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Article on carbon capture and storage misguided
Posted by Admin
February 22, 2009
In his article, The dirty truth, published on The National Post blog February 20, 2009, Lawrence Solomon writes,” Carbon capture has only one virtue: It solves short-term political problems for both leaders.” He is referring to Barack Obama’s visit to Canada this past week, when both he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to spend billions developing technologies that would capture carbon and then store it underground.
Link to this story: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/02/21/lawrence-solomon-the-dirty-truth.aspx
“Carbon capture and storage, as these schemes are known, is misguided environmentally, economically, and in the long term, politically too,” Solomon says.
While there may be some truth in what he writes about the political advantages in expousing carbon capture and storage (CCS) as an instant fix for the pesky Tar Sands and Coal Plant problems in Canada and the US, we should nonetheless, from a global environmental perspective, continue to consider CCS as an option.
The unavoidable fact is that we humans have pushed ourselves and our biophere too close to the ultimate tipping point of runaway global warming. We must first begin to draw down carbon emissions to zero as quickly as possible, certainly by the year 2050. To do this, we must switch to environmentally safe power sources such as geothermal energy, wind turbines, tidal and wave power, and above all, concentrated solar energy.
At the same time, our governments must encourage and fund development of technologies to remove excess carbon from our atmosphere. We must change our farming practices by using no-till farming and biochar; we must plant more trees, protect living forests, and consider burying dead trees underground.
One of the methods for carbon removal will almost certainly be CCS, whether this means removing carbon during the power production process or drawing it out of the atmosphere at remote locations. The one discussed in Solomon’s article involves removing carbon at the source. To our knowledge, green, clean technology for this doesn’t yet exist, though necessity may play mother to this demand in the very near future.
The second process for removal of from the ambient atmosphere is already being developed. These involve large devices, carbon dioxide scrubbers, or artificial trees, as they are sometimes called. Please click here for a video of Dr. Klaus Lackner of Global Research Technologies describing this technology.
There are other methods for atmospheric carbon removal, some promising, some questionable and some downright dangerous. Please see the article The Telegraph article, Can Geo-engineering rebuild the planet?, February 18, 2009 for information on some of these proposed solutions.
As for carbon storage or sequestration, there are many solutions for this difficult problem now under consideration. Please see the Houston Geological Society article on Geologic Carbon Sequestration February 09, 2009, where this subject is thoroughly examined. Here are some excerpts:
“Chemical processes involve removing the CO2 to form stable solid materials. Physical processes involve holding the liquefied gas in a setting that is stable over a long period of time. One proposed option for physical sequestration calls for large quantities of liquefied CO2 to be stored on the bottom of the deepwater ocean, where high pressures would compress the gas into liquid form. Denser than seawater, the liquefied CO2 would pool on the seabed. However, the most promising physical process involves geologic sequestration”.
It is important to consider the sheer volume of present CO2 emissions.
“The mass of CO2 emissions from all sources of combustion is huge. A single 1000-megawatt coal-fired generating plant can emit six million tons of CO2 annually – as much as is emitted by two million cars. In Texas alone, 667 million metric tons of CO2 is emitted annually. The United States emits about seven gigatons (billions of tons) of CO2 each year and the global total is more than 27 gigatons and growing, according to the United Nations Statistics Division…
…Even compressed into a liquid, the volumes of captured CO2 could be vast. Over the 60-year lifetime of a 1,000-megawatt plant, the CO2 emissions will have the equivalent volume of three billion barrels of oil. The storage of large volumes of CO2 will be a growing challenge as more countries adopt carbon credits and cap-and-trade rules”.
When Solomon writes, “the world’s store of non-renewable fossil fuels would be consumed at a fast clip wherever carbon capture technology was applied,”
We say, “not so.” CCS should never be considered a bandaid or quick fix. It should only be attempted in conjunction with a global effort to reduce GHG emissions to zero. It will be difficult enough to sequester what we already have.
At the end of his article, Solomon writes, “At heart, what politicians and the public most want is clean energy and a clean environment.”
Yes, but if we can’t bring atmospheric carbon dioxide down to what is believed to be the safe level of 350 parts per million or less, we won’t have a planet we can live on.
We at West Coast Climate Equity are constantly searching for new information on this important subject and be sure to keep our readers informed.
Whatever works need to be applied. We shouldnot argue over one method vs the other but use ALL methods that will help.
The biggest thing as far as I see it it to limit driving for emergencies or an occasional trip.I am not talking about service vehichles but look, hey, an electrician and a plumber in Montreal do their jobs with an electric bike plus a cart for tools. To wean society from a car culture to a planetary consciously derived mode(s)of mobility is still the biggest hurdle. Everything else will follow when this commitment from enough citizens in enacted.
myna lee johnstone
In Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS, promoted as “clean coal,” for each megawatt generated, CCS may require that 67 percent more coal be burned to capture 80 percent of the smokestack CO2, liquefy it, transport it, and store it in old oil fields or in deep ocean.
CSS is not likely to be in widespread use until 2050. Like other emission reduction schemes, CCS should not to be confused with a climate fix.
Emission reductions are not working and they cannot work because the natural drawdown mechanisms are too slow. While worth doing for clean air and energy security, no one should pretend that they are a climate fix. They are merely an adjuvant therapy (valuable to modify another therapy but insufficient by themselves, as when chemotherapy supplements tumor removal).
Only large-scale carbon sequestration will reverse ocean acidification and most of the climate change.
Carbon capture and storage is of compelling interest for two reasons. One is the recognition that retreat from hydrocarbons is going to be very difficult, and to the extent we can neutralize their effects by capturing their emissions we buy time in the transiton to zero carbon technologies. This capacity would be a great asset – but we don’t have it yet.
Secondly, we know the present level of gaseous carbon in the atmosphere is beyond the safe zone in terms of ultimate temperature effects, and the sooner we can draw it down the better. Recognizing it is unlikely we could ever enlarge the biosphere to accomodate the carbon we have released from the geosphere, we are trapped really by the need to engineer a removal method that accelerates geological sinks. What this might be is still an open question. That we need it is not.