I have never believed in carbon capture and storage. I doubt I ever will.
I do, however, believe in government capture. So do the makers of this video.
The usual language warnings apply to this one, which is suitably cynical:
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The energy required for carbon capture is greater than the energy consumed from burning it in the first place. Exactly where is all that energy coming from? Once again the ‘economics’ is ignoring science and the laws of thermo dynamics.
We add more than 30 billion tons of co2 to our atmosphere every year. We would be better off with that carbon remaining underground.
I think that one of the best and cheapest ways to capture carbon with proven technology, is to plant a tree. It has so many other benefits too. The downside is that certain people can’t make a big profit. Once again, money first, people second.
🙂
I beg to differ – planting a tree in most environments reduces CO2 captured compared to the alternative of not doing so.
Tree planting only works if the tree can take advantage of resources that wouldn’t otherwise be exploited by what grew naturally. Have you seen the alleged CO2 capture rates of Napier grass? But in many environments most types of grasses capture more CO2 than trees, only losing out in the wild because trees outcompete them for height and light.
By all means go plant trees on car parks, or the edge of car parks or streets as they are shading out spaces of tarmacadam where grass wouldn’t grow anyway, but don’t plant them where other things would grow anyway please.
Canada’s just watched a load of forest carbon offsets release their CO2 in a rush. And tho’ Australia did change its national government last year, not much has changed on the CCUS/offsets front despite an inquiry and now a legal challenge. Captured political parties have to serve their owners after all. This Honest Government Ad was made before the election. Hard to tell to be honest…https://www.thejuicemedia.com/honest-government-ad-carbon-credits-and-offsets-pg/
Agreed – this is very good – carbon capture is just like the nuclear waste debate – where are you going to put in then, eh?
Best to not make it the first place perhaps?
Yes, I think so.
Moving quickly on then…………………….
CCS can only be effective for concentrated sources of CO2. Yes, it would encourage us to continue to use fossil fuels which makes it a bad thing. However, it could also be used to mitigate the large CO2 emissions from cement production. We’re going to want to continue to make things out of concrete for many more years into the future, so I wonder how long it would take for tree-planting or sea-grass growth or other such natural CO2 sequestration process to re-absorb those CO2 emissions? I’d love to see some good numbers on this.
Fair point – there may be industrial processes that are relatively unavoidable and release CO2 such as cement production. CCS maybe the answer to them but not an excuse to put a band-aid on processes releasing carbon where there may be better alternatives. Steel production being an example.
Phil, concrete is not necessary. It just requires the desire to use alternatives. For example, hempcrete and hydraulic lime can be used instead, and result in healthier buildings due to breathability. The Centre for Alternative Technology has done a lot of work in this area.
Interesting…..
Carbon Capture just an expensive unproven feeble fig leaf on yet more fossil fuel extraction.
Given that renewables combined with energy saving are so obviously both faster and cheaper to implement, one can only concluded that its purely short term financial interests that drives Sunak, Hunt and the government’s behaviour.
It isn’t hard to believe in carbon capture and storage – look around you. Much of our landscape is shaped by immense amounts of carbon, captured and stored over millions of years. Limestone and chalk geology*.
Unfortunately no one has come up with a realistic way of capturing enough carbon fast enough to deal with the current predicament. But presumably raised atmospheric CO2 is reflected in dissolved CO2 in seawater, and will be making growth easier for barnacles.
[*To be fair, you live in a part of the country not known for its limestone hills or chalk downs. But you have no doubt noticed them on your forays elsewhere].
Dissolving carbon dioxide in water results in carbonic acid. Increasing acidity of the oceans weakens shells and ultimately could wipe out such species.
Worth watching their series of videos. This one referring to Australia’s Labour government with its ‘shit-lite’ policies sounds worryingly familiar.
https://youtu.be/fHB0vDhdM3c
Indeed
The one that rather hit home for me was on the anti-protest law: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kecnSHmznic
Are we following Australia or is it the other way round?!!
Except that people in this country have been imprisoned for years for protesting.
There was someone wanting a review of their prison sentence last month, and the judge said no because the government wanted it that way to discourage protest. So s/he is locked up for three years for protesting.
Brilliant video! Thanks for sharing.
I do not think that CCS should be used to justify the use of fossil fuel and it would be far better to invest in renewable energy, insulation and carbon-free transport etc. However as I have tried to say before, we already have too much CO2 in the atmosphere which is why it is already too hot and the ice sheets are melting etc. To that end I think we need to invest carbon capture with an aim to reduce atmospheric concentration to pre-industrial levels, or maybe a bit less to allow glaciers and things to regrow. For this reason I probably got a bit over excited when I heard about Captura (please google) which does CC indirectly via the ocean and I also wonder whether the CO2 could be used in applications such as vertical farming which may be needed in order to cope with expected loss of efficient farmland.
Unfortunately I don’t know enough about all this stuff to be authoritative. Maybe someone here knows more.
To my mind we need to do the following.
1. All the much discussed stuff aimed at reducing our fossil fuel use.
2. Massively invest in carbon capture research to reduce CO2 concentration as motivated above. I do not believe reforestation can be fast enough or have the capacity required.
3. Accelerate the development of usable Fusion reactors which are capable of producing the energy we need and without the need to deal with radioactive waste whilst also being inherently safe.
I recommend you read Vaclav Smil’s Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate.
Just basic calculations of how much CO2 we need to bury and how much infrastructure that would take (leaving aside the difficulty of finding safe locations ti sequester it) make it uneconomic and unviable.
In brief: Sequestering the carbon emissions of 1/4 of world’s power plants = burying 5 billion tons compressed CO2 per year. 2008 world oil extraction = 4 billion tons. You need an infrastructure the size of the global oil and gas industry.
It would be simpler to Just close 1/4 of all coal-fired power stations.
https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Myths-Realities-Bringing-Science/dp/0844743283
I think there is only one reliable and effective way to capture carbon and store it permanently. Nature already showed us that. You have to take organic material, such as wood, and bury it. Ideally somewhere it stays buried, so that would be a sedimentary basin, for example the Mississippi or Nile delta. This is probably extremely difficult and expensive to do at scale and fast enough to make much difference to the current problem.
In geological terms nature already does this constantly. For example all the deep oceans are covered in organic sludge that is just stored carbon. It gets, to an extent, vented back to the atmosphere by volcanoes as oceanic plates sink into subduction zones and melt. Overall for the past billion years atmospheric carbon has gradually reduced. The oil and coal was once in the atmosphere, but in the Carboniferous the planet was considerably more hot and humid. As the carbon got gradually stored, so global temperatures slowly fell. Geologically the current increase is a temporary blip, but a blip that lasts millions of years.
Can’t rely on offshore windfarms for our fuel.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/05/uk-offshore-wind-at-tipping-point-as-funding-crisis-threatens-industry
No chance of reaching net-zero by 2050 if this happens..
That is a policy issue, nothing to do with its effectiveness
Koch Industries (boo hiss etc) have had a CCS project running in Oklahoma since the 1990s, it injects CO2 (from fertiliser production) into an oil well & gets more oil out as a result. The economics work – well at least for Koch. The Norwegians have been running another CCS project in the North Sea, Core problem with CCS is not many large projects because mostly, the economics don’t work. Renewables got cheap in the late 2010s so CCS for gas generators does not work (even with high carbon prices). Cement – needs CCS – to captures the emissions inherent in the process. Other industries could/should migrate to green H2. That’s about it. I see the vile-tories blow hot n cold on the subject – proabably a function of the level of bungs flowing their way. In the EU, mostly, it has died a death – apart from cement.
Richard
Thank you for raising the profile of the CCS (Technofix) nonsense.
Pushed by oil companies, it would require massive, unachievable infrastructure to make even a small dent in our global emissions before 2050. MSM (Along with CCC !) have swallowed this as a key climate solution, hook, line & sinker.
To really move forward on CC-action we need three things:
The need to skewer the delusional, bogus climate ‘solution’ of CCS; so that people we really do start thinking about driving forward actual solutions** for mitigation.
Secondly – again as you’ve already flagged – the need to move away from the GDP paradigm; for people to begin to appreciate that artificial & mythical basis upon our economic paradigm now tethered to our rampant exponential global resource consumption.
As economist Kenneth Boulding said: “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
Thirdly, communities and MSM really do need to start having serious conversations up and down the land about where and why we are headed in the wrong direction. Otherwise, the influence to have the grown-up politics and the proper focus on our health & well-being and reduced consumption will not come about, and serious transformation cannot begin.
You are certainly contributing to all those three points. Thanks again Richard.
* On CCS: There are excellent short briefing notes by the Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL)
https://www.ciel.org/reports/carbon-capture-is-not-a-climate-solution/
https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Confronting-the-Myth-of-Carbon-Free-Fossil-Fuels.pdf
**Incidentally, just to note, examples of Nature-based solutions for ecological CCS are:
Peatland; Forests; conserved soil; saltmarsh; mangroves, and sea grasses.
But as CCC noted in June of Wales, at current rates of afforestation it will not meet its ‘2050 target’ until the year 2600. England is not much better.
From memory it was as early as 1990 that Canadian energy researcher Vaclav Emil presented calculations to the OECD that showed CCS would be utterly ineffective. He later fined them and published them in some of his books.
In brief: Sequestering the carbon emissions of 1/4 of world’s coal-fired power plants = burying 5 billion tons compressed CO2 per year. 2008 world oil extraction = 4 billion tons. You’d need an infrastructure the size of the global oil and gas industry.
See Vaclav Emil, Energy Myths and Realities, 2010, pp.89-93 for the details.
https://vaclavsmil.com
Other than in his books I’ve never seen these figures published. I’ve sent them to many journalists over the years to no avail. It’s just basic arithmetic, but you know … numbers … mathematics … general innumeracy!
Trees capture carbon. We need MARS.
M=Mitigation
A=Adaptation
R=Remediation
S=Sustainable economics.
Remediation is doing what is happening now in many places where carbon is sequestered. Iceland is an example.
Basically CCS is hogwash. I heard it described recently as:
“It’s OK to soil oneself because I have a washing machine.”
When I lived in Zurich I used to go to the market where a local producer had simply the best (organic) tomatoes. His garden was adjacent to the village sewage processing facility which had been re-engineered to both capture the heat in waste water and CO2. This gas was then sent to the grower’s plastic tunnels to the benefit of his plants.
It will take years for Sunak’s new wells to come online, by which time there will be many more EVs on the road so that this new oil would probably be used in planes considering the compactness of oil as an energy medium. I have yet to hear how CCS would work on an aeroplane.
For at least three decades all the evidence has been that global warming is an existential threat to life on this planet and yet it is only now that a small number of the rich and powerful, the overwhelming majority are still climate change deniers, are even beginning to think about how this problem might be tackled.
Obviously, plans to phase out all use of oil and gas within the next 10 years is the fundamental starting point, but to get an idea of how likely this is to happen you only have to look at the Tory vilification and persecution of the Just Stop Oil protests.
Behaviour, that if we do survive Global warming, will horrify and appal our descendants, in the same way that past great evils like slavery and the holocaust do today.
https://getprdone.org.uk/dirty-business-is-our-electoral-system-holding-us-back-in-a-climate-emergency/
We have to change the voting system to change the energy system.
Well put.
The situation is bleak but I was encouraged by greanpeace’s action last week. It really helped to get the message out without inconveniencing any of the 99%. Will McCallum did a great job on Five Live at 9am (Friday I think).
Thanks to all contributers on brilliant Richards blog. Too much stuff to read!
Well put.
Thanks to all contributers on brilliant Richards blog. Too much stuff to read!
The situation is bleak but I was encouraged by greanpeace’s action last week. It really helped to get the message out without inconveniencing any of the 99%. Will McCallum did a great job on Five Live at 9am (Friday I think).
This was rejected in my previous comment?
Carbon capture to mitigate the burning of oil/gas is a nonsense, but there is plenty of indication that biochar could be used to sequester carbon within soil, improving its quality/fertility in the process. Biochar also be used as a feedstock additive for cattle, cement additive and various other uses.
That’s what I think of when I hear of carbon capture. Not the boondoggle pushed by the oil companies!