what are your thoughts on Carbon Capture and Storage?

[LSK]

From what I have read so far on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage">wikipedia, it looks like they are proposing storing it in underground natural facilities such as old oil wells and caverns and such. Another proposed method is to send it very deep into the oceans. In addition, the process itself uses additional energy in addition to the energy that the power plants already use. From what I have read, I am leary of this technology, it looks like a stop-gap measure that would cause more problems down the road.

[groovedaddy]

1. It is certainly NOT A PROVEN method

though they do use it to store natural gas.
I've wondered how they warn spelunkers (cavers) to avoid such areas.

[LSK]

I would think the areas they use are very secure and owned by companies

[eppur_se_muova]

5. They are usually hundreds of feet underground, only reached by bore holes.

Stray cavers are most unlikely. Gases are stored under pressure, so no openings to the surface.

[XemaSab]

2. I think it's an interesting option.

My boss at my old company was a specialist in power plant siting, and he was pretty confident that it would work. Most of the sites we were exploring involved IGCC with deep saline aquifers for the carbon dioxide storage.

We're going to keep burning coal well into the forseeable future. I just don't see that stopping.

At any rate, carbon storage underground can't be worse than the status quo. :shrug:

[Nihil]

13. Beg to differ ...

> At any rate, carbon storage underground can't be worse than the status quo.

It can be worse for several reasons:

1) It allows people/companies to carry on in the same way as always
(rather than making any effort to cut back).

2) It diverts money and time from more worthy projects.

3) It is a far more dangerous "inheritance" for future generations than any
radioactive dump because it *never* goes away.

4) It cannot store any significant fraction of the CO2 created daily.

5) In the event of a single accident (e.g., well-head failure, minor
earth tremor) you are not only releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere
(i.e., defeating the whole point of "sequestration") but you are looking
at a major environmental hazard that kills people & wildlife without
warning or escape.

In 1986, a major release of CO2 from the lake Nyos, West of Cameroon,
killed more than 1700 people and livestock up to 25 km away.

How many of these do we want to risk for the sake of "business as usual"?

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Your fears are well founded.

I've referred to this as "sweeping it under the rug" from almost the first time I heard of it. There's only so much space under the rug. This is not a sustainable approach. This is the "(big) business as usual" approach favored by those who currently profit from fossil fuels.

Several groups have reported they can feed the CO2 to algae and have a certain proportion (~10%, IIRC, which is uncertain) converted back to fuel. Unfortunately, that still leaves the bulk free to escape.

The only "carbon neutral" approaches are those in which carbon at the Earth's surface & atmosphere are recycled. Anything involving extraction of fossil fuels and "sequestering"(HA!! big lie word!) the CO2 is doomed to failure, even before the long run. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, and biomass (which only uses above-ground CO2) are all capable of providing energy without disinterring additional carbon.

[nebenaube]

4. grow

millions of acres of hemp and polymerize the fiber into engineered lumber year after year while letting the trees grow.

[kestrel91316]

6. These are just various forms of sweeping it under the rug.

Here's a sensible form of CO2 sequestration that massively improves soil fertility at the same time:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/terra_preta/TerraPretahome.htm

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. I don't see how "Terra Preta" is CO2 sequestration

As I understand it, "Terra Preta"/"Biochar" comes down to burying solid carbon (not CO₂.)

Am I missing something?

[XemaSab]

9. Wood is made from carbon. Plants get their carbon from atmospheric CO2.

So, if you bury chunks of wood, you're taking carbon out of the air and putting it into the soil.

[kestrel91316]

10. Oy vey. Tying up the carbon in plant material (trees) and then burying

it beats hell out of doing nothing. It does require the planting of trees and NOT subsequently buring them up or turning them into paper and burning that.

You can't make CO2 without C. Chemistry 101.

Edit - here's an article:
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/Gunasekaraucd05

Another:
http://www.green-energy-news.com/arch/nrgs2007/20070073.html

And another:
http://biopact.com/2006/08/terra-preta-how-biofuels-can-become_18.html

[OKIsItJustMe]

18. Okay, got it

That's gonna take a long time.

[losthills]

7. It's a charade.

And a cover for continuing to blow the tops off of mountains.

And a ticking environmental time-bomb with unpredictable consequences.

We should take steps to make it illegal before it gets started.

[GliderGuider]

11. It's very unlikely to get widespread use

You need to have ultra-secure underground storage for vast quantities of CO2, in reasonably close proximity to high-volume CO2 producers.

First, security of storage is a huge concern. You'd be putting a gas that is environmentally dangerous forever (CO2 doesn't decay like radioactive elements do), with no primary container, into an inherently porous rock formation that has already been pierced by many well bores. Compared to that, storing reinforced concrete containers of radioactive waste in the stable rock of the Canadian shield for a few thousand years is a walk in the park.

The second problem is the economics of capturing, compressing and transporting the gas. This makes the process unattractive to a profit-driven company unless there is a regulatory mandate. Such mandates will be fought tooth and nail if the process looks like it will ever get commercialized (think about CAFE standards). Right now all the CCS pilot projects are essentially greenwash.

Third, you have the problem of scale again. You can't stuff the trillions of cubic meters of CO2 generated every year into the billions of cubic meters of appropriate storage space available.

CCS just isn't going to happen. We'd be much further ahead doing Terra Preta.

[Nihil]

12. It's a scam ...

... and a very dangerous one at that.

The only good thing about it is that it isn't happening because it is
all vapour-ware and shell-games with (gullible) investor funds.

[yop]

14. Time

It's definitely a stopgap measure. The sequestered CO2 will escape someday: 50, 100, 500, or 1000 years from now. Nobody really knows how long the CO2 will stay buried, and you can be sure there will be a lot of variability from site to site. All it does is delay the day of reckoning some unknown amount.

But time is what we most desperately need, and even the not-so-good numbers for sequestration might be good enough for us to escape the trap we've caught ourselves in. An extra 50 or 100 years for wind turbines to be built, for photovoltaics to drop in price, for mineral carbon sequestration to be developed, etc. might make all the difference.

[GliderGuider]

15. Time is precisely what we have least of

Unfortunately, there are just too many chickens coming home to roost within the next decade. You could say we're flocked :P

Globally we're facing droughts, floods, declining soil fertility, deforestation, desertification, the death of the world's oceans, declining grain stocks, dropping aquifers, melting ice caps and glaciers, pervasive chemical pollution, rising CO2 production, and economic instability to name just a few of the converging issues.

To cap it all off we have the spectre of Peak Oil and its herald, the imminent fall in global net oil exports:



Following close behind we will have a peak and decline in the whole global energy supply:



Which will combine with the ecological and socioeconomic problems I alluded to above to give us this:



Lest you think I'm just bullshitting around with Excel graphs, the paper describing the model that supports this pessimistic view is available here: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP_page.html

[yop]

19. This analysis assumes

that we're all idiots. If that's the case, then we really are doomed.

The creator of these graphs assumes that we will continue doing things as we do now, right up until the bitter end. Personally, I think people are smarter than that. Altered circumstances result in human behavioral changes. The author acknowledges that "the probability of such changes will increase if the global situation shifts dramatically," but he refuses to consider the effects of any such changes because "such considerations would introduce a level of uncertainty into the analysis that would make it conceptually intractable."

Extrapolations are nice and all, but the creator of these graphs has gone beyond the useful limits of his model. When you start assuming that people would rather starve to death than change the "capital, regulatory, and public relations environments that the nuclear industry is now operating in", or that people would sit back and watch the collapse of global industrial capacity before they would implement carbon-capture-and-storage, I think you've gone a little bit too far.

[GliderGuider]

21. You can read the entire article about the model here:

http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP/WEAP.html - I think I have all the bugs out of it now.

I do not assume we will "continue doing things as we do now, right up until the bitter end", but I do know that the inertia built into our current economic and political systems, and even the inertial of our personal opinions, is immense. It takes a lot to change it, and the changes that do happen tend to be gradual. Those that are not gradual seem to have as much chance of going in the wrong direction as the right one, due to unforeseen consequences.

I think we will probably try to implement CCS, but it's not likely to affect the outcome much.

Read the model and let me know where my assumptions are off base.

[yop]

22. Peak-gas and peak-coal

The model has both of these occurring at the same time, with the result that global industry collapses, taking down all forms of energy production in the process, including nuclear and renewables. I don't see that happening.

For starters, global coal reserves are enormous, so peak-coal during the next hundred years would have to be voluntary. I don't see people voluntarily accepting the collapse of global industry and the loss of 87% of global population when there is plenty of coal left in the ground.

Furthermore, loss of oil, then gas, then coal should really spur the development of renewables and nuclear, not drag clean energy down. Basic economics- the loss of supply of butter causes the price of butter to rise, causing consumers to switch to margarine. Oil, gas, and coal are butter, renewables and nuclear are margarine.

I don't have any graphs or links, but here's what I expect to happen: As oil runs out, I expect to see the world turn to gas and coal, then, as gas runs out, to even more coal. Hopefully, most of the CO2 will be captured and stored. Throughout this timeline, renewables will continue their rapid growth and drop in price until eventually even coal is phased out, finally ending the fossil fuel era. New discoveries and developments will be very welcome, of course- mineral carbon sequestration, nuclear fusion, etc.- but we cannot depend on such developments.

At some point in the future, in a bid to try to undo damage to the climate and as formerly sequestered CO2 starts to leak back into the atmosphere, I predict that we will need to even go beyond a carbon-neutral economy and actually develop a carbon-negative economy. Terra preta is good. I have high hopes for combining biomass electrical generation with carbon sequestration, eventually hopefully mineral carbon sequestration. I'd really like to see much of the middle of this country returned to prairie with the grass harvested for biomass to feed into such systems. Seeding the oceans with iron might be necessary. OTEC is promising as well- lots of nutrient rich deep water could support lots of CO2 absorbing plankton. Hopefully we won't let things get so bad that we'll need to pump aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect incoming solar energy.

Lots of "hopefully"s in there. Keep the faith.

[GliderGuider]

23. A couple of things about coal use

First, take a look at the Energy Watch Group's PDF on coal use. they explain the peak in there, in terms of the declining energy content of the remaining lignite and bituminous coal (essentially it's an EROEI problem). They don't project as steep a post-peak decline as I do, but the peak itself is about the same. The reason I assume a steeper decline is because of the pressure the environment will put on us:

Zero emissions needed to avert 'dangerous' warming

Only the total elimination of industrial emissions will succeed in limiting climate change to a 2°C rise in temperatures, according to computer analysis of climate change. Anything above this target has been identified as "dangerous" by some scientists, and the limit has been adopted by many policymakers.

A warming of 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures is frequently cited as the limit beyond which the world will face "dangerous" climate change. Beyond this level, analysis suggests the continents will cease to absorb more carbon dioxide than they produce. As the tundra and other regions of permafrost thaw, they will spew more gas into the atmosphere, adding to the warming effect of human emissions. The end result will be dramatic ecological changes, including widespread coastal flooding, reduced food production, and widespread species extinction.

In January 2007, the European Commission issued a communication stating that "the European Union's objective is to limit global average temperature increase to less than 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels". Andrew Weaver and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Canada say this means going well beyond the reduction of industrial emissions discussed in international negotiations.

Weaver's team used a computer model to determine how much emissions must be limited in order to avoid exceeding a 2°C increase. The model is an established tool for analysing future climate change and was used in studies cited in the IPCC's reports on climate change. They modelled the reduction of industrial emissions below 2006 levels by between 20% and 100% by 2050. Only when emissions were entirely eliminated did the temperature increase remain below 2°C.

A 100% reduction of emissions saw temperature change stabilise at 1.5°C above the pre-industrial figure. With a 90% reduction by 2050, Weaver's model predicted that temperature change will eventually exceed 2°C compared to pre-industrial temperatures but then plateau.

And that is going to put enormous pressure on humanity to stop with the coal, already.

Natural gas is hard to model in the aggregate like I did, because as I point out it's a regionally-limited energy source. So while the USA, Canada and Russia (and the countries they supply like, say, Europe) may be screwed within 10 years, some of the rest of the world may do fine for a while longer.

Yes, terra preta is good. It's beyond good, it could be a little bit of magic. If we stop with the coal, already.

[hatrack]

26. I was talking with Dave Hughes last night, and he said it's basically a farce

Parasitic energy loss to CCS comes out at about 35% of output in all the models and analyses he's worked with on this.

You're going to have to dedicate a huge amount of output to keep the pipeline charged, to say nothing of the capital/energy invested in drilling the hole, in placing the casing, in building the pressurization systems and all the rest.

So, what does this mean? It means that a coal-fired plant equipped with CCS is going to have to burn about 35% more coal than a non-CCS facility, day in, day out, for the life of the facility, just to hit the same designed power output. So, assuming that sequestration holds in the rock formation of your choice, widespread development of CCS would mean increasing coal demand for electrical generation by about a third, even if you're using ultra supercritical plant design. Or, in his words, you're taking a 21st Century coal plant and converting it to a 1960s plant in terms of net efficiency.

With coal projections through the roof in the next 30 years, I don't think that adopting a technology that's going to boost coal demand for the generation of baseload power by another third is, uh, wise. Shiny, cool and new, sure, but intelligent? Hardly.

Of course, you could do things like the Danes do (and did you know that they're the world leaders in coal plant design as well as wind?). Anyway, they're very careful about siting their plants - always near the ocean and within industrial zones so that waste heat can be utilized for the buildings next door.

Of course, we wouldn't do anything like that - you know, altering our land use patterns or encouraging development in designated facilities based on power stations, 'cuz we're 'Muricans, or it's socialism, or some such rot.

[yop]

27. Climate vs life

Choose one:

(A) Keep burning coal.
(B) Let global industry collapse, leading to the loss of 87% of global population, including the majority of our own people.

We, those of us lucky enough to have a choice, the world's rich, are going to choose (B). We're going to keep burning coal and accept the horrible environmental damage. Deaths will be mostly confined to the global poor. At first, at least.

The plus side is that we get to keep building windmills and solar panels and keep doing research. Someday, we may be able to undo some of the damage and try to atone for what we have done.

Or we may bring everything toppling down, ourselves included. But this way we'll have the satisfaction of being the last to go.

[AlecBGreen]

16. pyrolysis

burning carbonacoues material in an anaerobic environment creates charcoal (pure carbon) which can be worked into soil. This method 1) uses waste material 2) sequesters carbon and 3) increases soil ferility. It also makes hydrogen and biodiesel to boot, and can be used to generate electricity as well. A win-win-win situation :)

[GliderGuider]

17. Terra Preta rulez!!!!

:toast:

[NNadir]

20. It will not happen and it will not work. Other than that, it's just great. n/t.

[Javaman]

24. It's a stale tactic until someone has the nerve to say it's all bullshit. nt

[Kolesar]

25. Stall tactic...eom