Did you know CCS (carbon capture and storage) requires an industrial plant almost as large as the coal fired power station it is supposed to clean up? Or that it uses fully 40% of the energy of the entire output of the same station? It turns out to be such an onerous, costly pursuit it could only have been dreamed up by an enemy of coal.
The central problem is that under conditions we humans like to be in, the CO2 molecule emphatically wants to be a huge voluminous gas. To make it more compact and storable back in the small hole it came from, we either have to change it chemically, or forcibly stuff it in under some combination of extreme pressure or extreme cold. And there aren’t many cold sealed rock vaults in Earth’s thin crust, which rests on a 1000 degree C ball of magma. Any form of chemical, temperature or pressure change uses monster amounts of energy, and there is just no getting around it without fiddling with laws of chemistry. The whole idea of CCS is so insanely unfeasible that in order to stuff a beneficial fertilizer underground it appears we must spend 60% more to build every new power station and then throw away 40% of its output as well. You can’t make this stuff up. CCS is the threat that makes new coal stations unaffordable in the West, and building those costs into the plans makes cost comparisons with renewables (and nuclear) so much more “attractive”. Anton goes through some provocative numbers. — Jo
Guest Post: Anton Lang (TonyfromOz)
Here’s why CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration, Storage) or “Clean” Coal is impossible
The Big-PR machine makes it sound simple:
…
Credit to Genevieve Young (Univ of Utah) for an image that has been adapted by others.
Billions of investment dollars hinge upon it, but few will correctly explain the whole process and what it entails. If they did, the public would see it for the pie-in-the-sky fairy plan that it is.
CCS is the proverbial Sword Of Damocles, hovering over every proposal for a new large scale coal fired power plant because it might only be approved only if it includes CCS. It’s used in the costings for new plants, making them virtually unaffordable. Making coal fired power enormously expensive means wind-power appears to be “cheaper” than coal. It’s one of the ploys used to artificially raise the costs for coal fired power, so renewable proponents can point and gloat that wind especially is now cheaper than coal fired power.
CCS artificially raises the costs of coal fired power in two ways
First, it raises the initial construction cost for any new large scale coal fired plant by around 60%.
For example, look at the pricing of USC plants (Ultra Super Critical Coal, hotter and more efficient). China leads the way here, and they can construct a new 2000 MW plant for around $2 billion, partly because labor is cheaper there. In Germany the equivalent cost is A$3.4 billion. The construction cost for a new USC plant with CCS in Germany is $5.5 billion, almost not economically viable. That capital cost must be recovered from the sale of the electricity the plant generates over its life.
Second, the CCS process is hugely energy intensive — consuming up to 40% of the electricity generated by the plant. So the plant can only sell 60% of the actual power it produces.
But money is not the only reason that no one has built a true CCS coal plant.
The warmists would spend more and more,
To capture and lock in a store,
All the ‘carbon’ ‘pollution’,
As their hare-brained solution,
On advice from their guru Al Gore.— Ruairi
Few are aware of the scale of the process of capturing CO2
Those new USC coal fired plants burn 15% less coal (see my post here). A new USC plant will burn 5.5 million tons of coal a year. At the average multiplier of 2.86 tons of CO2 for every ton of coal burned, that means CO2 emission of 15.75 million tons. Note well: the weight of the CO2 emissions is almost three times greater than the coal it came from, due to the weight of the oxygen from the air that it combines with. Furthermore, because CO2 is a gas, its volume is vastly greater than the volume of the coal it came from. Even if you freeze the emissions to liquid CO2, they are too big and heavy to stuff back down the hole that the coal came from (from which it would escape to the atmosphere anyway, as it warmed and regasified).
The amount is huge: a plant of this nature has a typical life span of 50 years, so it will emit around 790 million tons of CO2 in its lifetime. See the problem yet? Someone has to find a geostable rock formation with enough space to hold 790 million tons of CO2, and to hold it underground forever, never to seep back to the surface. For ONE new coal fired power plant.
CO2 is already injected into formations that used to be oil sites, in order to recover the full oil holdings. But if the legislation for this CCS process is similar to what was almost passed in the U.S., then existing oil and gas fields would be specifically prohibited from using this CO2 sequestration process. Completely new ‘green fields’ must be found.
The process can never be realized on the scale required.
We just can’t store it fast enough
Let’s construct one of these new technology USC power plants with CCS, and pretend that (a) the money is no problem and (b) there is a ‘hole in the ground’ big enough to hold the CO2. So there is a pumping station at the storage site, and pipelines from the plant to the site.
A new USC pant has two turbines, and each turbine/generator unit will have to have its own CCS unit. At full generating capacity, the furnace of each unit will be consuming one ton of crushed powdered coal every ten seconds, and emitting CO2 at the rate of one ton every 3.5 seconds.
We need to capture the exhaust, and CO2 has to be separated from the rest, all at the same rate of 1 ton every 3.5 seconds.
The process of separating the CO2 from the exhaust could be achieved in a couple of ways, but the current (seemingly) best option is by injecting all the exhaust gas into a solvent and boiling the solvent. Only the CO2 is given off by the boiling, thus separating the CO2 from all the other exhaust from the plant. However this must also be achieved at the same rate as the exhaust is being emitted.
Then the CO2 has to be cooled by placing it under extreme pressure to be liquefied, and this is where the electricity cost skyrockets. The process decreases its volume considerably, but the weight remains the same. So here we have a one ton of gaseous CO2 converted to one ton of liquid CO2. Liquefied CO2 weighs in at 8.8 pounds per gallon. So one ton of the gas must become 255 gallons of liquid. It must be produced at 73 gallons a second, the same rate as it is being emitted.
Two turbines means the output is 145 gallons every second. Think how long it takes to pump 10 gallons of petrol into your car. This liquid CO2 now has to be pumped down the pipeline under high pressure and at low temperature all the way from the plant to the hole in the ground.
At the storage site another large pumping site injects the liquid CO2 into the ground. As the liquid goes deeper into the ground it warms, reverting to its gaseous form and greatly expanding in volume.
You cannot do it at any other rate other than what it is being emitted at, because you cannot store the liquid CO2, not on that scale, and with it still being emitted from the plant.
Can you see now why I can be so confident when I say this will never be achieved on the scale required?
Yet it is still pointed at as being horrendously expensive, because, hey, look at that LCOE. Hugely expensive. Why would you not go down the Renewable path instead?
See why they just say ….. ‘Clean Coal’. How easy is that.
— Anton Lang
For the purpose of explanation here, I have used Imperial measures both for weight, one ton being 2240 pounds, and an imperial gallon of CO2 weighing 8.8 Pounds.
Some of you may have heard of how CCS is (supposedly) a raging success and they will point you to a Canadian plant which is using CCS, (as shown in Joanne’s first link) and that plant is The Boundary Dam Plant in Saskatchewan, and I’m including this information separately for the sake of comparison for what is required at a full large scale operation as I described in the original Thread above.
This Boundary Dam Power Plant has 6 units for a total Nameplate of around 820MW, but only one Unit has this CCS technology, and they are only doing half the process, capturing the CO2 emissions from just this one unit. Even then, they are only capturing around 60 to 90% (claimed) of the CO2 from this one unit. Even then, only half of those emissions are used for the next part of the process, enhanced oil recovery from an all but depleted oil field, and the CO2 is not being stored in that oil field but eventually outgassed back to the Atmosphere. The other half of the captured emissions are in fact not stored at all, but immediately vented off into the Atmosphere after capture, sort of defeating the whole intent of the process. So, referring to this plant as a shining example of the success of CCS is a stretch at best.
This is one unit at that plant, Unit Number 3. Originally operating a 139MW generator, it opened in 1970, and was scheduled for closure, and so they used that existing site to construct this CCS project, so while new, it was not at a ‘green field site’.
The generator was replaced with a new 160MW unit and the CCS was, as they say here, retrofitted, but for all intents and purposes this was a new Unit effectively. The unit now delivers a claimed 110MW of power, (a loss of 32%) so 50MW is used by the CCS process just for this one unit. It supposedly captures 85 to 90% of the CO2 being emitted, and they say that this could equate to almost one million tons of CO2 each year. Now, compare that to the example for a large scale power plant I mentioned in the text for the Post, 2 Units each running a 1000MW generator, and emitting almost 18 million tons of CO2 each year.
Of note for this Canadian Unit is the cost, $1.35 Billion (Canadian), for a 110MW generating unit. Also of note is that they say that the plant could have an operating life of 30 years, telling me right away that this CCS lowers the life span for a coal fired plant from the expected usual of 50 years to now only 30 years, effectively meaning that the CCS process only has a projected life span of 30 years. This life span means that they will be sequestering around 18 million tons of CO2 at the absolute most, compared to the almost one Billion tons for the large scale plant I mentioned in the text. So not only does it consume almost 40% of the power, they now have only 60% of the life of the Plant to recover those costs, so you can see how it dramatically increases the cost of the electricity it must sell, giving the impression now that renewable power will end up being cheaper, than what is being generated and delivered here at this Plant. Just having that CCS facility there also considerably raises the yearly costs for maintenance etc at this unit, which also raises the ultimate cost of the electricity it delivers.
So while this Canadian plant is looked on as a great success, it is in fact tiny in scale, is having problems already, and all this for a horrendous cost.
The process at this Plant is so small, it captures barely 5% of what the scaled up technology eventually calls for, for just the ONE large scale plant, let alone a whole fleet of them, so here, to attempt to scale it up to a full whole of large scale single plant operation, they need to multiply everything being done here by a factor of 10 for one large scale unit, and each new prospective USC coal fired Plant will have at least two units. Scaling things up by a factor of ten may not be easy to comprehend, but what it means is that the whole series of processes involved needs to have the rate of work scaled up in speed by a factor of ten or more, in other words doing everything ten or more times faster.
This by no means can be called a success, as it only achieves half the process, and vents the CO2 to the Atmosphere anyway.
Tony.
690
Thank you, TonyOz
I’ve posted several times over the last year or two that the “S” part of CCS (ie. the Storage) is too expensive to resolve at the scaling needed
The “CC” part is ok – CO2 scrubbers of varying efficiencies have been around for decades
240
TonyfromOz,
Excellent article, Tony. I do have one problem though. You’ve already covered all the angles explaining why this scheme won’t work. That leaves next to nothing for the rest of us to add. 😉
Abe
230
Abe, thanks:
And therein lies the method in the madness.
I can do the Maths. I can look laterally. I even think I can explain it in a way that the average person can understand it
I can only find so much. I look and look and look, and use different word constructions in different search engines in attempts to find even more.
What I do with things like this is to put it out there. I then know that others will go looking for more on the same subject. The non believers will try and find fault with links they may find. Others will find other things.
So, while all of you look at something like this and go ….. Judas Priest, look at that. I had no idea , well I also end up learning something new.
I can do all this and be safe in the knowledge myself, but actually putting it out there is part of the process.
And can you see from my just saying that, that here I am, with a piddling little nothing Associate Diploma in Electrical Engineering. We have Climate Change PhD’s out there publishing their work, casting around for Peer Review.
Associate Diploma in EE, well this is my attempt to put stuff out there, to people who I know will find more things for me to go and look at.
For me, this is a win win situation.
Tony.
540
What about pumping all that CO2 into the ocean deep?
Would enough of it dissolve? That could be a cheaper option.
Personally I prefer to see all that CO2 fertilizing the atmosphere, where it can actually do some good. Trying to store the CO2 is a complete waste of precious CO2.
100
One can also look at it in reverse. Want to reduce your coal reserve by 40%? Sequester the resulting emissions. Any way you look at it you are burning money. Throwing away an asset. Only a fool would consider such things.
There are options for chemically sequestering CO2:
https://www.alcoa.com/australia/en/info_page/sustain_home_case_carbon.asp
But generally the amounts are relatively miniscule.
70
A friend told me today that she heard on ABC RN that the brown coal fired pose stations in Victoria are now adding bio mass, timber chips?
100
I heard that too, and wondered how the heck doing so is better. Chip fallen timber or the remains of milled timber and turn it into biochar for agriculture or horticultural use perhaps, but burn it up the chimney of an already functioning power station????
30
Brown coal IS biomass that has not been coalified.
20
Tony – as far as the Gorgon project in Western Australia goes, it was hailed as the biggest CCS project in the world (when it was 1st approved by the federal government a few years ago).
Their CCS system is designed to re-inject CO2 extracted from the gas process stream into a deep ultra-saline aquifer.
Chevron claim that this will reduce CO2 emissions by ~40% a year (lets be generous and call it 4 million tonnes a year), with approximately 100 million tonnes of CO2 to be stored (re-injected) over the life of the project.
It isn’t (officially) designed to do anything with the CO2 from the expected ~16 million tonnes of LNG produced, sold, and burned each year, or with the CO2 from vast amounts of diesel burned in order to drill and complete the production, and re-injection wells, or with the CO2 from running the gas plant itself.
Chevron claim that they received only $60 million from the Australian government for this, but I am pretty sure this does not include the subsidised exploration/feasability wells drilled on Barrow Island to assess the aquifer, and various other funds handed over by the Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, and Abbott governments.
110
Tony, in the main article up top there were a few moments where I felt a bit bamboozled by the figures.
For those of us who live on the Moon or in any country other than the USA, Liberia, and Burma, some of those units just didn’t hold any intuition for the scale of it all.
Running my trusty copy of ConvertAll on a few key quotes…
90
Yes, I quite like your tongue-in-cheek here. I’ve had a few startling experiences with US engineers when they were faced with m^3 x RD = tonnes (Resources, Reserves)
50
It all made perfect sense to me, having been educated in England in the 50s and 60s!
10
Thanks for the post and your comments. Very complete and informative.
In the US, coal mines and oil and gas fields have to control off site runoff and sediment yield for a 25 year return period flood. These small reservoirs stop off-site runoff and contaminated sediment yield. Often times the trapped water is polluted with liquid hydrocarbons (which mostly float) and contaminated sediments (which may be colloidal).
The containing of these pollutants onsite solves one problem. But if wildlife is harmed or killed by birds such as ducks landing on the ponds and dying the fines start at something like $100000. per incident and ramp up to site closure for repeated violations.
The obvious solution to energy production is to have uniform environmental regulations and penalties. This would greatly level the field and protect the environment and wildlife at the same time. Also, bald eagles and golden eagles have additional protection.
If wind turbines and solar plants (such as the solar-reflector boiling water plant in California) were subject to the same standards for their environmental impact statements and subsequent penalties for violations as applied to the oil, gas, and coal production facilities this would sort out the most environmentally benign technologies.
The current situation is that all these regulations are strictly applied to fossil fuels but wind turbines and solar plants are essentially granted exceptions. As a result these protected species are slaughtered by the untold thousands.
The whole point is that fossil fuel energy producers are subject to the laws while renewables are exempt. That is the leftists’ way.
170
Hey, why don’t we split the molecule apart, store the Carbon as a solid and release the O2 bit to the atmosphere?
Oh hang on, isn’t that what plants do?
642
Maybe, instead of trying to store the CO2 underground they should feed it through some enclosed greenhouses, upping the CO2 levels to 3-4 times the atmospheric levels. Especially good for growing tomatoes I believe.
220
Kevin, I have thought about that, though photosynthesis happens pretty slowly, but frankly you could pipe it into real greenhouses over say 100 square km and maybe 1/5th of it might get absorbed. You could also force feed it to certain algae/bacteria from which you could make oil.
But except for the food production value frankly it’s still a waste of money – better value than windmills and solar panels but still a waste. Best to just release it into the atmosphere for the whole biosphere to use.
100
From the Book of Gaia:
… 22 and Gaia looked upon her work and was pleased.
23 She then saw that the life created was causing removal of a precious resource from her cloak of air, 24 and realised that this would result in no more life on her bounteous surface. 25 So She decided to encourage a life-form that would release the entrapped resource, and – lo! – allow life to prosper as before. 26 This life-form She called “Man”, and She built into it the belief that it could master what She had created, 27 ’cos She likes a larf…
30
What is the thought process behind those who would give bobl’s comment the thumbs down? I mean, it’s absolutely factually correct, as sure as trees is trees.
And the beauty of it is: we don’t have to make that much effort/time/energy to manufacture more organic carbon-capture units (aka plants). Nature does it for us naturally as the plant food increases. And for free!
Alas, all of this is way over the heads of Alarmists, I am sorry to say.
220
I sometimes wonder about that too. I wish they would comment so I can address their disagreement, but the alarmists just run through and tag anything PRO CO2 with a thumbs down for the sake of it regardless of whether the post is factual. Mind you some sceptics tend to do that too, sometimes, rarely we do actually get an accurate statement from our warmist buddies.
So fellas and goils, if you thumb down how about a comment to say why?
60
I reckon that one red thumb down was from a plant who felt very used and taken-for-granted by all this planning of how much they were expected to eat without asking for their feelings on the matter.
We can at least be certain that thumbs down was made by a vegetable.
70
There is another small problem, or two.
A large volume of CO2 in one place is dangerous.
If it suddenly escapes, it will asphyxiate anyone in the vicinity. The gas is heavier than air, and will take a while to safely remix.
This has happened in Africa.
Also “supercritical” CO2 is an amazing solvent. You need to be really, really sure it will not find a way out of anywhere it is stored.
320
Apparently the volcanic activity in/under Yellowstone National Park releases bucketloads of CO2 a year.
I understand it to be in the order of 5% of global CO2 emissions, according to the author of this paper, published in Science.
121
Yes, and according to the IPCC, nature puts 97% of the CO2 into the atmosphere, and humans the rest.
110
In 2006 I wrote to a Parliamentary inquiry into geosequestration about the danger of a mass CO2 escape due to accident or terrorism as well as other problems and my submission is at
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_representatives_Committees?url=scin/geosequestration/subs/sub11.pdf
Apparently Government experts told the Committee that mass escape was impossible.
70
This is the contents of my 2006 submission referenced above. I hope it is OK to post here.
Comments on Inquiry into Geosequestration Technology
Those who advocate the continuation of carbon-based energy production propose that carbon dioxide so produced can be permanently eliminated by effectively burying it in the ground in either exhausted gas fields or other porous rock formations. The following brief comments will attempt to address why this is an unwise idea, indeed one that could lead to a great catastrophe for future generations.
Sequestered carbon dioxide must be stored forever – this carbon should never be released into the environment. This is impossible to guarantee over geological periods, and assuming civilisation survives, its unintended release in the future could have devastating results.
Sequestered carbon dioxide will ALWAYS be potentially harmful. In comparison, nuclear waste eventually becomes harmless in geologically short periods of time. In addition, nuclear waste occupies smaller volumes, by many orders of magnitude, and there are many more suitable sites.
The mere fact that exhausted gas fields have held their contents for long periods of time is no evidence that they will continue to do so in the future. Firstly, it is likely that these fields have lost portions of some or most of their contents by natural processes over eons of time. The gas-containing volume is not truly hermetically sealed as may be supposed. Secondly, as gas is pumped out of fields the rock structure changes as it is no longer supported by internal pressure. It cracks and otherwise degrades. In addition, gas recovery is often enhanced by deliberately inducing cracks in the reservoir. Repressurising the field is not likely to repair this damage. Furthermore, there is no proof that once a field is filled with carbon dioxide, the plug can or will remain intact over the rest of time.
Most if not all gas fields contain water. The carbon dioxide will react with this water and create carbonic acid which may weaken the formation.
The potential for destruction by the accidental release of gas is tremendous. Furthermore terrorists are a great risk to this technology. They could easily compromise the seal on sequestered gas, or cause a gas reservoir to be released before it is ultimately sealed. A sudden release of carbon dioxide is extremely dangerous. In 1986 naturally accumulated carbon dioxide was suddenly released from the bottom of Lake Nyos, West of Cameroon and more than 1700 people were killed along with livestock up to 25 km away. This involved a much smaller volume of gas than may be sequestered from a typical power station.
Given all of the aforementioned problems it is difficult to imagine that there can be any strong case made for carbon-based electricity production with associated carbon sequestration. Further, there are few alternatives. Most “alternative” forms of energy are not of a sufficiently high energy density to ensure economic collection and distribution. Wind farming is environmentally destructive due to bird strikes, infra-sound and visual impact and does not work without subsidies. Solar cannot meet base load production requirements and is also expensive. There are limited hydro resources and these are
currently almost fully exploited. Wave and tidal power is of limited application. The reality is that nuclear power is the only technology that can compete on a similar economic basis to carbon-based electricity production and has fewer problems with disposal of its waste products. Short of returning to the Stone Age, if we decide to remain an energy-based civilisation, we must use nuclear energy. The carbon dioxide problem cannot simply be buried in the ground as is advocated.
In summary, carbon dioxide sequestration is poorly conceived, cannot guarantee sequestration of gas forever as is necessary and has potential for great harm due to accidental or deliberate release. It is nothing more than a ploy by those who are not prepared to face reality and recognise the urgent necessity of developing large scale nuclear electricity generation which ultimately has far fewer potential problems than sequestration.
170
All the more reason we need to reduce the amount of CO2 we are producing by burning fossil fuels.
674
Its a ‘no brainer’ Harry, CO2 does not cause global warming.
546
el gordo,
As the world turns and some scientist are coming to the reality that CO2 ‘forcing’ amount to as close to zero as makes no difference.
A chart from landshape.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/6921/ is a graphical compilation of published CO2 climate sensitivity results since 2000. The trend for a temperature increase from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (so-called climate sensitivity) has fallen from over 4°C to under 2°C today.
As Gervais, Weiss and Lüdecke conclude in their EIKE piece:
[my bold]
Makes you wonder why bother even looking at the very expensive and impractical CCS.
291
tomomason – the URL does not work. Can you please post correct one. Thanks.
10
Sorry but that’s NoTricksZone problem, they warned of earlier in the day that thet may go off-line — looks like it happened.
Apparently upgrading the WordPress software is causing it.
http://notrickszone.com/ is up but not linking to any stories.
30
David Maddison,
Until NoTricksZone gets up and running, you may want to check out Jo’s piece, Relentlessly shrinking climate sensitivity estimates, on that same topic.
Abe
10
Harry,
and what better way to achieve that by constructing new USC coal fired plants, thus reducing CO2 emissions by 15% and even more.
Just forget the CCS part of it.
Tony.
451
TonyfromOz.
I agree, pretty much everything is on the table at this point until they figure out what works best.
Cutting back on power consumption works too.
Just anything to get the world off the exponentially increasing CO2 emissions pathway.
357
Harry,
210TWH of consumption, and that’s 210,000,000,000KWH. (just for Australia here, and umm, look at your power bill on how insignificantly small your family’s personal consumption is)
30% of that is used in the Residential Sector.
Over to you then.
How much of a cutback do you envisage, and where.
Hospitals, the rail system, every high rise in every city, traffic control and lighting, Industry, Commerce, shopping centres, food storage in every Supermarket.
What percentage of cars will you be taking off the road? Which airline will you be cutting back? What road transport will you be cutting? How many freight trains removed from the network? Which phone companies removed from the network. How many TV channels will you be cutting? And on and on and on.
Feel free to put some numbers to it.
Over to you then.
Tony.
482
TonyfromOz.
Fear-mongering?
148
No, seriously Harry,
it was you who said we need to cut back on power consumption.
Where then ….. Harry?
Tony.
402
TonyfromOz.
No need for you to misrepresent what I posted.
I never said we “need” to cut back on power consumption. It is an option we have, one of many. You said “need”, not me.
142
Harry,
Correction- at #4 you said:
So you say we *need* to cut back CO2 production by burning fossil fuels, without cutting power consumption.
Do tell.
No wriggle room left, sorry.
442
“So you say we *need* to cut back CO2 production by burning fossil fuels, without cutting power consumption.
Do tell.”
51
Dave N.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
05
Harry, rather than label Tony’s questions fearmongering, you should embrace it as an opportunity to demonstrate that you understand the issues in all their specifics and that you’ve thought through the solutions. i.e. What, when, where and how much they will cost in relation to their efficacy at not only lowering CO2 emissions but also what the net impact will be on lowering temperature and whether they will stimulate or drag on the economy.
I would love to see your take on all this fully quantified.
312
TonyfromOz,
Do you have a computer model for that like proper climate fearmongerers use?
After all by using pen/paper and a calculator aren’t you just sequestering CO2 the old fashioned way by letting the grass grow under your feet?
Anyway your figures aren’t correctly fearful enough as they are just based on years of experience of true observed measurements; where are your wild hypothetical figures that are required for an IPCC approved modeled world?
So come on tony and jump on the bandwagon of ‘fear makes money’ that the IPCC encourages politicians to join.
102
Harry, why do we need to cut CO2? Remind me…
372
Joanne Nova.
You are probably asking a rhetorical question, but I will answer anyway.
We need to cut back on CO2 production to slow the accumulation of excess CO2 in the atmosphere. You know the greenhouse effect, global average temperature increase etc.
163
Harry. CO2 is necessary for life on earth and the more the better. CO2 has no proven affect on global temperatures. It has proven affects on enriching plant, animal, and human lives.
391
Leonard Lane.
Yes, CO2 is necessary for plant photosynthesis.
No, there is plenty of evidence that increasing CO2 is increasing the greenhouse effect and increasing the global average temperature. Not to mention increasing ocean acidification which has the potential to impact sea life that produces a shell (the relationship is complicated).
Yes, CO2 fertilisation does help some plants. But the same plants still need enough other nutrients, water and a certain temperature range to thrive.
I have never seen any evidence that increasing CO2 enriches animal and human lives.
018
What evidence? CO2 concentrations continue to rise more or less steadily; global temperatures have not.
At risk of appearing repetitive – what evidence?
120
What “excess” are you talking about?
The earth got down to 280ppm CO2. At that point the trees were at their limit of survival, any less and there would have been some serious die off.
Do you have a favourite value for CO2 in the atmosphere? At what point is it “excess”.
Are you aware that the human contribution of CO2 in the atmosphere is around 3% of the total?
Are you aware that CO2 only stays in the atmosphere for a half-life of 5-7 years, before being absorbed by the oceans?
Are you aware that plants the world over (meaning food for everything on the planet) has increased growth up to 10% faster in some species?
Are you aware that a global average temperature is a magnificently meaningless number? This average number relates to NOTHING.
361
Greg Cavanagh.
I have never seen any scientific evidence for the “CO2 starvation” hypothesis.
Looking at the data for the last 800,000 years CO2 concentration has dropped below 200ppm from time to time – was there a major vegetation dieoff at those times?
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
I do not personally have a favourite CO2 concentration. Safety dictates that it not go too much over 280ppm to avoid disrupting the climate that humankind has adapted to.
I am aware of the carbon balance in the atmosphere but your “3%” is beside the point, it is the accumulation that is dangerous. And the accumulation is now 40% over pre-industrial, and will get much higher than that.
I do not know that your half life calcs are correct (reference?), but the excess over pre-industrial will take a lot longer than 5-7 years to be absorbed.
When you say “global average temperature” if you are referring to the estimated global average temperature then the figure is not meaningless. If people do not believe in the concept of an estimated average temperature, then there is no need to dress differently for a base in Antarctica or for Darwin.
015
There is a key piece of evidence that Warmist can’t erase, that shows the earth is currently at the very bottom of the normal range of CO2 levels. That evidence is that two whole new group of plants evolved several million years ago specifically to cope with low CO2 levels. They developed a new method of photosynthesis called C4 which permits greater water efficiency and the ability to photosynthesise in higher temperatures at greatly reduced CO2 levels. An even more robust adaption called CAM was evolved by plants like cacti which we now see living in deserts. The kicker is C4 and CAM come at a price and are not competitive with the C3 pathway when there is an abundance of CO2.
Another piece of less obvious evidence is while plants maybe able to just barely survive at 200 ppm THEY CAN NOT GROW OR PRODUCE SEED! Also the less CO2 the slower the growth and the longer to maturity. During glaciation this means plants bump up against
#1. Lower CO2 due to colder oceans and Henry’s law.
#2. Last frost/first frost problems.
#3. More stomata and thus more water loss under the drier conditions and greatly expanded deserts during glaciation.
………..
Harry is quoting the REVISED CO2 data (which has been mangled as much if not more than the temperature data.)
That 178 ppm CO2 number alone is enough to make anyone sane question the results.
The ice core analysis method switched from an analysis of the WHOLE SAMPLE to analysis of the CO2 left in the air bubble. This newer method gives much lower CO2 numbers. that do not agree with the older numbers or with the plant stomata data.
Stomata data by Wagner, Aaby and Visscher prove conclusively that the ice core data is seriously in error. The ice core data can be corrected using J.J.Drake’s correlation, the profile does not change but the ppm values do so the analysis is still valid.
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/19/12011.full.pdf
In general the stomata research totally destroys the ice core data
I have tons of links but this is the simplest to understand:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/CO2-ice-HS.htm
The PPM when trees and C3 plants are no longer viable was also revised and the biology paper I used to link to (–
200 pm CO2 trees starve — http://biblioteca.universia.net/ficha.do?id=912067 ) was removed from the net. All newer papers rely on the ice core data for revising the number down to 180 ppm.
So now we have to go to the people who know and depend on the truth – FARMERS (Farmers overwhelmingly think CAGW is organic fertilizer. Iowa State Univ polled nearly 5,000 farmers. 66 % believed climate change is occurring, but only 41 percent believed humans bore any part of the blame for global warming, thus 75% rejected CAGW. Other studies show numbers over 80% reject CAGW.)
Hydroponic Shop
GREENAIR
HYDROFARM
Humans are returning much needed CO2 to the carbon cycle and therefore saving many species from extinction in the next glaciation. Remember plants are not dealing with just the % CO2 in the air but with the partial pressure of CO2 and that decreases with elevation.
THIS is what the Warmistra are not telling you – Eco Physics Lab PDF
That means if the CO2 level is around 210 ppm you can kiss trees and other C3 plants growth above sea level good by and that is most of the earth.
[I’m not sure what trapped this in moderation except possibly its size so I’m approving it. Just remember that very large comments and comments with a lot of links in them both will put the comment in moderation.] AZ
111
Gai.
So the data I reference is “mangled”, while the data you quote is perfect – I wonder how you can tell the difference?
Anyway red herrings are sometimes interesting, so I go along with the gag. Needless to say my discussions above are not about reducing CO2 concentrations to below pre-industrial levels, that are all about reducing the emission of excess CO2 to keep the earth off the exponentially-increasing pathway.
013
How can I tell if the data is ‘mangled’?
Verification and validation from different methods and sources. Also just plain old common sense and a LONG look at the politics.
WHY has all the data that does not fit the CAGW agenda tossed out and made to vanish?
1. Ice Core data up to 7000 ppm has been tossed – CHECK
2. Historical data up to 500 ppm and above has been tossed – CHECK
3. Stomata data that shows Ice Core data is artificially low and smoothed is tossed – CHECK
4. Mauna Loa data that does not ‘fit’ is tossed – CHECK
5. The laboratory of Charles Keeling owns the global monopoly of calibration of all CO2 measurements (WMO 2001/2003). – CHECK
And then there is the politics. An exposé on Maurice Strong informs on just about everything needed to know about the true characters behind the CAGW meme, and thus its legitimacy.
121
“If people do not believe in the concept of an estimated average temperature, then there is no need to dress differently for a base in Antarctica or for Darwin.”
What? Makes no sense to me.
If you were flying into Darwin, would you:
A. look at the global average temperature.
B. look at the local temperature of Darwin.
A global average temperate relates to no place. It’s an amalgam of temperatures collected from all over the world, which when summed and averaged; are not relevant to anything or any place.
81
gai.
“And then there is the politics…”
Ha ha I had a feeling you would get to the United Nations (or NWO same difference) eventually.
09
My other comment is in moderation (too many links) [Approved a few minutes ago.] AZ
Here is the crux of why Twinotter is mislead about CO2 and C3 plants.
So Harry, take all those ice core numbers given by the IPCC and adjust them to represent 100% of the CO2 in the ice instead of 20% in the air bubbles.
101
And why pray tell would we want to do that? Are you people from another planet where CO2 is unhealthy?
241
Why don’t you arrange a controller to be installed that disconnects you from the grid whenever the renewables are generating less than the nameplate, that way you can be the first off the grid as the renewables fail. Then they wont have to fire up that fossil backup on your behalf. That’s about as green as you can get…
Oh hang on, just switch the power off, renewables are never generating their nameplate total.
191
Yeah. I love how I keep getting offered free replacement LED bulbs and other “energy saving” gadgets.
Someone is making a HEAP out of yet another “Climate Change” SCAM!
151
Also Dave, unfortunately you can not make LED bulbs without high concentration energy — fossil fueled or nuclear.
Windmills and solar can not do it.
80
“….Just anything to get the world off the exponentially increasing CO2 emissions pathway.”
WHY?
Why ever would anyone in their right mind want to lower the amount of CO2?
Earth has been near CO2 starvation for plants for millions of years because the plants and the oceans took CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequestered it as rock (Coal, limestone….) Without plants there are no animals so without decent levels of CO2 there would be little life on earth. 1500 ppm to 2000 ppm would makes plants very happy and would make the earth bloom.
PROOF:
Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15642948
The royal Society: Carbon dioxide starvation, the development of C4 ecosystems, and mammalian evolution.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/353/1365/159
This paper says low levels of CO2 and not temperature were the limiting factor for treeline in mountains:
Impact of lower atmospheric carbon dioxide on tropical mountain ecosystems
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9367947
La Brea tar pits is close to sea level BTW.
141
Gai.
It sounds like the ecosphere is adaptable to many changes. And the process of adaptation takes…
010
Why?
00
You sound like one of those advocating to green the planet by allowing nature (that puts far more CO2 than humans ever have) look after itself.
🙂
192
tomomason.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
230
As usual, twotter?
164
Alicia.
The usual from you, definitely.
04
Not only that Harry, but you have no idea what you are talking about.
I suggest you would have more impact if you came back with proof that CO2 causes warming. It is “settled science” so it must be easy to find.
232
What about wood-fired power stations Harry – can you please demonstrate the CO2 ‘balance sheet’ and time scale for this – including processing and transport of wood pellets too, as I know you like accuracy.
In other words, can you tell us all how many years it will take for plantation timber (assuming that’s what they will use eventually) CO2 uptake to be equal to the CO2 emissions from said wood-fired power station (plus wood pellet processing)? I’ll even let you assume that power output and efficiency will stay constant.
181
James Murphy.
I never mentioned wood-fired power stations – is that a good idea to reduce CO2 emissions?
If you want to do your own calcs, there is probably plenty of facts and figures on the internet.
223
Your whole premise that we NEED to reduce CO2 emissions is just flat out wrong!
342
Harry,
I have to admit, you’re an expert at avoiding direct answers to direct questions.
You are the one who said “…pretty much everything is on the table at this point…” in post 4.2.1. Wood pellets are considered to be part of ‘pretty much everything’, aren’t they? Surely you must have an opinion on such fuel? You can’t possibly pretend you haven’t heard of this activity before.
Why should I do the calculations? – You’re the one telling us how we should cut back on CO2 emissions, so you must have a few answers as to how we can reasonably expect to do so – perhaps including the CO2 balance involved in burning wood pellets instead of coal.
If that one is a bit tough for you, maybe you’d prefer a simpler question – if I was to assume that someone wanted to manufacture and install a wind turbine in South Australia. Ignoring the financial aspect, how much electricity would be needed, and how much CO2 would that process generate, given that SA produces roughly 20% (being generous perhaps) of electricity from renewables?
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James, you forgot to make sure that Harry includes the loss of CO2 sinking capacity by clearing 5000 square km of coastal land, and the cost of the maintenance, including the trucks and line inspection helicopters.
71
Nah, Bobl, that’s old hat.
UAV aeroplanes are increasingly being used for automated powerline inspections. GPS and computer vision guidance, a very high res “line camera”, huge onboard memory, and some heavy-duty post processing with image mosaic software will make a bird’s eye map of the powerline detailed enough to see rusty spots on the cable.
Cheap to operate, safer than choppers, and… dare I say… a very low carbon footprint.
Amazing what they can do these days.
The other day I even saw a quadcopter that was capable of traveling horizontally underwater, rising to the surface and then cleanly taking off out of the water and flying to land. The mind boggles at the possibilities.
Probably want to keep that one away from seaweed though.
30
Harry Twatter,
First sensible thing you’ve written:
“All the more reason we need to reduce the amount of CO2 we are producing by burning fossil fuels”
We certainly do need to reduce CO2 by burning fossil fuels.
Love your philosophy… your science, not so much.
143
Why not kill two birds with one stone. Use CO2 for fracking instead of water. Look here.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512656/skipping-the-water-in-fracking/
100
The majority of water (or gas) used to stimulate a well returns to surface during the ‘clean-up’ flow phase.
This is why there is (well, maybe not so much currently) a boom in the water treatment industry in the USA, as all that returned water had to be treated somehow, as it will contain organic compounds which render it unfit for stock/domestic use.
(There’s also a lot of money in pre-treatment of water for these jobs, filtering, and pretty much sterilising the water before injection into their reservoir(s), as bacteria have been shown to decrease productivity)
80
Who do they think will pay for this crazy caper?
120
You and me, of course.
Abe
90
You two are very generous, does this mean I do not need to pay anything?
131
Wishful thinking James…
40
Until the hand wringers manage to understand that old growth forests barely absorb CO2 compared to young & vigorously growing young woody plants that have to share space with the old ones I don’t even listen to them much.
70
On Channel 9 News NSW tonight how Mangroves are capturing CO2 and burying it at an unprecedented rate, in this “global warming” disaster.
120
There’s that word ‘unprecedented’ again. And ‘they’ve’ been measuring this particular variable for how long?
51
I didn’t catch the news item, but I can confirm from on-site measurement* next to the mangroves in front of my place, that there is a strong surge (+25 – 50ppm) when photosynthesis shuts down. On the other hand, mangroves trap sediment and vegetation-loaded run-off and tides, so they are also an area of very active fermentation. Nursery for juvenile fish, habitat for crustacians etc. Very much alive with popping, bubbling and stink.
I have thought that some of the surges in CO2 that I have detected during late summer afternoons were caused by the “carbon pipe” effect, eg the Coral Sea outgassing as it warmed. I have pointed out that there are no power stations off-shore here, but I might be wrong. There’s this massive mangrove digester firing off 🙂
* = using CM0039 1% datalogger. I also tried an AZ7755 hand-held, but it goes a bit berserk in this environment.
Measurements taken at 19°11’52.48″S, 146°41’46.88″E. Area is 1.5km x 1.25km (at greatest extent).
40
The Norwegians have been there and done that and nearly lost their T shirts in the process.
And they had the huge advantage of having depleted North Sea oil reservoirs complete with platform to shore piping to reverse the flow and sequester the CO2 in those former oil reservoirs.
If anybody was going to make CCS a financially viable operation then the Norwegians with all their oil drilling experience and technology and huge financial reserves built up from North Sea oil revenues were going to be the ones who made it all work on an industrial scale.
They failed not so much technologically although that was a major factor but the cost of industrial scale CCS was simply not sustainable by the Norwegian economy.
__________________________
Nature.com; 23 Sept 2013.
Norway ditches large-scale carbon-capture plan
Norway’s government is cutting off support for a facility that by 2020 was to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions at a commercial scale. After years of delays and mounting costs, the plan to capture 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from an oil refinery and gas power plant at Mongstad would be halted, said oil and energy minister Ola Borten Moe on 20 September.
The failure at Mongstad follows hard on the heels of a series of disasters for European efforts to launch large carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. While North American projects look set to switch on next year, Europe has failed to finance projects that were conceived at similar times in the early and mid-2000s – thanks to a mixture of political reluctance, the economic recession and its effect on carbon prices, and government bureaucracy (see ‘Europe’s untamed carbon’).
In Norway’s case, says the Bellona Foundation, an environmental non-governmental organization headquartered in Oslo, the Mongstad failure was “a reflection not of the technology involved, but rather the shoddy organization and perpetual equivocation on behalf of the Norwegian government.”
The latest decision followed a critical report on 17 September from the country’s Auditor General, which said that the government had overspent on the project and handled financial risks poorly. “The complexity of implementing CCS was underestimated in 2006,” it said. That was when Norway first embarked on efforts to support a large-scale CCS plant, by passing laws that new gas power plants would have to install CCS, and by setting up a state enterprise, Gassnova, to support research and demonstration projects in the area.
Since 2007, the government has spent 7.2 billion Kroner ($1.2 billion) on CCS research and projects at Kårstø and Mongstad, the report said. Some 3 billion Kroner ($500 million) was to have been invested just on planning full-scale CO2 capture at Mongstad, following the launch of a $1 billion technology centre last year.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg had earlier called the Mongstad facility, a joint effort between Norway’s government and the domestic energy firm Statoil, a ‘moon landing’ project, according to Bloomberg. But the moon landing proved too expensive.
“There was too much risk associated with the costs we had in front of us – and that we couldn’t complete the project in the timescale given,” says Håkon Smith-Isaksen, a spokesperson for Norway’s energy ministry. Stoltenberg had admitted over the past few years that the costs of carbon capture had “unfortunately become much higher”.
The decision came in the dying days of Stoltenberg’s coalition government, which has held power for the last seven years but lost elections on 10 September. On paper, all of Norway’s political parties are still signed up to a climate package that a CCS full-scale plant be built somewhere in the country by 2020, says Smith-Isaksen — although it’s likely that the Mongstad project would have missed its 2020 target in any case.
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Further reading from Germany’s “Der Speigel“; May 2012. which is prior to the my above post;
‘Norway’s Moon Landing’: Massive Carbon-Capture Facility Spawns Skepticism and Hope
The world’s largest facility for filtering carbon dioxide out of industrial emissions was inaugurated in Norway this week. While some see it as a godsend in efforts to reach environmental targets, others find the technology too dangerous and expensive.
&
The Process and the Costs
Amundsen is already focusing on the plant’s first test runs. “We can take readings at more than 100 locations,” he explains. Indeed, whether it has to do with measuring the gas’s composition, volume or conductivity, testing equipment monitors the complex cleaning procedure at every step along the way.
Two different processes are installed at the site in order to determine which is more effective in actual practice. Both processes employ a washing fluid, one containing ammonia and the other amines. While emissions bubble up the 60-meter (200-foot) tower using the amine process, they are forced through tiny holes in plates containing flowing washing fluid. The amines react with and absorb the carbon dioxide contained in the emissions. Then the mixture flows into another tower, where steam hisses through the liquid and removes the carbon dioxide so that it can be liquefied and moved into final storage.
“However,” Amundsen admits, “all of these processes consume a great deal of energy.”
Indeed, critics say this is the true Achilles’ heel of CCS technology, and even Amundsen has no illusions about it. “In a gas power plant, we lose about 8 percent efficiency,” he says, pursing his lips. “That would make the cost of electricity about 30 to 40 percent greater than it is now.”
Amundsen hopes his engineers will be able to bring down the energy consumption of the CO2-filtering technology even further. For example, power-plant engineers at the German engineering giant Siemens have developed a promising method using a new and supposedly more effective washing substance, which could soon be tested in a third facility at Mongstad.
This new method might enable the engineers to cut energy losses in half. “But, at some point,” Amundsen says, “we’ll inevitably run up against physical limitations.”
[ more ]
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Graphic on how the Norwegian CCS plant was supposed to work in both carbon capture and sequestration [ CCS ] and to enhance natural gas recovery from North Sea gas reservoirs.
70
I love the beautiful uniform horizontal rock strata.
It’s always like that, you know.
120
Yes, I know.
Like this:
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3486/3938699991_6953b4fa78_z.jpg
21
Gee, I think I just drove through some of that last week only the road was so narrow I had half the tread on the passenger side hanging off the cliff.
(My hands are still a bit cramped from the white knuckled driving.)
00
Gai
This brings to mind the Herb Miqnery cartoon of the eroded pickup in “Does mountain driving make you nervous?”
00
TRM
I get the impression that ROM knows something of diagrams like those.
It is amazing that diagrams of thermals for gliding always seem to show them uniform, circular and going straight up
21
Yeh! The amount of gas aka “air” in those thermals make the amount of gaseous CO2 they are trying to capture look like piddling in a lake.
Say a thermal is 300 metres across;
Thats an area of about 71,000 sq metres
Thermal height from Ground to inversion or cloud base ; say 2500 metres [ 8000 ft ]
Air weighs in at sea level and standard temperature and pressures at 1.1 kgs / cubic meter so say with the decreased density at altitude , about 1 kg / cu mtr
Weight of air in a typical Australian summer thermal , very, very roughly 1.75 million tonnes all moving upwards at anything from 2 metres / sec [ 400 FPM ] to 8 mtrs / sec [ 1600 FPM ]
And you have something like that every 2 or 3 or 4 kms as you can see when those cumulus clouds dot the sky. Each one of which was created by the water vapour in that thermal column condensing out when it runs into the colder levels of the atmosphere at height.
Similar in effect when you breathe out on a frosty morning and your breath turns into a thin fog from the water vapour in your breath condensing when it reaches the cold dry frosty outside air .
ALL clouds as in ALL clouds other than the 80 to 100 km high Arctic and Antarctic Noctilucent Clouds are formed by rising air.
Of course there are many, many other days where the air is dry enough so that no clouds or few clouds form on the top of thermal columns and we have clear air thermals.
Where air goes up, air also comes down but usually spread over a much wider area and therefore slower in descent than in a thermal column.
But if you run into a good patch of “sink” the altimeter unwinds like the backward running second hand of a clock which definitely gets ones attention as the ground starts to loom up.
A regular, nice round classical thermal column is like global warming, it exists in theory but most glider pilots have yet to find one as thermals are messy, shifting, changing, more often petulant than not and makes one wonder why the hell one ever took this frustrating sport up
A really rough thermal, one that jars your teeth literally like getting mixed up in a good willy, willy thats more like the inside of a concrete mixer as you try to climb away from a low level definitely shakes your confidence in your immortality.
Thats until you hit a beauty and get a lift like ride at 1200 feet or more a minute up to 10,000 feet and you are on your way with a smile on the face and the wind in your hair, thats figuratively speaking only in these days of fully enclosed cockpits.
61
ROM
An adequate description IME
01
Diagram is for indication only actual strata layers may vary!
or
like this.
31
One should counter CCS with “recycling”. Germany managed to fight WWII for months by manufacturing their own hydrocarbons. Use coal or nuclear (my favorite would be thorium) and just recycle. It’s all Green.
120
Just find something that eats CO2,you know,something like a plant ,it could be a big plant like a tree or something little like an algae,or maybe we could ignore it and we will never know that it is there,it’s not as though it does anything like change the weather.
200
Don’t expect the media to understand anything that they’re put in front of the gullibles. This earlier report from DW.de (Germany’s version of the BBC/ABC) has to have some figures taken with a mountain of salt, but was instructive in that it said:
IIRC, One test plant (I think this one) installed at a new coal-fired power station was only capturing and liquifying CO2 at a rate equivalent of a few tens of megawatts in electrical power generation; the power station being a hundred times larger. I understand that they released the CO2 into the atmosphere because there’s nowhere (else) to pump it.
70
Tony you say that co2 is formed when carbon from the coal combines with oxygen from the atmosphere [i didntknow that] .In the natural co2/oxygen cycle a lot of co2 is absorbed by plants then the oxygen is released back into the atmosphere, so isnt co2 capture and storage preventing oxygen from returning to the atmosphere thus depleting the atmosphere of the very air we breath and because co2 has two atoms of oxygen to just one of carbon then shouldnt we be calling these machines atmospheric oxygen capture and storage devices
71
doubtingdave,
(simplified muchly) the coal is pulverised (crushed) to the consistency of the finest of fine talcum powder. It is then injected under pressure into the furnace.
Air is also injected under pressure into the furnace.
All the burning of the coal is done inside the furnace, naturally, and that’s where the carbon content of the coal combines with the oxygen from the injected air.
Tony.
61
Thanks Tony , so the oxygen used is normally returned to the atmosphere when the power plant vents co2 back into the atmosphere to be absorbed by plants which then release the oxygen back to where it came from, but if you capture the co2 and pump it deep underground you are preventing the oxygen from returning to the atmosphere???. So if this technology is adopted world wide how much could atmospheric oxygen levels be depleted and could this cause a problem in the long term
92
Yes, that’s absolutely correct. I even sent a letter to the CCS research foundation stating that I can think of nothing more stupid that burying our atmospheric oxygen for a few millenia 2 for one with the horrid carbon.
I suggested instead that they remove the oxygen and just deposit the waste carbon in the covalent crystaline form on my front lawn and it’ll be sweet.
60
I want some of that carbon too!
http://moneycrux.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/diamfcts-001.jpg
30
The by products of burning hydro-carbons, with complete combustion, is mainly co2 and water vapor. Both are harmless to the environment. Carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms combine with two oxygen atoms each, if there are the proper amounts of fuel and air present. The breaking apart of the bonds holding the hydrogen atoms to the carbon atoms releases energy. Impurities such as sulfer may be present resulting in small amount of so2 and so forth.
51
I hope that didn’t come across as too basic or implying that one didn’t already know that. That was not the intention. It just came out that way and I don’t know if I can edit or not. Please forgive me.
Anyway, there is no sound reason for putting co2 released from burning hydro-carbons into the ground in stead of the air where natural prossesses take their courses, even though there is so much o2 in the air that it is probably insignificant if co2 is put into the ground.
41
The warmists would spend more and more,
To capture and lock in a store,
All the ‘carbon’ ‘pollution’,
As their hare-brained solution,
On advice from their guru Al Gore.
200
Ruairi – excellent as always. When can we expect to see a published collection?
30
In enhanced oil recovery the CO2 pumped down to force the oil to the surface of course comes back up. Storage = 0. Also increases H2S (deadly gas) often found in hydrocarbon formations to be forced to the surface. I was told the combination of gases causes a high quantity of carbonic acid in the oil requiring the use of high quality stainless steel thus multiplying the cost.
The kind and generous people (taxpayers) of Saskatchewan (one million total population) paid much of the cost of the 1.3 billion dollars. The Canadian government took credit for some grant money provided but Saskatchewan is the only province with a balanced budget and pays a higher per capita percentage of equalization payments. A Canadian thing.
Boundary Dam project costs were said to be off – set by the sale of CO2 to the oil companies. Rumored but disproven (unproven? ) was the CO2 was pushing H2S up to the surface through natural fissures and poisoning animals drinking from sloughs near the ironically named community of Goodwater.
51
Texas has been using CO2 since 1972 to enhance oil production in the Permian shale play. CO2 has been trapped in ginormus vaults running up the eastern side of the Rockies. It is profitable, but expensive. So, now the Texans want to capture man made CO2.It’s cheaper. The University of Texas, Permian Basin hosted the 20th, annual CO2 conference. Attending scientists share information to enable continuous improvement and cost reduction.
The following was extracted from Kinder Morgan, Inc’ web page.
“Kinder Morgan CO2 is the largest transporter of carbon dioxide in North America. We deliver approximately 1.3 billion cubic feet per day of CO2 through about 1,300 miles of pipelines for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects to recover crude oil from mature fields. We use a good portion of this CO2 in our own EOR projects and we sell CO2 to third-party customers.”
Regards,
40
I’m a Canadian geologist. The Saskatchewan Weyburn CCS project was NEVER a CCS project. It wass a tertiary oil recovery project. With an oil netback of up to $50/bbl, CO2 recovery makes big sense.
The diagram of stacked reservoirs is disingenuous. Mountain coal doesn’t lie above oil and gas (generally) and the saline reservoirs aren’t sealed if there are big faults. Flat coal may be co-located with oil and gas but most shallow deposits are gas.
CCS really needs pipeline to oil fields. The Sask oil uses CO2 from North Dakota on the USA. New oil pools don’t need the extra pressure. Old ones still have >50% oil left first attempts to recover oil. But C02 doesn’t work with all rock types, especially the highest porosity and permeability.
The claim of the Saskatchewan project as a CCS example is a PR stunt and understood here as such. CCS is not applicable usefully in most places and not locally applicable in almost all cases.
The cynic in me says the eco-green know this and uses the process as a tool to derail coal power. But the technical ignorance of the eco-green is so great and his religious belief in sciecce and technology so correspondingly naive that I hesitate.
The ignorant hopeful want to change the world back to a Rousseauian ideal while living in suburban homes in cold climate environments. They are fantasists without a clue
281
Well, yes, of course but that isn’t the point for a mass audience
The informed eco-greens (those genuinely cynical ones) have used this public ignorance to their benefit many times
Perhaps the most egregious, in Aus, is the ploy of diagramming simplified “strata” and contained aquifers to demonstrate the destructiveness of CSG, but without including the actual coal seams in the strata (99% of the public don’t notice this, and the publishing meeja don’t care). When the seams are added, it becomes obvious that the target seams are 200-250m below the significant aquifers so the risk is actually negligible with properly constructed wells
51
A well managed forest plantation will sequestrate around 5 tonnes of Carbon per ha. per annum by converting it into solid wood, or 5 x 44/12 tonnes = 18.3 tonnes of CO2. You could either burn it as woodchips, which is a vastly inferior fuel to coal, or use it for something more useful such as a log cabin or make a table or chair.
Apart from the fact that someone has yet to demonstrate to the world in general that CO2 will cause a disastrous rise in global temperature, since photosynthesis is a photochemical reaction, a rise in temperature also means more CO2 will be sequestrated.
I find the scientific illiteracy of the climate change pundits incredible, but let’s not get in the way of a money making exercise funded by the public at large.
110
Um try 500 Tonnes. A good mango plantation can produce 40 Tonnes of JUST fruit (dry weight) per ha, representing at least 60 tonnes of CO2 – just in the fruit that’s harvested.
50
I wish people would stop saying CO2 is hard to sequester. It’s not, it’s quite a reactive gas. Mother nature has been doing it for eons. For those in the US, look over at the Grand Canyon. The vertical rock faces are mostly limestone which means its sequestered CO2 that happens naturally in warm shallow seas with the help of a few organisms. (I think there are a few warm water islands where it deposits on its own without the help of living creatures.) These limestone formations extend several thousand square miles beneath the western US. (In fact limestone is 0.25% of the rocks in the earth’s crust.)
The odd thing about Calcium and Magnesium Carbonate is that they are less soluble in warm water than in cold. If Australia really wanted to do industrial scale CO2 sequestration (and honestly I thinks its unnecessary), they ought to go to where the warmest water, loaded with minerals is and give mother nature a hand with she’s perfected a long time ago. Remember, mother nature already reabsorbs more than 98% of all the CO2 emissions (manmade and natural) and half the anthropogenic CO2.
70
I really would pump CO2 in sea where possible. It is safer there than in the atmosphere, and it will in any case eventually end up there.
51
You can’t just dump it into the ocean anywhere. Calcium carbonate will re-dissolve where the water is cold. That’s why warm shallow seas are the key. It precipitates out and collects on the bottom as long as the temperature is high enough. Given Australia’s closeness to the equator at the western side of the Pacific where a great deal of warm water collects, it could be an ideal spot for this type of process.
20
What’s the harm of it dissolves? CO2 will dissolve in the sea eventually from atmosphere as well.
Cold water takes more co2 than warm. So its easy to dump it in cold water. F…. This automatic spell checker phone. Fixes every second Word wrong.
00
Sean, it’s really a bit of an oxymoron, people are going to save reefs, including the Aust. Barrier Reef, by reducing man-made CO2 whereas in fact you need it to grow more coral. Perhaps there should be a campaign to eat more lobster, prawn and oysters to save the planet; I would vote for that.
40
I have to say that when my tiny engineering mind applied the First Law of You Can’t Get Something for Nothing it did come to the conclusion that if you converted coal into energy and CO2 then if you wanted to put the CO2 back you would also probably have to put the energy back as well!
180
More. Entropy lures. 😉
20
As a mechanical engineer with a strong bias in chemistry I have always considered carbon capture as a joke played upon the scientifically-challenged and the ignorant masses that would readily believe in flying pigs and carbon capture even if they read it in the ‘Aliens are Coming’ weekly magazine for idiots.
More than that, trying to pump this CO2 gas into the earth’s crevices is madness. Even if achievable (it isn’t), one fine day the planet would decide to produce a ‘big fart’ out of that unnaturally locked gas, making it escape back to the surface with the risk of suffocating people.
It happened in Cameroon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos
” Lake Nyos suddenly emitted a large cloud of CO2, which suffocated 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock in nearby towns and villages. Though not completely unprecedented, it was the first known large-scale asphyxiation caused by a natural event.”
120
Thank you Albert; now could you tell us how you really feel about CCS.
20
Tony,
Don’t forget the hidden part of the story. CCS implies that, were it to be adopted, fossil fuels would be consumed at approaching twice the rate for a specific usable energy output, hence robbing future generations. I enjoy watching the faces of proponents of the technology when this “dilemma” is posited.
I personally consider CCS to be immoral and repugnant. Those supporting it are worse than those that voted to abolish DDT.
150
The abolishment of DDT has actually caused the death of millions. CCS is just a proposed way of doing the same thing but more indirectly …
10
CCS sounds like another money wasting green idea to try and fool nature, I bet if this did go ahead and people started getting carbonated water from their taps CCS would be labeled a scheme by Big Soda.
70
CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE (CCS)
Analysis of Incentives and Rules in a European Repeated Game Situation – From Electricity Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge.
A study for DECC, UK Government 1 June 2009, before the recent UK government change of mind over subsidizing the (un)rewables to the detriment of the public good.
21
Amazing!! Even Greenpeace don’t like CCS:
As per the Ecologist: http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2884701/false_promise_of_carbon_capture_exposed.html
[Edited to correct unfortunate spelling error -Fly]
10
It’s not clear that Greenpeace understood the situation; that a coal power station will need to use 40% more coal to produce exactly the same amount of power. Or whether they are thinking that the power station will be getting paid to CCS.
00
Yes. With CCS you get 60% of nominal power as electricity and the rest (40%) goes into CCS. So to get the same amount of power you have to burn 1.66 times as much coal with a commensurate increase in CO2 leaving you not much better off than if you vented the stuff into the air…
00
The ideologically driven Green extravaganza may well be seen in the clear light of reality, as the unaffordable nightmare it is.
20
“Western banks say they are coming under heavy pressure from Chinese officials to refrain from negative comments. They are effectively gagged if they wish to do business in China.”
What a strange twist of words. Who would want to do business with a bank that slagged off at them whilst doing business with them? Who would think that is acceptable?
10
Ahoy Tony
Even the NSW Mines department has its CCS fans.
A while back the department engaged in a 2 hole drilling program ( complete with all the Oil/Gas bells & whistles) to :-
• Investigate the potential for Gas
• To look for Hot Rock Granites
• To look for potential CO2 storage reservoirs.
They drilled one hole near Wilcannia & another near Louth.
http://www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov.au/energy-consumers/energy-sources/coal-innovation-nsw/research-projects/darling-basin-drilling-program
Trying to “multipurpose” such a drilling program appeared to many to be an expensive farce.
You have to wonder what the motivation really was. The Cobar Shire had a public presentation by the department to inform the shire on the work.
I understand the question was put :-
“How do you propose to get the CO2 out here if you do find a suitable reservoir site?”
I believe the response was something to the effect that they had already instigated discussions on an easement.
Now considering that AGL owns Bayswater & I believe a significant share in APA Group; a cynic would have to ask some WOTIFs about the age, carrying capacity & serviceability of both the existing pipeline & the coal fired boilers at Bayswater & WHERE the munificent taxpayer might fit into any scheme which would either see the gas conversion of a major power plant or a deal over reticulation infrastructure. The existing pipeline is pretty old.
http://www.agl.com.au/about-agl/how-we-source-energy/thermal-energy/agl-macquarie
http://www.apa.com.au/our-business/energy-infrastructure/new-south-wales.aspx
20
Going OT but this is big news
Pachauri ceases to be Teri chief
http://wap.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/pachauri-accused-of-sexual-harassment-sacked-as-teri-chief-115072301020_1.html
Nitin Sethi | New Delhi Jul 24, 2015 12:40 AM IST
Accused of sexual harassment of a colleague, R K Pachauri ceased to be chief of The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), within days of resuming work after a court order had allowed him to physically attend the organisation’s offices. The environmental group’s governing council, meeting in Bengaluru on Thursday, announced that Pachauri would be replaced by Ajay Mathur, who is at present the director-general of the Bureau of Energy Efficiency under the power ministry.
Pachauri, who had proceeded on leave when the news of complaint broke out, in a sudden turn of events, took back charge again at the helm of Teri on July 17. But on Thursday, the governing council of Teri, which includes prominent names such as Naina Lal Kidwai, Kiran-Mazumdar Shaw and Deepak Parekh, met at Bengaluru to conclude that Mathur would replace Pachauri.
Business Standard also reviewed letters written by senior lawyer Vrinda Grover to the Delhi Police commissioner, pointing out that two former employees of Teri, too, wanted to give written complaints of sexual harassment against Pachauri but the police had for months not recorded their statements. She noted that she had repeatedly requested the Delhi Police over months to record their statements in confidentiality but the police had not acted upon the pleas of the two complainants. The letters date to March and April of this year…
60
No doubt the CFMEU will muscle in (or more likely, be rewarded) with these megalomaniac “environmental” projects.
20
CCS reminds me of the massive multi billion $ oil cleanup after the Exxon Valdez disaster. It took years. What is notable is that beaches which were equally polluted and not touched cleaned up just as fast with no cost or effort. Oil you see is natural, edible, degradable, dispersable naturally. So is CO2.
Of course this CCS exercise is in total denial of the half life of CO2 in the atmosphere, established conclusively and simply at 14 years. (The IPCC say 80 years, but as Mandy Rice Davies said, they would, wouldn’t they.)
So half of the CO2 output worldwide in 2001 is gone. 97% of CO2 output in 1950 is gone. The idea that you can accumulate any gas on one side of a huge body of water is nuts, a contradiction of known physical chemistry. (Chemist Will Steffen could agree) The atmosphere is 1/400th of the size of the ocean and 98% of all CO2 is already in there, compressed to liquid at depth. (According to the IPCC, this is irrelevant)
There were attempts to pump CO2 to depth. They failed as the liquid turned to solid and blocked the pipes, but you have to think we are paying a fortune trying to do what happens naturally anyway. Man does not control the atmosphere. It is estimated 50% of all the oxygen comes from phytoplankton on the world’s oceans, the lungs of the planet. That in turn comes from.. CO2.
How much more money and time is going to be spent because the Green politicians are utterly science ignorant. They are the reincarnation of druid high priests running the Church of CO2. There is no such thing as ‘The Science’.
100
To make a further point, half of all CO2 in the atmosphere in 2001 is gone. That is CO2 from all time, not just that output in 2001.
80
Unfortunately, a lot of the “scientists” are ignorant of the science as well.
80
That’s just it. The true science doesn’t matter because it’s the most powerful thing the elite left power brokers have to push their political agenda of transforming (destroying) the world’s economy. They will not give that up that leverage right, wrong, or in between. Especially with so many science illiterates out there. With zealots the ends always justify the means. Isn’t that what Christy what’s her name with the UN so much has said it is what it is all about?
50
Christiana Figueres, a disciple of Al Gore, was appointed as Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Jan. 2015 she said;
United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model.
That should give anyone with two braincells nightmares. Bureaucrats ALWAYS screw-up an economy royally when they try to ‘manage it’ and now the most corrupt, inept and egotistical bunch (the UN) want to try their hand at reworking the economic model of the entire world!
60
Doesn’t the Government listen to ANY competent science or technical authority?
70
No, it is like a corrupt king that picks and chooses his own high priests that will always tell him what he wants to hear.
60
I’ve read of accounts of war generals who did similar things, to their folly.
20
Dave M
You wouldn’t want any of that peeing on your latest “Government Enthusiasm”!
20
Judith Curry has been invited to testify before the US Congress. But one never sees the substance of her very competent testimony presented in the main stream media. It is like it never happened.
30
The majority of climate scientists got it wrong. The CO2 level has been higher than now for most of the Phanerozoic eon (the last 542 million years). If CO2 was a forcing on temperature (which it is not, in spite of it absorbing some of the 15 micron radiation from the terrestrial radiation spectrum, which is mostly spread over 6-100 microns) there would be no life as we know it on this planet. This deduction employs existing data and the computational mandate that temperature change is in response to the time-integral of the net forcing; not proportionately to the instantaneous value of the net forcing itself.
60
I’m not sure if it was a majority.
Originally there were very few people who could call themselves a “Climate Scientist”. It’s become a fashionable name in recent times, but very few people who call themselves thus, are in fact, thus.
In the early days there were a few people, who could loosely called scientists, who had a particularly nasty leader. Together they created reports and news bites; they bullied other scientists studying various fields who came to different conclusions to themselves.
Eventually, and somehow, their central idea has gained legs. And the more people, who see advantage in it, have taken advantage of it. Therefor the whole thing has taken on a life of its own.
It didn’t need a majority of scientists to be wrong, just a vocal few.
30
The oceans have been remarkable stores of CO2, just look at the White cliffs of Dover. Momma earth also stores it {CO2] for us in wood, oil, gas, coal.
CO2 and nature – no tricks.
40
The real driver for this nonsense is a Marxist agenda as this alarmingly frank and disturbing 2010 statement from IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer testifies:
Just when we thought Marxism was dead, it re-emerges in the form of “Climate Change”.
But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy….One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
See original German at http://www.nzz.ch/klimapolitik-verteilt-das-weltvermoegen-neu-1.8373227 and translation at http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/uploads/media/IPCC_Edenhofer__Climate_Policy_Is_Redistributing_The_World__s_Wealth_.pdf
In his Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottmar_Edenhofer he admits he was influenced by Karl Marx, among others.
[Since you quote someone and it applies to climate change I will let this out of moderation.] AZ
60
In my comment above which cannot be edited I meant to put the line “Just when we thought Marxism was dead, it re-emerges in the form of “Climate Change”.” as the last one. It is my comment, obviously not part of the quote (which is in italics).
30
The comment to which I refer is not visible now because it is “awaiting moderation”. Not sure why…
20
Here I come in late again, but here goes
When I look at the graphic at the top what I seem to be looking at is very similar to a fracking plant working in the opposite way. I wonder why one is going to be so good for the environment and the other such a terrible risky business. I would have thought that removing gas from the ground was better environmentally and less risky than putting gas in. The act of the liquid CO2 turning into gas under pressure will cause all manner of potential problems – I would imagine much worse than fracking would.
40
I don’t think liquid CO2 will turn to gaseous CO2 under pressure. Not unless someone has changed the laws of chemistry since I went to school.
00
Grant co2 must be under permanent pressure – to stay liquid – that cannot be done deep in the ground – from liquid co2 turns directly into ice crystals and then slowly warms up to below -78.5 and disperses as gas. Carbon sequestration is same as: when you fart on the bottom of the swimming pool -> it makes ”U” turn and comes to the surface, as compacted gas, with revenge!
00
great post, TonyfromOz. comments are mostlly informative as well:
27 July: UK Register: Lewis Page: Hurrah! Windfarms produce whopping ONE PER CENT of EU energy
Solar’s even worse. No matter how you slice it, it ain’t working
We here on the Reg energy desk only noticed this particularly this week because of a chirpy press release that flitted past us just the other day, claiming that “wind energy provides 8 per cent of Europe’s electricity.”
Hey, we thought, that sounds almost like it’s getting somewhere! So we looked into it. The eight per cent figure comes from the latest Wind Status Report (pdf) from the EU Joint Research Centre, and sure enough, it’s claimed therein that all those massive wind farms produced no less than 238 terawatt-hours of the 2,942 TWh of ‘leccy used in the EU nations last year.
That’s eight per cent, right enough – and that’d be a noticeable bite out of EU carbon emissions, maybe even one worth tying an energy-prices ball and chain round the ankles of the European economies.
Except it isn’t, of course. Like most developed economies, the EU nations use the great bulk of their energy in non-electric forms: we burn fuels to run transport, to provide heating and cooking and hot water, to power most of our industry. And this accounts for most of our energy use and carbon emissions.
By the most recent figures available, in fact, the EU is using around 1,666 million-tonnes-of-oil-equivalent of energy from all sources every year: that’s 20,710 TWh. Wind electricity makes up just over one measly percentage point of that. Solar? About half that again, for a total renewable-‘leccy contribution of around 1.5 per cent and a roughly corresponding CO2 reduction.
The large majority of the “renewable energy” figure claimed by the EU is produced by optimistic accounting on biomass and renewable-waste, much of which is dubiously renewable at best. Even the proper renewable ‘leccy figures are not to be relied on, particularly in southern Italy where the Mafia is well known to be heavily involved in the industry.
Actual renewables, despite their horrific expense, are not even scratching the surface of real-world modern civilisation’s energy requirements…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/27/colossal_expensive_windfarms_produce_whopping_one_percent_of_eu_energy/
40
I first mentioned CCS at my home site way back in 2008, (at this link) when I first started there, in my original Kyoto Series. While I was just starting out, I was a little tentative on the processes and the numbers because it all seemed so huge. That Company also included a (simplistic) diagram as well.
At that link, I mentioned an Australian outfit who was doing work on CCS, CO2CRC.
I like to go back and check these things over time to see if there has been any advances.
I noticed that there was a currently dated link to an article on CCS, dated 05Mar2015, only a few weeks back now.
(Firstly here, keep in mind from my original Post at the top on how from one large plant, they need to sequester around 16 MILLION tons of CO2 a year)
Now read the article at the link and note how they are going ahead in leaps and bounds. (Aww! C’mon Tony, I told you before about this sarc business)
From the link: (my bolding here)
The article then goes on to say: (again, my bolding here)
Significant!!!
Hallelujah brothers, the battle is won!
Give me strength!
Tony.
111
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Ferguson
Odds on that being the same person, funny how Labor stooges end up being the top of a dodgey operation. Not that much can be said for the other (was going to say side) slightly different team.
10
***a “masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications” or simply wrong?
27 July: WaPo: Chris Mooney: Climate change skeptics may be about to lose one of their favorite arguments
There’s no doubt that growing Antarctic sea ice is a mystery in the climate system — and an anomalous, seemingly contrary indicator. However, if a controversial and much-discussed new paper from ***famed former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 colleagues is correct, then actually it could be a troubling climate warning sign. (Indeed, other scientists have reached similar conclusions.)
According to Hansen’s thinking, expanding Antarctic sea ice is precisely what you would expect to see if the Antarctic continent itself is losing a lot of ice mass from its vast ice sheet, adding to sea level rise…
Reached by phone, Hansen added that one reason he thinks the model he is using is is right — and other models are not — is that it captures Antarctic sea ice expansion. “All the other models have sea ice disappearing as the planet get warmer,” he says. He also thinks the Antarctic ice expansion trend will continue, along with ice sheet melt.
“It will be clearer, give us a few more years,” he says…
Granted, the new Hansen study is simultaneously advancing a gigantic new synthesis of existing research and also pushing the envelope — it will need to be scientifically digested for some time, and has already drawn some critical comments from experts. However, the Hansen paper also just received its first official peer review by one of several reviewers designated by the journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions – the University of Chicago geoscientist David Archer. And it is a strong review – Archer says that the paper is a ***“masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications.”…
Overall, it’s not clear that scientists yet fully understand what’s going on in this extremely remote part of the climate system.
Nonetheless, this serves to point out the danger of seizing on a mysterious anomaly in the climate system — like expanding Antarctic sea ice — and interpreting it ***to score political points. For what may seem like good news for the climate — and bad news for climate “alarmists,” as skeptics put it — could be the utter opposite.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/07/27/climate-change-skeptics-may-be-about-to-lose-one-of-their-favorite-arguments/
22
It’s just more worthless Hansen modeled unreality. Remember this is the guy that said New York would be under a few feet of water by now because of rising sea levels, Arctic ice would disappear by year 2000, and that the tropic hot spot would appear and spell death for all humanity. He’s made Youtube videos, and made a fortune getting on the lecture circuit doom-laden scenarios that spell mankind’s end, at a few hundred $thousand per show.
10
26 July: Time: Helen Regan: Hillary Clinton Pledges to Install 500 Million Solar Panels if Voted President
VIDEO AD: STAND FOR REALITY – HILLARY CLINTON
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Sunday made tackling climate change one of her key goals were she to enter the White House, pledging to have more than half a billion solar panels installed nationwide by the end of her first term in office.
Clinton also called for a major increase in other renewable-energy sources, saying she ***wants every U.S. home to be powered by clean energy within a decade, reports Reuters.
“I want more wind, more solar, more advanced biofuels, more energy efficiency,” she said at a weekend rally in Iowa. “And I’ve got to tell you, people who argue against this are just not paying attention.”
The two goals were unveiled in a video posted to Clinton’s campaign website Sunday, and are part of a comprehensive agenda on climate change that will be laid out over the next few months.
“We are on the cusp of a new era,” she said in the campaign video. “We can have more choice in the energy we consume and produce.”…
According to the former Secretary of State’s campaign, her climate-change agenda will increase ***output of solar energy by 700% by the end of the decade.
http://time.com/3972710/hillary-clinton-presidential-election-climate-change/
***”goals would lead to a 700 percent increase in the nation’s installed solar capacity from current levels, and eventually could lead to the generation of at least one third of all electricity from renewable sources” – not quite what Time reported, is it?
26 July: Reuters: Alana Wise: Hillary Clinton sets renewable energy goals to spur more wind, solar power
(Writing by John Whitesides; Additional reporting by Kay Henderson; Editing by Eric Walsh and Cynthia Osterman)
Her campaign said the goals would lead to a 700 percent increase in the nation’s installed solar capacity from current levels, and ***eventually could lead to the generation of at least one third of all electricity from renewable sources…
She criticized Republicans who are reluctant to say climate change is a man-made phenomenon.
“They will answer any question about climate change by saying: ‘I’m not a scientist.’ Well, I’m not a scientist either. I’m just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain and I know we’re facing a huge problem,” Clinton said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/27/us-usa-election-clinton-energy-idUSKCN0Q00X920150727
never forget the grandchildren. only CAGW believers care.
11
28 July: UK Daily Mail: David Martosko: EXCLUSIVE: Video shows Hillary Clinton boarding private jet just hours after launching global-warming push – and she’s using a FRENCH aircraft that burns 347 gallons of fuel every hour!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3176630/Video-shows-Hillary-Clinton-boarding-private-jet-just-hours-launching-global-warming-push-s-using-FRENCH-aircraft-burns-347-gallons-fuel-hour.html
btw can’t find anyone reporting on how Al Gore got to Australia!
31
Solar single-seat aircraft?
I forgot, that suffered major battery burnout.
30
Not sure how he got here this time, the press is remarkably silent about that. But here is a video of just one instance of his private jet use in the US. https://youtu.be/kEFMfl4_WHs
20
He arrived on one of Hilary’s bicycles.
Off topic: The Sydney Morning Hamas has an article today about the cold spell.
Their enviro journo tells us that the cold spell is a weather phenomenon.
However, when we have a hot day, it is NOT due to the weather – it is due to climate change.
20
Prime Minister Tony Abbott calls ETS an Electricity Tax Scam. He is right.
70
read all…time will tell:
28 July: Guardian: John Vidal: Arctic sea ice expert complains to press watchdog over Times story
Cambridge professor Peter Wadhams says he was misquoted in a story about the deaths of three leading British scientists in 2013
Professor Peter Wadhams, Cambridge professor of ocean physics, has complained to the Independent Press Standards Organissation (Ipso) that his scientific reputation had been damaged by Times environment editor Ben Webster and that he had been inaccurately quoted.
The Times (LINK) said it had a recording of Wadhams’ comments and stood by the story…
A spokesperson for The Times said: “We have a recording of Professor Wadhams making these statements. Another newspaper [the Telegraph] subsequently reported that he had made similar comments to their journalist. We stand by the story.” …
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/27/arctic-sea-ice-expert-complains-to-press-watchdog-over-times-story
31
Professor Peter Wadhams … inacurately quoted by the media?
Perhaps this makes up for all the times his nonsense “science” re Artcic ice has been acurately quoted by the media as fact.
What goes around comes around – you train the media to parrot whatever you say without questioning it – someday they are going to be burned by it.
30
why only report The Times? UK Independent only posted this piece 9 hours ago, quoting Wadhams from the Tele:
27 July: UK Independent: Alexandra Sims: Cambridge professor claims three leading climate scientists may have been assassinated
Despite reporting the alleged assassination attempt against his life to the police, Professor Wadhams told The Telegraph that he had not announced his theories over the three deaths for fear that he may be seen as a “looney”.
He told the newspaper: “It’s just a very odd coincidence that something like that should happen in such a brief period of time.”
“They [the deaths] were accidents as far as anybody was able to tell but the fact they were clustered like that looked so weird.”
“I thought if it was somebody assassinating them could it be one of our people doing it and that would be even more frightening. I thought it would be better not to touch this with a barge pole.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cambridge-professor-claims-three-leading-climate-scientists-may-have-been-assassinated-10419159.html
21
So the idea is to inject the CO2 into a large, fancy, layer cake?
20
ABC Breakfast today:
Fran to Fairfax’s Coorey: PM says Labor’s renewable energy charge would be a massive hit on consumers and jobs, $60bn or more. turns out that figure comes from modelling showing price of 50% renewables would be $65bn; 11,000 additional wind turbines would be needed … that would be the cost of that …but that would be the capital cost, certainly not a cost to consumers haha(???)
Labor knows renewable energy is popular with the community blah blah…they haven’t done their modelling yet, but Turnbull really brought us back to reality yesterday, saying all low emission policies have a cost to tax payers, including direct action which has a direct cost to taxpayers…
AUDIO: 28 July: ABC Breakfast: Politics with Phil Coorey
The Australian Financial Review ‘s Phil Coorey joins RN Breakfast to discuss the latest developments in federal politics.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/politics-with-phil-coorey/6652752
the contrast between an animated, friendly Fran talking to Coorey and the dull, uninterested monotone of Fran talking to Christopher Pyne later in the program (halfway through, she gives a station call & says our guest is Christopher Pyne, “a” Liberal Minister), is striking.
31
“Benefits of CCS perhaps ?- radioactive Argon “
Storing large quantities of CO2 produces low radioactive Argon(39Ar), due to Neutrino interactions.
This is already done commercially to some extent, as it is used in research into dark matter, welding, and is also used by athletes as a doping agent.
Unfortunately it also is very dense and it will asphyxiate anyone coming into contact with it, a bit like CO2.
Argon in the Earth’s atmosphere constitutes 0.93% (9,300 ppm), but has not been singled out as a pollutant by the CAGWers !
10
“Billions of investment dollars hinge upon it” and I assume those $Billions will come from taxpayers in a few ways. Governments subsidising these plants and the cost of electricity sky rocketing. This high electricity cost flows through entire economies adding significant costs to everything purchased along the way. Costs which cascade throughout the entire economy touching everything in it multiple times over.
30
This whole business is so frustrating! People on this blog know the truth. E.g. there is NO AGW. CO2 NOT a greenhouse gas etc.. How can we make the sheeple understand?
40
All it would take is a special Greens Party sponsored Carbon Free Day, a day when no CO2 was emitted from any power plant in Australia. Just turn them all off for one day.
One day would be all it would take.
Then this whole thing would just go away.
Seriously. ONE DAY.
You could even make it a non working day Sunday, the day of least power consumption.
The cost would be huge, but that’s all it would take.
It would work World wide, as soon as they saw what happened.
The other benefit would be that it would also kill off the Greens Party as well.
It’ll never happen, but the thought is nice.
Tony.
60
One day!
Who am I kidding?
It wouldn’t even last an hour at the absolute most. Panicked Government Ministers would be reaching for their mobile phones so fast to order the plants to come back on line. (and then looking at their phones wondering why they weren’t working)
Tony.
60
Tony this actually just happened in Clunes (36km North of Ballarat) with power off from 9am to 3pm Tuesday the place was described as a ghost town without power and this is only 631 customers!, you are bang on with the impact of such an experience for the population, unfortunately this may have to occur to slap many out of the unachievable green dream.
30
Tony I thought this might interest you also Windfarms produce a whopping 1% of EU energy, just in case you haven’t seen it but I know you don’t need convincing. 🙂
10
First order of business to make people understand is to perform a complete revamp of our schools, in particular the public ones. The pupils today are being taught so much rubbish, propaganda and lies, not just about climate change but in so many other areas of science.
30
I am not a scientist, however this is interesting i came across this in 2004.
The feasibility of an alternative CO2 mitigation system and a methanol production process is investigated. The Carnol system has three components: (i) a coal-fired power plant supplying flue gas CO2, (ii) a process which converts the CO2 in the presence of He from natural gas to methanol, (iii) use of methanol as a fuel component in the automotive sector. For the methanol production process alone, up to 100% CO2 emission reduction can be achieved; for the entire system, up to 65% CO2 emission reduction can be obtained. The Carnol system is technically feasible and economically competitive with alternative CO2-disposal systems for coal-fired power plants. The Carnol process is estimated to be economically attractive compared to the current market price of methanol, especially if credit can be taken for carbon as a marketable coproduct.
11
Col:
this has been around for many years. It is based on the old town gas process, which took carbon (coke) and water vapour and produced hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This could then be converted to methanol. To do so it was necessary to supply energy (heat) i.e. carbon + oxygen giving carbon dioxide.
If you burn coal to CO2 you get energy, about 44% maximum efficiency. To extract the CO2 you need energy (see above). To generate H2 from natural gas requires more energy. To react the CO2 + H2 to methanol requires more energy, in fact this step on its own will take more energy than you get from that coal fired power station.
So you wind up with 3 or 4 coal fired power stations and a system that can handle the effluent CO2 from only one of them. No way is it economically competitive, but it will get rid of subsidies very quickly and efficiently.
50
The US Navy is working on a system to extract CO2 and hydrogen from sea water using their big nuclear powered aircraft carriers reactors as the power source and then using catalysts to convert the products of the various reactions to Jet aviation fuel.
The cost per gallon of jet fuel synthesised by this method is claimed to be about the same cost as the purchasing and transporting of JP5 jet fuel and no doubt in the future , ship fuel for the smaller vessels around the world in Navy Tankers to keep their jets and smaller ships operating, about $4 to $6 US / gal.
The US Navy believes it will have this system operational by about 2020.
Synthesising their own jet fuel on board of the carriers would remove one of the big vulnerabilities that carrier aircraft suffer from, fuel has to come a very long way in highly vulnerable tankers across the open oceans to keep those carrier based jet aircraft flying.
——————————–
Fueling the Fleet, Navy Looks to the Seas
[ quoted ]
.
Refueling U.S. Navy vessels, at sea and underway, is a costly endeavor in terms of logistics, time, fiscal constraints and threats to national security and sailors at sea.
In Fiscal Year 2011, the U.S. Navy Military Sea Lift Command, the primary supplier of fuel and oil to the U.S. Navy fleet, delivered nearly 600 million gallons of fuel to Navy vessels underway, operating 15 fleet replenishment oilers around the globe.
Refueling Navy vessels at sea can prove in many ways to be a costly endeavor.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is developing the chemistry for producing jet fuel from renewable resources in theater.
The process envisioned would catalytically convert CO2 and H2 directly to liquid hydrocarbon fuel used as JP-5.
From Seawater to CO2
Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory are developing a process to extract carbon dioxide (CO2) and produce hydrogen gas (H2) from seawater, subsequently catalytically converting the CO2 and H2 into jet fuel by a gas-to-liquids process.
“The potential payoff is the ability to produce JP-5 fuel stock at sea reducing the logistics tail on fuel delivery with no environmental burden and increasing the Navy’s energy security and independence,” says research chemist, Dr. Heather Willauer.
NRL has successfully developed and demonstrated technologies for the recovery of CO2 and the production of H2 from seawater using an electrochemical acidification cell, and the conversion of CO2 and H2 to hydrocarbons (organic compounds consisting of hydrogen and carbon) that can be used to produce jet fuel.
“The reduction and hydrogenation of CO2 to form hydrocarbons is accomplished using a catalyst that is similar to those used for Fischer-Tropsch reduction and hydrogenation of carbon monoxide,” adds Willauer.
“By modifying the surface composition of iron catalysts in fixed-bed reactors, NRL has successfully improved CO2 conversion efficiencies up to 60 percent.”
[ more ]
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Cont. I think global warming is hugely overate to almost down right fraud, however the carnol process can make a transportation fuel using byproducts well that’s fine by me. We must be efficient in what we (humans) do.
01
“… in the presence of He from natural gas …”
I’d believe ‘H’ but not ‘He’.
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the majority of today’s helium supplies come from processing of natural gas.
00
This comment is in “Moderation”????
[Some days the filter just acts up. I can’t explain it either.] ED
00
As everyone is aware, The Goracle is spreading part of his giant carbon(sic) footprint on Australia as we read this.
Al likes to cite California as a role model.
~ ~ ~
VERMONT STRUGGLES WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY: (realclearenergy.org)
“Vermont is finding — like California and Germany before it — that the fastest way to a clean energy future is to close down local sources of power and import it from other regions.
California gets more than half its energy from neighboring Arizona, Nevada and Washington State, the largest import energy bill in the nation.
Both New York and New England are looking to Quebec hydro for future clean power.”
Burlington claims to be the first city in the country to have achieved 100 percent renewable status, although these claims are open to debate
The city’s main source of electricity is the Joseph C. McNeil Generating Station, which was recently converted from coal to wood.
This is considered renewable in that trees regrow, although the amount of carbon thrown into the atmosphere has been shown to exceed that of coal.
~ ~ ~
STANDING UP FOR SCIENCE: America’s Air Conditioning Habit Is Eco-Friendly. (bloombergview.com)
Americans still expend much more energy heating their homes than cooling them.
On average, the move from cold areas to warm ones has actually saved energy, not caused us to use more.
Unlike a cold winter with no heat, a hot summer with no cooling won’t definitely kill you.
50
Cutting down forests to burn the wood in power stations shows you just how insane this whole thing has become.
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Europe and the east coast of the USA were denuded of their trees. That is why there was a switch to coal in the first place!
If you walk through a New England woods you will find stone walls all over the place from the time when the area was mainly fields.
Biomass fuel is completely idiotic but I am sure someone is making lots of money off the gullible.
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I wouldn’t worry too much about any power station starting to “bury” the CO2. They will be the first to go broke soon as the economies of the world continue to deteriorate. I can see GFC Mark 2 very soon now.
40
When you consider the thousands of billions spent trying to solve a non problem while so many serious human problems go wanting, you understand why Bill Gates and Warren Buffet do not want to donate to bodies like the UN or the Greens?
Private donors want real solutions to real problems, not retired UN politicians in expensive apartments in New York and driven around in limousines and flying on diplomatic passports on tours of inspection of trouble spots like the Australia’s Great Barrier Reef resorts. History will judge the carbonbaggers harshly, but they do not care that it is all nonsense. It’s safer than Iraq.
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Well done Tony. you are one of the best!. Personally the idea of burying plant food always seemed counterintuitive to me. We’ll have to dig it up one day. Ah well, it’s only faceless taxpayer dollars innit?
50
Kudos to TonyfromOz and kudos to Primo Levi
for his essay on Carbon in ‘The periodic Table.’
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2006/10/13/primo-levi-on-carbon/
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List of 1350 scientific papers supporting AGW Skeptic arguments. http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
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Retro video promo from 1978, Leonard Nimoy narrating. Cool!
Watch “The Coming Ice Age – 1978” on YouTube
https://youtu.be/1kGB5MMIAVA
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“Freeman Dyson on the Global Warming Hysteria April, 2015” on YouTube
https://youtu.be/BiKfWdXXfIs
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As it becomes increasingly clear that the effect of CO2 on World temperatures is close to zero after its negative feedbacks kick in, the only reason to want CCS is to make solar and wind power look economic by comparison. Apart from the evident dangers of catastrophic failure in all CCS projects, if you need 24hr power, solar and wind will need virtually 100% back-up from conventional power, nuclear or hydro-electricity. The Warmistas hate nuclear and hydro almost as much as they hate CO2, so they are actually advocating expensive solar or wind power lumbered with 100% additional extremely expensive conventional power, all to achieve nothing more than increased starvation of all plants and all poor people in the World.
You couldn’t make up a more ridiculous idea if you tried.
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I think it is now obvious that people are either stupid or there is a social engineering agenda going on. Most likely a combination of both. See quote I posted above from IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer who freely admits this.
It is no longer about science as the observations don’t fit the hypothesis so according to the scientific method the hypothesis of AGW must be rejected (except now they are altering the original observed data to make the data fit the hypothesis).
40
Excellent summary!
10
I think Anton’s article shows us that it is not just the greenie left that can come up with these crazy schemes. The greenies have opposed such schemes for ages and it has been one of the favoured schemes of the Conservatives with Greg Hunt showing a lot of excitement and enthusiasm at the prospect of it. It is telling too that Tony Abbott is an avid supporter of Canada’s Conservative PM.
10
How can any sane person propose this? How can anyone with even a high school level of chemistry think it is a viable alternative. Basic HS chemistry formulas shows that that a “back of the envelop” guestimate that conservatively if CO2 were collected that there will be twice the mass. Thus the shipping costs would be twice of that of the coal/oil, etc. tripling the total cost of transportation. Then when you factor in the cheapest proposed cost of decreasing the volume of this tremendous mass, you would double the costs of fuel again. Now you have to factor in all of the other associated costs. Thus, regardless of how or what you do there is no practicable method of reducing these costs by any possible proposed, predicted, enhanced, pipe-dream method below a point that makes this a viable option. Yet they keep telling you that you can do this, that, this-other-thing, ad infinitum. Give it up, it is a lost cause.
20
Whilst I generally agree with Tony’s posts and comments especially regarding electricity generation you have made a fundamental error in the physics here.
I’m not going to argue the need for CCS or the economics as they are both questionable but supercritical CO2 does not behave the way you describe.
In your introduction above the diagram you state “To make it more compact and storable back in the small hole it came from, we either have to change it chemically, or forcibly stuff it in under some combination of extreme pressure or extreme cold.”
Further on you state “As the liquid goes deeper into the ground it warms, reverting to its gaseous form and greatly expanding in volume”
Sorry but that is not actually how supercritical fluids work, Wikipedia has a reasonable explanation and there are many phase diagrams around on the web you can check. Wiki states
“Carbon dioxide usually behaves as a gas in air at standard temperature and pressure (STP), or as a solid called dry ice when frozen. If the temperature and pressure are both increased from STP to be at or above the critical point for carbon dioxide, it can adopt properties midway between a gas and a liquid. More specifically, it behaves as a supercritical fluid above its critical temperature (304.25 K) and critical pressure (72.9 atm or 7.39 MPa), expanding to fill its container like a gas but with a density like that of a liquid.”
In sedimentary basins these conditions are generally met at depths greater than around 800 m and at temperatures hotter than 31.1oC and corresponding pressure. So the supercritical CO2 is injected and behaves like a fluid not a gas. This is the way natural gas which is mainly CH4 behaves in a reservoir, it also does not exist as a gas at reservoir conditions. This is also the reason CO2 is used for enhanced gas and oil recovery.
It is not only CCS that will be geologically storing CO2 as mainly natural gas deposits contain up to about 20% CO2 which at the moment is vented to the atmosphere and not counted in the comparison with coal when burnt. The Gorgon and Wheatstone projects on the North West Shelf will be sequestering CO2 beneath Barrow Island.
10
Alan,
thanks so much for this.
As I mentioned above in Comment 1.2.1 I can put things out like this, and I learn just as much as those readers who see all this as something new, so, while they learn something, so do I, and what you have done here is exactly that, so thank you so much.
The process away from the actual power plant itself was something which always bothered me, and, as I also mentioned, I can search and search and not find the correct combination of words to find what I want, so, I can only go with what I have, if you can see that.
The CO2, after it has been separated from the exhaust gas, boiled in the solvent to release just the CO2, and then, under enormous pressure and temperature constraints is converted to a liquid, or as you have said here, a fluid, then the next part of the process is to transport the gas from the Power Plant itself, most probably via a pipeline to where it is to be injected into the rock formation underground.
You say that this CO2 supercritical fluid has the properties of a gas but is in a fluid state. So, does that mean it still has the volume of the gas?
If transported via pipeline, would it still stay as that fluid, hence the need for cooling and pressurising inside the pipeline itself?
Then, the same with injecting it into the ground. You say it stays in that fluid state but with the volume of a gas, and would it stay in that fluid state for the duration of its sequestration ….. umm, forever?
Again, Alan, thanks for leaving this comment.
It seems that this incredibly complex process has now become even more complex.
Tony.
20
Tony
Yes it is a bit difficult to get your head around the behaviour of supercritical fluids, not sure if I have totally. My understanding is that CO2 behaves very much like natural gas (CH4) both in the ground and in pipelines.
There are a few interesting youtube clips of the behaviour such as here and here
Supercritical CO2 can also be used as a solvent and for extracting coffee and spices.
Have you done any calculations on the CO2 comparisons of a typical coal fired power station and a gas fired station if you include the gas used has already has 10 or 20% CO2 removed. Obviously the gas industry doesn’t mention this and it is very difficult to get full cycle figures
00
Alan,
for coal fired power plants, the calculation for CO2 emitted from the burning of coal averages out at 2.86 tons of CO2 for every ton of coal burned.
For natural gas fired power plants, the CO2 emissions from the burning of Natural Gas are calculated at 122 pounds of CO2 for every MCF (1000 cubic feet) of NG being burned.
Tony.
10
Sorry, I hit Post Comment instead of Preview.
You might also look at this link for CO2 emissions, also from the EIA in the U.S.
Tony.
10
Thanks Tony
I guess my area of unknown/interest is how does the gas comparison go when the CO2 content of natural gas which is currently vented prior to burn and at the production platform lower the gas advantage? As mentioned this can be 10-10%.It is common for discussion to mention CH4 leakage/loss but not the CO2.
00
The good Lord made water to wash things – your dirty hands and butt AND rain is washing CO2 + SO2+ nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil – the more dirt in the air, the more it washes down!!! Water evaporates as distilled; CO2 and the rest stays and improves the soil.
#2: Ana Bligh built a carbon sequestration plant in Qld and released lots of CO2 building the plant, at 105 million cost but will never sequestrate one molecule of co2> Who is the clown to say that: 300ppm of co2 is the best for trees and crops?!Trees say: everybody is lying!!: https://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/global-warming-lost-its-compass-again/
00
Trees would MUCH prefer 1500 ppm to 3000 ppm (so would humans if they knew better CO2 for healing lungs)
10
Interesting that you mention lungs – The American Lung Association think that CO2 is “carbon pollution” that can damage lungs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwDd9FVzQx8
Fact – current atmospheric CO2 is around 400 ppm
Fact – exhaled air contains about 4% or 40,000 ppm CO2
Fact – medical oxygen has CO2 added to aid rapid uptake, generally between 5% and 10%, or 50-100,000 ppm
gai gave a link earlier which said that
… yet concentrations in submarines, and even unventilated offices can be double the 2000 figure and more.
00
Isn’t CCS quite simply “trying to put the genie back in the bottle”? Let all the prisoners out of jail, and then think up lots of wizard wheezes to get them back in again? Into a jail that’s not totally secure?
All “carbon sequestration” schemes are dreamed up by loonies: discuss.
20
Correction:
“then think up lots of wizard wheezes to get them back in again” should read
“then think up lots of wizard wheezes to get money on the pretence of them back in again”
10