Amongst the other stuff that almost went without notice over the past few days, the Victorian parliament passed legislation covering carbon sequestration, with the support of both Labor and the Coalition.
One of the stronger critiques of CCS is who has responsibility for the greenhouse gases thus sequestered, and over what timescale. While there are good reasons to expect CO2 sequestered in depleted gas fields to stay there, the consequences of leakage, particularly sudden leakage, are potentially very severe. While the legislation essentially hands control of the entire process to the Minister responsible, it does make clear that, ultimately, the greenhouse gas sequestered becomes the property – and thus the responsibility – of the Victorian government, something Greens Upper House MP Greg Barber covered in his speech on the matter (as the slightly paranoid parliamentary website warns us, this is a proof transcript and may contain the odd error).
The problem really starts with clause 16, which provides that someone who, having received a licence to inject carbon dioxide into the ground and do some monitoring of it, can have their licence cancelled or be required to surrender it and the ownership of that licence can then be transferred to the Crown. It is clear what this bill is about. I invite members to just to think about that. There might be 1 million tonnes of CO2 being injected into the ground. There are concerns about it staying there — it might move sideways or it might move upwards and out into the atmosphere, but 1 million tonnes of CO2 will be down there and it will belong to the people of Victoria. Let us say it is 50 years from now and that stuff is priced at $100 a tonne. You will have a $100-million liability just sitting there, ownership of it having been transferred.
For all the talk in the bill about monitoring, bonds and remediation and insurance requirements, at the end of the day, however you might like to structure those, you are betting against two things.
One is that it will stay down there for a long, long time. The other is: what will the monetised impact be if it starts to escape and turn up in the atmosphere?
Whatever the price of carbon is in that future time — and I expect it will be very high as years, let alone centuries, go by — that is our liability, not anything else, not anything that was agreed up front or paid off or paid out or cashed out up front.
It will be extremely interesting to see what kind of insurance the government ultimately requires of those who sequester CO2 underground; and, indeed, whether commercial insurance companies are prepared to take the risk. Will we end up with the CO2 version of Price-Anderson?
Back in April:
Sounds like Teh Gods were trying to tell us something.
Monitoring for only 2 years is a valid trial for a forever phenomenon? Australia emits 400 miilion tons/year? A mammoth pipe network to ferry carbon dioxide from coal power stations to geological storage sites hundreds of kilometres away?
It would seem they’ve certainly first been made mad.
You gotta give it to Martin’s for science-based thinking:
The really dumb part of sequestration from coal fired plants is that it could be reduced significantly if the existing coal fired generation was converted over to gas fired (Coal Seam Methane) generation using combined cycle gas turbines (off the shelf technology BTW).
The only difficulty is that the owners of the mines and generators will have to de-commission the old mines and coal fired plants and install new plant. They borrowed money on the basis that the plant would last 30+ years. Oh and the unions are going to be mightily pissed off when all those miners lose their jobs.
This is an old story; the Capitalists and the Workers trapped in an obsolete industry fight together to preserve the status quo.
There is a vast resource of CSM in Australia – at least 100 trillion cubic feet, probably about 3 or 4 times this when they really start looking.
The efficiency of generation from this feedstock is about twice that of conventional coal fired generation. Its CO2 emissions are 400kgCO2/MWh compared with 800kgCo2/MWH for Black coal and 1200kgCO2/MWh for Brown Coal (as in Victoria.
Thus the introduction of CSM generation could halve the CO2 emissions overnight (say 6 years). Follow this up with CO2 sequestration (remember you have 1/2 the CO2 to deal with) and you have more reductions available in the following years.
The true irony of all this is that relatively simple distribution and demand side measures (BTW I am not talking about some Hippies clustered around candles here – no change to the “standard of living” required) could enable the closure of at least one coal fired power station on the East Coast of OZ. The same measures applied to the US would result in the closure of about 10 power stations. So now you know why they will never be adopted.
Huggy.
Thanks for this, Robert. Good post.
I imagine you’re right – Carbon sequestration is uninsurable in much the same way as nuclear power. Ulrich Beck made much of this latter point in his seminal work in the late 1980s on Risk Society. In this sense, government as insurer of last resort is nothing new at all.
As an aside, I’d note the current disconnect from risk and its etymology: risiko the undersea cliffs that would take the precious merchant shipping cargoes in the Mediterranean. these were ‘known unknowns’ in the sense that their only their locations were not known. The risks associated with sequestration are not really knowable or quantifiable in any meaningful sense, not least due to the uncertainties surrounding nano-scale biology.
It sounds like the philosophy of “privatize the profits and socialize the losses”.
Next thing they’ll be telling us the CO2′ll be worth something one day, and we, the people, should consider ourselves damn lucky that they didn’t make us pay cash for it. Oh that’s right, we did.
dk: It’s important to clarify what we mean by “uninsurable”.
You can’t get insurance against a comet crashing into the Earth. Doesn’t mean we need to panic about it.
Can someone pleeeeease get Marn Ferson to listen to the fact that the majority of Australians want their limited remaining old-growth forest protected – another way to contribute to carbon sequestration.
Huggybunny, the problem with gas fired electricity is that it’s still a huge carbon emitter, and if everyone starts using it the supply will run out fairly rapidly. It’s like many other things that are currently only small sources of energy: there’s a lot of known sources that are fairly readily accessible, but as soon as wholesale demand hits the known supplies start to look pretty small. Unless you’re looking at solar or wind, anyway. Yes, eventually we’ll run out of easy wind sites… one estimate I saw said that with 30 years of intensive wind farming and a doubling of consumption (increased population and industry) we might peak out around 25-30% of our electricity coming from wind. Baseload will probably have to come from geothermal or wave, but once you get to that level of wind farming “it’s always windy somewhere”.
Count me a treehugger, I think if we wasted less we’d need less.
It was interesting visiting my parents recently (they’re in their early 60’s) and noticing how many of the “cool green hippy” ideas match their tightfisted habits… turning lights off, having the house insulated 20 years ago, growing (some of) their own veges, even trivial things like keeping clothespegs in a bag not on the line so they last longer. I expect they will once again vote National “because they know how to manage the economy” (despite the ample contrary evidence), but they still live greener than a lot of the hippies that I know.
cheers moz; and nothing like living on tankwater, to quickly learn about using as little as possible.
moz, Yes gas fired electricity is a temporary mitigation, but we know it works and it will buy time. Not so sure that the resource is as small as you think. The next cab off the rank is artificial geothermal, there is no shortage of resource here. Large scale solar thermal with thermal storage will have a role as the carbon trading or whatever starts to bite. Wind can be used to boost the efficiency of gas fired generation by storing compressed air in suitable formations and using it to boost the compressor stage in the gas turbine. Not sure that suitable formations exist in OZ but the idea is being tested in the US.
The absolute last resort is nuclear IMV.
Huggy
In the very beginnings of commercial nuclear energy in the United States, insurance companies wouldn’t provide insurance, because they didn’t have quantitative understanding of the risks associated with nuclear energy.
That’s what all insurance is all about – quantitative understanding of risks. If they don’t understand the risks, quantitatively, then they cannot make money selling insurance. Once they had a better understanding, however, commercial insurance of nuclear power became commonplace – all nuclear power utilities in the US are required by law to provide their own very large insurance pools, and the US taxpayer has never paid out any money to anybody under Price-Anderson.
Just like commercial insurers wouldn’t insure commercial nuclear energy in the early days of that technology, I doubt commercial insurers will deal with carbon dioxide geosequestration until they know enough about the risks of CO2 escaping to allow them to quantitatively assess the risks.
Luke: there is another reason why Price-Anderson – or a revised version thereof – is still around. It provides a liability limit for private insurers.
Not that that’s a terrible thing, merely noting that it’s the case, and might also be the case in the long term with sequestration.
One thing that i am concerned about with carbon dioxide sequestration is that it might be difficult to know or find out if the CO2 that has been pumped underground is starting to leak back into the atmosphere or into underground water systems. As with anything under pressure, there only has to be one path for the CO2 to escape to the surface along and substantial amounts could leak back into the atmosphere.
Excuse the cynicism, but what is stopping a company pumping huge amounts of CO2 underground at a nice profit while most of that CO2 escapes from some unknown location after a short amount of time? Why would they care, especially with this legislation? Perhaps traces of signature isotopes could be added to CO2 as it is being pumped underground, but even then, how would you detect the location of a leak and what could be do about it if we do find out it is leaking? Zip in all likelihood.
Is it an irony that while while talking about pumping liquid CO2 (under pressure and probably below a freezing temperature depending on the amount of pressure it is under) another alternative source of energy that is commonly mentioned is geothermal? With geothermal you assume a near endless supply of thermal energy underground and you extract that energy by pumping water down there and using the steam that comes back to the surface to generate electricity – in basic terms. Some places are more suited to geothermal than others, obviously. Are the conditions underground adequate to keep the CO2 in a liquid state or if it does mix whatever underground, what happens when it is supersaturated? Would even a minor earthquake be liable to set most of the CO2 to escape into the atmosphere like a fizzy drink that has its cap seal broken?
I don’t know how you could give this technology the benefit of the doubt. If it were for just small volumes, sure. But to store years’ worth of waste generated in coal power stations…
RobV: the places where they’re proposing to pump it have sequestered natural gas (which contains a fair amount of CO2) for millions of years. It’s not unreasonable to expect that it might hold CO2 for a few tens of millennia, which is enough.
I’m certainly not advocating panic, but just outlining a yawning chasm in understandings of risk. Simply bracketing my objections off as ‘panic’ just doesn’t capture my position on technology generally and risk specifically.
Your’s and Luke Weston’s definitions of risks and risk understanding assume that risk meanings are “not constructed meanings, but objectively given ones”, to quote Brian Wynne from a 2002 paper. My problem, which Wynne goes on to articulate as follow, is that these entrenched epistemic positions
“… exhaustively define the objective meaning of the public issues of technology. A striking contemporary resonance is to be found between this scholarly understanding of risk, and the predominant understanding of the domain of lack of control, or ignorance, exposed by Grove-White (2001) in an exchange with the chair of a key UK government scientific advisory committee. As a member of the UK Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission, Grove-White was questioning the institutional scientist at a public hearing. The relevant passage was as follows (Grove-White, 2001: 471):
This nicely delineates the dominant, entrenched, cultural-institutional mind-set in which any consequence that may lie outside prevailing scientific risk-knowledge cannot be described – by definition, because it is a matter of scientific ignorance – and cannot therefore be given any standing, even as a general category, of which there are many real, costly, examples. Responsibility for such possible effects is thus pre-empted and externalized, and anyone who might wish to refer to their relevance suffers from ‘a fevered brow’. The public meaning of the issue is thus very tightly confined to what we can control, practically or intellectually, with the institutionalized discourse of risk.”
Sorry, dk, wasn’t meant to characterise objections to sequestration on the basis of risk as “panic”.
That said, I do have a fair bit of sympathy with that scientist. It’s fair enough to worry about “unknown unknowns”, but the general public’s attitude to risks is often almost exactly arse-about. They worry about the million to one risk (example: I will be killed by an acolyte of Osama bin Laden) and ignore much bigger ones (I will be killed by a drunk P-plater crossing the road) precisely because they’re familiar.
I posted a while back (here) on the CCS in the Otways, which is a recent volcanic/seismic area (including a Richter 5 back in 1960). What concerns me is that there do NOT appear to be generally-agreed criteria for determining when something is seismically stable enough for CCS.
That said, gentle subduction zones (which are seismically active) seem to be good candidates for CCS. This adds complexities to developing rules.
However, the use of CCS to mitigate against the effects of burning brown coal is fairly counterproductive, from a 2007 Scientific American Article:
Surely no-one is laboring under the misapprehension that this debate is about climate change and science: per (1), it wasn’t Wong or Garrett that launched the diabolical demonstration, but Ferguson, and he couldn’t have been clearer about the parameters of his concerns:
“We must succeed on this front because Australia as a nation is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for energy,” Mr Ferguson said….” we are a fossil fuel dependent economy and our major export is coal….. There is no alternative,”
This is no Karl Popper, doing his rigorous best to demonstrate the falsity of his hypothesis.
I see on his eponymous website
It will be interesting to see how successful various electorates are at accessing that money. Batman will be right up there, you think?
He doesn’t list it as a “Current Issue” there, and he reckons elsewhere “aviation contributes just 2 per cent of greenhouse emissions” ( y’know, piffle), but the Indian press is reporting him being there, signing an MOU and discussing ” various matters relating to bilateral cooperation in tourism sector (such as ) the carbon tax imposed on the aviation sector by some developed countries to discourage emissions (being) not good for tourism.”