greater than ambient as is done in greenhouses in which the CO2 concentration is increased to 800-1,000n ppm during the day.
Don’t worry, I bet it won’t stay in the ground. It will escape sooner or later. We should take bets on how long it’ll take.
A ton of CO2 at STP occupies a cube 27X27X27 feet. Storing CO2 after capture will then require pressurization to reduce the volume.
All gas stored at pressure will eventually leak. Its a fact of life.
Therefore, storing CO2 under pressure that will not be used is idiotic.
I didn’t realize it would be stored under pressure. Seems impossible that it won’t leak- sooner or later. It’d be one thing if in a tank designed for that purpose, but in the ground?
“Carbon dioxide was blamed for the deaths of around 1700 people in Cameroon, west Africa, in 1986 when a massive release of gas occurred from Lake Nyos, a volcanic crater lake.”
Natural gas doesn’t leak out of naturally occurring reservoirs so it is certainly possible to store CO2 underground for millions of years.
Those naturally occurring reservoirs are “tight” and need to be drilled into and often fracked. I doubt they’ll be trying to pump CO2 into such tight rock formations. Maybe, I don’t know but I doubt it. Also, even if they think they’ve found such a tight formation, they may be wrong about that- with dire consequences.
Actually they are proposing to replace the natural gas with CO2. Have a look at:
https://www.ineos.com/news/shared-news/denmarks-first-co2-storage-facility-is-now-ready-to-receive-large-amounts-of-co2/#:~:text=The%20ambition%20is%20that%20up,North%20Sea%27s%20seabed%20from%202030.
Which makes sense. Once you pump out the natural gas from a naturally occurring reservoir you can pump gas back into it and it will be stored for as long as the original gas was.
Alternatively there are a number of researchers and companies working on converting CO2 directly into solid state compounds such as calcium carbonate. Have a look
at
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2017.00017/full
Fine, except for 2 reasons:
What an ABSOLUTE WASTE of time, effort and money.
Must be a very leftist idea.
If the natural gas can be extracted, then it is impossible for CO2 to remain captive for all time.
I suppose I am one of the “&co” mentioned above . But , like Paul, I am so not becauseof a connection to Big Oil , but due to a concern that a nation with so much debt and so many people struggling financially should waste money on projects already shown to be a failure (eg at DraX)and already, 10 years ago, rejected by the then Govt as futile.
However it is a tactical mistake to downvote Final Nail. The “environmental” voices of Final Nail (&co) are the most powerful in the UK and virtually everywhere else. If they reject this stupid and destructive project then it is possible that it will be stopped . We will all benefit by that ,.Well all except the spivs who expect to make a ton of money from the construction of the useless structures .
(“SPIV:” an old English wartime name for people of immoral character who make money from the rest of the nation at a time of national difficulty or disaster).
TheFinalNail, are you a supporter of China? They are the world’s largest polluter (both actual pollution and the imaginary carbon variety), and they are increasing their pollution far faster than the UK can do anything. I hope plant life supporters file a legal claim against the willful denial of plant food.
But Ron, every solar panels and wind turbine that the UK imports from China, adds to that real pollution in China.
The whole Net-zero nonsense is totally and absolutely counter-productive.
Might as well throw India into the mix as well.
Are you wearing three masks too?
Are you related to Richard Greene?
I think Ed Miliband has already claimed that this is going to make the UK a world leader as we have depleted North Sea Oil fields just waiting for the technology to become fully operational
Or was it Starmer?
So as usual, taxpayers / citizens are the “collateral damage” of idiotic green fantasies?
You seem to think profit is a dirty word. I wonder if you have ever earned an honest dollar that wasn’t taken out of someone’s pocket by the government. Profit makes the world go round and C02 is an essential gas for life on earth. Get used to it!
Well, thanks for clearing that up. I thought there was something more to TheFinalNail, but he is just your ordinary, imbecilic marxist. Shame the rest of us have to suffer your vanity.
Fossil fuel companies power our economies, and I invest in them heavily because of that. Renewables are worthless except in a few small areas. Remote homesteads and solar for spacecraft (since nuclear isn’t allowed), and wind to pump water out of the ground where electricity isn’t available. I can’t think of many others. But NG, propane, gasoline, diesel, kerosene – these support our economy.
So whatever excuse FF companies need or can find are fine by me. They would be fine by you, too, if you would admit you wear FF clothing, drive a car that couldn’t have been built without FF on roads that would exist without FF, eat food that couldn’t have been grown in such bulk without FF, or delivered to your local store.
You tell yourself whatever lies you need to let you sleep righteously at night, but you’re only lying to yourself and your fellow unicorn riders. The rest of us are laughing at you.
“Yet nobody in the world has yet proven that carbon capture can work commercially at scale. So we could end up chucking billions down the drain.”
“Could” is too flimsy here. The lever has already been pushed, and those billions are already swirling in the toilet. That money will go down the drain.
It would be fine if any stupid private enterprise wanted to invest its OWN money in carbon capture.
Agreed, except if they are paid by the ton somehow through taxes or fees for doing it. Then it’s MY money and no longer fine.
Well said. David
Does anybody know the technology that is proposed? I only know of amine absorbtion, an absorbtion / desorbtion process using amines such as Methyl Diethanolamine (MDEA) solution in water.
Widely used in cleanup operations for ‘raw’ natural gas, but it’s energy intensive!
Is there some new miracle process in the offing?
I did a brief search and did not find the specific technology being used. Probably amine absorption/desorption, as you say. No miracles I know of. (Oh, wait! Green plants! Trees! The natural world is a wonder of wonders.)
There have been a few projects (partially financed by subsidies) on coal. But no one has built or operated a station using natural gas. The CO2 concentration is around 4% while a coal boiler has 15 – 18%, making capture way less efficient and a different animal.
lol lol Labour
You can either laugh or cry; they’re convinced they’re right and they’re going to do it.
The Labour government claims that there is a £22 billion black hole in the public finances. But they can somehow find £22 billion to waste on this ridiculous white elephant.
Reeves is considering a cut to the overseas aid budget. It hasn’t gone down well with the komrades
Rachel Reeves, Queen of Thieves
Bill – the co-incidence of the same amount being quoted struck me too. Could this be where the alleged “black hole” came from?
Its not unproven, its already been proven to be a complete waste before and somehow the Unicorn Farts will work this time because more Taxpayers funds are to be thrown at it.
The govt should be forced to spend far less on a demo plant to prove CCS works. BP proved many years ago that it is feasible, but at a completely unacceptable cost. Nothing has changed and nothing will, because it is just ‘physics’
and of course it’ll be far more expensive as a government project
But is it Socialist, Planet-saving Physics?
Auto – running out of /sarc with this lot already!
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry air is 426 pppv. One cubic meter of this air has only 0.837 g of CO2 and has a mass of 1.29 kg at STP. This small amount of
CO2 in air can only heat up such a large mass of air by a very small amount. There is no need to capture and sequester the CO2 produced by the use of fossil fuels.
For a sunny day with a temperature of 70 deg. F and a RH of 70%, the concentration of
H2O is 17,780 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has 14.3 g of H2O and a mass of 1.20 kg.
In this warm air there is only 0.78 g of CO2 per cubic meter. To the first approximation assume that the absorption of IR light is proportional to mass, then the amount of the
greenhouse effect (GHE) due to water is:
GHE for H2O = 14.3 g H2O / 14.3 g H2O + 0.78 g CO2 = 0.95 or 95%
H20 is the major greenhouse gas and CO2 is a minor trace greenhouse gas. We really do not have to worry about CO2.
Based the above data and calculations, I have concluded that the claim by the IPCC
since 1988 that CO2 is a cause global and a threat to the environment is a deliberate
lie. The purpose of this lie is to provide for the UN a justification for their scheme to distribute funds via the UNFCCC and the UN COP from the donor rich countries to the
poor countries to help them with global warming and climate change. The amount of
the donor funds is presently many, many millions of dollars..
Hopefully this fraud can not go on forever.
It will go on so long as people can make money out of it and not suffer any immediate negative consequences. Unfortunately, given that government-directed taxpayer money is behind it, that’s pretty much until the country goes bankrupt.
If Trump is elected for president, he can end the donations to the IPCC, the UNFCCC, and the UN COP. Use Google and search for COP58 budget. For 2024 it was 57 billion dollars.
PPMV not PPPV.
That was a typo. Do you know about the typo correction feature that you can use after posting a comment. You have a five window for making corrections.
After posting a comment, click on the lower right corner. After the little gear wheel appears, click on “Edit”. Make corrections to the text, then click on “Save”.
H2O has a dipole moment based on its molecular structure. It reacts to EM energy much more profoundly than most other molecules. Hence the micro wave ovens (nee radar range).
CO2 does not have a dipole moment. The means in addition to the relative densities, CO2 is less reactive than water, significantly.
A induced dipole can be formed when a molecule of CO2 collided with other molecules such as N2 orO2. This why CO2 can absorb IR light
Here’s a carbon capture idea: come over to my place and rake up all the acorns you want, which can easily be 4 trash barrels in a season. Load them into an airplane and disperse them over an unpopulated area like in Canada. In a generation you will have sequestered many tons of carbon in the form of beautiful oak trees. Repeat the process each year.
Since 1930 10 billion trees have planted in BC to date. If you disperse the corns, they will be eaten up by the animals
Many oak trees are planted by forgetful squirrels
Good for them too! For a squirrel that weighs a few ounces, it must be like finding 20 pounds of steak.
This was a banner year for pines and oaks in Wokeachusetts. The pines had so many cones that their branches were bent over so much I thought they’d all break. I see pine seedlings popping up everywhere, in lawns, in flower pots, in the cracks in the roads. Now the acorns are dropping. You almost need a hard hat walking in a forest. The ecosystem loved the warm wet weather. Lawns never looked so green in August. Flowers everywhere thriving. Most farms had a great year. Yet my state government says we’re having “a climate emergency”. It’s on every state agency’s web page. Each agency’s leader is told to push the cause. Many don’t like doing it but they love their easy, overpaid job.
I’d like to understand better the causes of these cycles.
A few years ago, I was riding my bicycle along a tree-lined back road. A breeze picked up and I was suddenly pelted with acorns! I was wearing my helmet, so no pain was involved, but it was quite startling.
I like it. My carbon choice for capture is in leaves. The quantity of my acorns from year to year varies significantly, but there is always an abundance of leaves.
There is no better than coal power plants to power this stuff : nut zero guaranteed.
Another eco scam for the mentally challenged.
In a democracy the people get the government they deserve. If the government is crap you have to look to the people to find what they are doing wrong. IMO the two most important elements to support a good democracy is a high standard of education of the constituents and a high moral code. Both have been slipping for decades otherwise we would not have political parties.
The USA is a Constitutional Republic.
That aside, look at how politicians buy votes.
How did the UK become so demented?
For one thing, the book 1984 was taken as a blueprint and not a warning.
The real problem here is not the stupid waste of taxpayer money, but reinforcement of the insane idea that CO2 is evil. In truth, CO2 is the essential intermediate chemical supporting life on this planet. Plants use it to grow, can’t grow without it, and animals (humans included) need plants for food and the oxygen released by plants to breathe. Mechanically removing CO2 from the atmosphere is a net negative for life on Earth.
The same money can be spent beneficially to take CO2 out of the air in a life-supporting manner by building the infrastructure to compress CO2 and feed it to edible plants in greenhouses built for that purpose. Plants will grow better and more efficiently in the CO2 enriched atmosphere and the sale of that food will eventually offset the initial capital. There will be a net economic gain over time, and the ridiculous “carbon capture goals” will actually be met with the carbon going into life forms (humans included) and the carbon cycle will not be violated.
If CO2 is removed from the air, it will be replaced by CO2 from the oceans. We should remind these guys about Lavoisier’s law re disturbance of equilibriums.
You don’t understand. It’s not about reality. Its about virtue signalling.
Carbon capture requires a place to store the gas, which will be underground. To put it there requires drilling deep into the earth. I was under the impression that drilling was verboten. What if they accidentally find methane?
Aside from leaks, what happens when we run out of places to build the CO2 underground tanks?
“It is hard to think of a more stupid …” Well, we’re talking about the UK, so suicidal demographics and cultural surrender for a topper?
Carbon Capture. Supposedly meaning carbon dioxide capture. You can’t expect most of the mainstream “experts” to understand will achieve nothing to save the planet or change the climate. What it will achieve is totally unnecessary energy costs and poverty for most of the world excluding the totalitarian states
I don’t know if this a joke but I read the other day that Mr Ed is going to introduce giant flywheels to the national grid around the country to to catch “surplus” energy from solar and wind and store it for when it’s needed.
I’ve just got this picture in my head of the spinning plates variety act where plates are placed on top of bamboo sticks. But in my head it’s Ed Milliband running around trying to keep them all up in the air at the same time. Made me smile anyway.
What is really funny is that many people are looking at CO2 as a potential surfactant to pull more hydrocarbons out of fracking sites. As it turns out, apparently only 10% of the hydrocarbons are being extracted out of shale formations because the heavier hydrocarbons simply won’t unstick. But in North Dakota, for example, where they would love to pump CO2 to try and free up more oil – it would take 10 to 15 years to get a CO2 pipeline built from Wyoming coal electricity plants.
Does the UK even have coal electricity plants any more? If not, it means capturing CO2 from ambient air = colossal waste of energy.
The last coal-fired power station in the UK closed last Monday.
What a really bad idea. Winter is coming. They can give the saved coal to people for use in their fireplaces.
Hoover up all the leaves that fall each autumn and store them in nitrogen to prevent rot. Carbon capture at 1/10th the cost.
I think the process is proven to be very inefficient. How much energy is required to power the system?
There’s probably more CO2 created in building and running such a system than the system takes out of the atmosphere. There’s no such thing as a free lunch in physics but these numpties don’t understand that.
The human body uses CO2 rather than O2 in much of its chemistry. To demonize CO2 is to demonize humans. Could it be that CCS is HCS in disguise.
It is difficult to square this latest UK foot shooting initiative with Britain being the nation that gifted the world the industrial age.
Only someone as scientifically illiterate as a PPE graduate such as Ed Miliband, could come up with a proposal costing £22 billion that will have zero impact on the very issue he claims it is designed to impact.
Here is what the IEA had to say about Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) in October 2023
“CCUS accounts for 8%of cumulative emissions reduction in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE Scenario) to 2050”
“CCUS deployment remained relatively flat in the last decade and this has led to progressive downward revisions in the role of CCUS in the updated NZE Scenario”
“Operating CCUS projects concentrate in the lowest cost areas such a natural gas processing. In contrast around three quarters of capture by 2050 in the NZE Scenario are still at demonstration or prototype scale”
“For all CCUS applications, economic viability remains a significant hurdle as costs can be prohibitively high compared to unabated technologies. In addition long lead times for project development and implementation can impede progress, particularly related to CO2 storage development”
What they didn’t say “CCUS – Completely Crazy, Utterly Stupid”
So carbon capture differentiates between natural and man made CO2? This falls into the category of messing with nature because we know better. What could go wrong?
CO2 in the life cycles of plants and animals is “good CO2”. CO2 produced by the use of
fossil fuels is “bad CO2”.
Who are these biologically illiterate morons who think that carbon dioxide is anything but food for all plant life on earth? Not to mention aquatic organisms that photosynthesise.
The appropriate place to capture carbon is in plants, in phytoplankton, which is then continuously recycled through soils and the air to allow constant cycles of germination, growth, seed production and death.
Who is the numpty who thinks that taking carbon dioxide away from plants is what plants want?
When you have a globally available, absolutely free resource called plant life that will capture carbon hundreds of days a year, why on earth do you need to waste £22bn+ developing some second-rate substitute that will take carbon dioxide away from plant life and bury it somewhere under the sea???