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16 comments on The Bullroarer - Saturday 13 July 2008
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16 comments on The Bullroarer - Saturday 13 July 2008
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Running 'dry' CO2 gas in a pipeline to anywhere is not the corrosion problem. Without water it is effectively inert (I think!).
It's when you pump it into an oil/gas field which inevitably contains some water that the problems begin. From the wells through most of the surface process facilities, the combination of water and CO2 produces an acidic environment. Unless the facilities were designed for high CO2 from the start (eg if the oil field already contained high levels naturally) then it's prohibitively expensive to change - you're really talking about drilling new wells and building new process trains from scratch.
Yes, that's right.
CO2 by itself is inert with respect to metals. When water gets in, it reacts and forms H2CO3, carbonic acid. This is of course corrosive.
Of course the whole idea is preposterous. Vaclav Smil makes the useful comparison - to process and sequester even 10% of annual emissions would require infrastructure bigger than we have for the entire world's oil industry. 10% of our emissions of 49Gt is 4.9Gt, and we use 4.3Gt of oil annually. Which effort leaves us with 90% of our emissions to deal with, and assuming business as usual would be overcome in two years by normal annual emissions rises.
Consider the costs and efforts involved in the entire world's oil infrastructure - just for a 10% reduction. I'm sure we could get considerably more than a 10% reduction by the same investment in conservation and renewables.
So, tell me, the reason the Rudd govt is spending so many millions of our taxpayer dollars on CO2 geosequestration experiments is...?
Because saying "geosequestration" makes thems sound like they have the problem under control. It's better than Tim Flannerys idea of "atmosulpherication" (think up a sexier sounding term and post here) to effectively shade the planet from nasty sunlight. I think the Chinese are experimenting with that in Beijing at the moment and it would be interesting to see what the ground temperature difference is in polluted Beijing vs clear sky Beijing. If they get it cleared up for the Olympics, we should all take very close note of teh temperatures and compare them to previous and future years.
It's a subsidy for the coal and gas industries. It allows them to be appear to be doing something while not doing anything at all, and allows us the public to feel something is being done which will not inconvenience us in any way whatsoever. Warm fuzzies.
If you're going to say that "they're spending money on it, so it must be a good idea", then you have to agree that CEOs really do deserve salaries in the tens of millions, that highways really do cost a year's wages a metre to build and are worth it, that Saddam had WMD, that a guy lending a mobile phone sim card to his rather amateurish terrorist cousin was worth spending more on than the cost of an MRI machine, that submarines which don't work and are in drydock half the time really are worth a couple of billion each, and so on.
Just because money is being spent on it doesn't mean it's a good idea.