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Arguments against carbon capture and storage (CCS) |
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Posted on April 22, 2009 @ 10:59:00 AM by Paul Meagher
The coal lobby wants us to believe that coal can be a "clean" source of energy. By "clean" the coal lobby means they are optimistic that they will be able to effectively sequester co2 and other harmful emissions from coal-powered plants. Given that the U.S. has the largest reserves of coal in the world, it would seem that CCS technology offers the best hope for a cheap, secure, and clean energy future for the U.S.
Unfortunately, this is all propoganda. While the Gore sponsored commercials by the Coen brothers raise awareness about CCS propoganda, they don't provide people with the compelling arguments that can be directed at those spreading the propoganda. Andrew Nikiforuk in his 2008 book, Tar Sands, does a good job of assembling the arguments. He is the main source I used for this critique. Here are the arguments against:
- The cost of capturing carbon is prohibitively high; between $25 and $115 a ton. Most CCS pilot projects have failed for lack of money. Two billion dollars was sunk into one U.S. project before the plug was pulled.
- Capture and storage of carbon can eat up nearly 30 percent of energy provided which drives the need to mine and burn more coal to compensate.
- A CCS-enabled power plant will raise the cost of electricity production by 37-91 percent. So much for cheap energy.
- Renewable energy infrastructure could be developed faster and at less expense than a CCS-enabled energy infrastructure.
- CCS is largely untested technology. Promoters are just being overly optimistic about its potential given the lack of real data on its feasability. Consider that to really test the viability of CCS would require actually sequestering carbon in some geologic formation and waiting a few thousand years to find out the fate of the stored carbon. An article in the most recent issue of Nature suggests that most of the stored carbon ends up dissolving in water in underground storage formations. No one knows whether this water will, in the fullness of time, carry the dissolved co2 out of these formations. Many geological formations are unique so generalizing from one project to the next is also frought with uncertainty.
- To compress, transport, and store just 15 percent of the world's carbon would be a geo-enginnering feat of such magnitude that even a projected date of achiving this by 2050 is optimistic. Just to transport it would likely require as much pipeline as already exists for transporting crude oil.
- There are safey concerns. In the tar sands, many of the places where they want to bury it are on a landscape perforated by around 350,000 oil and gas wells. These drill holes provide a potential escape route for stored carbon. Heavy co2 leaks can be extremely dangerous and difficult to deal with. Anyone nearby heavy co2 leak will die for lack of oxygen in the air and motorized equipment won't operate in such an environment unless fed with an artificial supply of oxygen.
- A slow leak of 0.1 percent a year over time would empty the storage site in less than 6 thousand years.
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- CCS extends the pretense that coal is not dirty and that we can proceed with business as usual.
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The promise of bio-char |
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Posted on January 27, 2009 @ 09:53:00 AM by Paul Meagher
Bio-char has been on my radar lately. Last week Boing-Boing provided excerpts from a New Scientist interview with James Lovelock in which he claimed "There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal". This is an interesting development from a renowned maverick scientist. This interview incited me to finish reading a recent biochar review article by Mark P. McHenry in "Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment" called "Agricultural bio-char production, renewable energy generation and farm carbon sequestration in Western Australia: Certainty, uncertainty and risk". (vol 129, 2009, pp. 1-7). From this article I took three main things:
- Biochar is an umbrella term for an integrated set of technologies whose end product is biochar among other desirable products.
- Because biochar production has so many different types of co-benefits there are many different biochar systems that can be constructed depending on the co-benefits you want to emphasize.
- Biochar technology is an excellent area to invest in if you know the technology and don't expect an immediate return on investment. Biochar production technology is starting to come on stream now and within the next five years we will likely start to see many profitable biochar companies because there are so many co-benefits associated with the technology.
The list of co-benefits were summarized in the "Conclusion" section of the article:
Producing bio-char from farm or forestry waste provides an impressive list of potential co-benefits, including the generation of renewable electricity, liquid biofuels, gas biofuels, activated carbon, eucalyptus oil, large amounts of heat or low-pressure steam, and the potential of a net withdrawal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. With the introduction of new policies and initiatives, the sum profitabliliy of these various production streams is likely to improve, especially if theare are integrated into existing agricultural production and energy systems. ~ p 6.
I think that one of the more important issues to consider when investing in bio-char technology is the scale of the technology you want to invest in. For example, some bio-char technology is focused at the farm level and utilizes dairy bedding and manure for feedstock. In contrast, the Narrogin Integrated Wood Processing Demonstration Plant is using a base of 50,000 hectares of mallee trees and can generate 7500 MWh of electricity, 690 tons of activated carbon, and and 210 tons of eucalyptus oil. I suspect that smaller scale technology would produce a smaller ecological footprint as there is less need to transport feedstock to the production side and resulting products to markets. At the farm level, transport costs are fewer because the feedstock is on-site and the resulting products are used on-site: biochar is an excellent soil additive and when it comes from dried cow manure and bedding the additional nutrients means that it is essentially an organic fertilizer.
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Cars, cars, and more cars |
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Posted on November 7, 2008 @ 08:39:00 AM by Paul Meagher
I have not examined Barack Obama's energy and environment policies in too much detail yet. I scanned a clip in which he discussed green ecomomy ideas. One part that I did not resonate to was Barack's advocacy for subsidizing the automotive industry to retool so that the industry can become "green". Given that Barack is from the epicenter of cartown U.S.A. it is hardly surprising that he would be advocating a future in which we get a 100 miles to the gallon in our Jetson mobiles. Unfortunately, I don't think the CO2 math is on Barack's side. Heavy support for the renewal and expansion of historically unsustainable U.S. automotive industry and its players will in all likelihood not help the U.S. to achieve a declining CO2 output.
The next big players in a quickly transforming transportation sector may not be a familiar names like Ford, GM, or Toyota, but rather names like Norco, Specialized, Giant, and other innovative bicycle design, manufacturing, distribution, retailing, and repair shops.
I think we need to allow the transportation sector to evolve in the context of government advocacy of active and public transport alternatives, rather than propping up an unsustainable automotive industry. Many european cities have evolved away from cars and traffic into different work/living arrangements and transport modalities. The bicycle is often the primary mode of assisted active transport in those cities.
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The dangers of thawing permafrost |
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Posted on October 27, 2008 @ 08:00:00 AM by Paul Meagher
Spent quite a bit of my time sunday night trying to absorb a review article in Bioscience on the thawing permafrost and the carbon cycle. The thawing of permafrost increases the ability of microbes to release carbon contained in permafrost organic matter. The international group of scientists estimate that permafrost C pool is double the amount of the atmospheric C pool. A significant transfer of C from permafrost into the atmosphere is something we need to be concerned about because 1) the shear size of the permafrost C pool (permafrost covers 22% of the northern hemisphere landmass), and 2) the potential for a positive feedback cycle between C release, further heating, further C release...
One issue of particular concern to the scientists is the fact that water goes through a phase transition as it switches from ice to water. The scientists worry that because of this, and with larger temperature increases expected at higher latitutes, we might hit a threshold point where permafrost system dynamics change rapidly. The dynamics of permafrost thawing still needs more research to know exactly how events will play out.
Thawing permafrost is the largest "vulnerable" C pool, however, there are 4 other major C pools that potentially are vulnerable to climate change:
To learn more about permafrost, visit the Permafrost wikipedia page, or What is Permafrost by the Geological Survey of Canada.
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Carbon monoxide in your neighborhood |
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Posted on October 10, 2008 @ 06:41:00 AM by Paul Meagher
Carbon monoxide is a tastless, odorless, and invisible gas. It is often around us in fairly high concentrations. Carbon monoxide can be formed when gasoline is burned without enough oxygen. 75 percent of CO emissions are from automobiles. Cigarette smoke also releases fairly high concentrations. The U.S. governement has set a danger level for CO at 9 ppm over 8 hr and 35 ppm over 1 hr. If you take a reading in many urban areas of the U.S. you will get a reading between 7 and 8 ppm. If you are close to the street then these levels are exceeded much of the time.
CO binds to hemoglobin and interferes with its normal function of transporting O2. The result is drowsiness. It also forces your heart to work harder as it requires more effort to get an oxygen supply. Chronic exposure to high levels of CO may result in physical and mental impairment.
It might be an instructive science project to measure CO levels in your neighborhood. Or, go to a busy street with your carbon monoxide detector and see if it goes off :-) TSI Inc. offers a Q-Trak device which monitors CO and CO2 levels. The Beijing 2008 Olympics used TSI Inc's services to monitor air quality during the Olympics but I'm not aware of the results.
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Carbon dioxide equivalent co2e |
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Posted on September 26, 2008 @ 09:00:00 AM by Paul Meagher
You can't just use the amount of co2 in the atmosphere to estimate the probable degree of global warming we might expect in the future. What you also need to factor in are the effects of the other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other greenhouse gases in our altmosphere that we are concerned with have a Global Warming Potential (GWP) greater than co2 which is used as the standard and has a GWP of 1. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the GWP for some other significant greenhouse gases are:
- Carbon dioxide has a GWP of 1
- Methane has a GWP of 21
- Nitrous oxide has a GWP of 310
- Halocarbons (HFC) has a GWP of 140 to 11,700
- Sulphur Hexafluoride has a GWP of 23,90
This means that a ton of methane has 21 times more ability to trap heat than co2. Thankfully there is less of it so it does not have as large effect as co2 currently does; neverthess it does have a significant effect as there is alot of methane going up into the atmosphere from various sources.
You can use the EPA greenhouse gas equivalence calculator to compute the co2e amount of greenhouses gases you are emitting.
To learn more about co2e and how it is calculated you an read this co2e clarification over at Real Climate along with 193 responses to it.
The bottom line is that it is co2e that we need to be more concerned about as it is the value that we would probably plug into our models to predict the degree of global warming to expect. There probably needs to be more general education to the public about the co2e concept, how it is calculated, and where we are at now.
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Geologic Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide |
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Posted on July 21, 2008 @ 06:45:00 AM by Paul Meagher
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released a document called Geological Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide that proposes regulation to create "a consistent, national framework for the injection of carbon dioxide underground and protection of underground drinking water resources. The rule would create a new class of injection wells under the authority of the Safe Drinking Water Act's Underground Injection Control (UIC) program." The EPA is hoping that this document will help pave the way for increased innovation in this area.
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