82 comments on CO2 capture and storage: The economic costs
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If you could apply Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) to the world's 2,000 largest fossil fuel power plants (about 90% of them coal) you would reduce world CO2 emissions by something like 25%.........
OK - where do you put the CO2??
It doesnt matter if we capture it. If you burn 1 km3 of coal per year where do you put [x]000km3 of CO2..
answers on a postcard please
...well the oxygen I can live with -we don't want to get rid of that!!
Also, we don't necessarily need to get rid of the carbon from the atmosphere at the source -just remove it from the carbon cycle. That's after all how the carbon got down into Ghawar and the like in the first place.
A problem with any CCS idea is that is uses energy from the very fossil fuels it aims to cut the emmissions from. Therefore the pie either needs to expand ("oops1" after PO) or we get less energy out the end ("oops2" after PO).
In his book "The Millenium Project" Marshal Savage envisages using Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) to power and overproduce algae blooms that are then encassed and sunk to the sea floor. The OTEC gets it's power from outside the current non-renewable system so it expands the pie, not decreases it.
I really think that unless we can come up with a solution that does not detract from NET energy then once we hit PO the GW thing will just take a back seat as we scramble to merely keep the lights burning...
Nick.
Hello everyone,
I just wanted to make sure Terra Preta was included in this discussion.
I am from the American site and we are talking about the current energy legislation (or lack thereof) and the prospect of a recession resulting from the sub-prime fiasco. If there is a recession and it spills over into the global economy then the chances of GW and PO being addressed are going to be slim.
So, I wanted to bring up Terra Preta because it is cheap carbon capture. Essentially Terra Preta is the practice of making charcoal and working it into the ground as fertilizer. Some of the carbon is released into the atmosphere during the process but the rest is sequestered in an inert form in the soil. Grow a tree, turn it into charcoal, bury it, repeat. I think this is going to be important because it is cheap, low tech, accessible to individuals and small groups, and it pulls the carbon directly out of the atmosphere instead of at the source. These are all going to be important factors should governments and industry fail to act in time.
Additionally, I didn't see any mention of algae photobioreactors using the flue gas from the coal power plant. A decent amount of biodiesel can be generated this way. It doesn't keep the carbon out of the atmosphere, but the carbon gets used twice. Once for electricity and once for liquid fuels.
Cheers,
Tim
The IPCC looked at this if you look at the report.
Roughly speaking this would be 2 bn tpa of carbon or 7.3bn tpa of CO2.
There is enough subterranean storage. Bottom of ocean storage is far fetched, but may eventually be practicable.