Yesterday Rudd officially launched the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute in Canberra.
Christine Milne:
I don’t believe that carbon capture and storage will ever be economically viable. I think renewables will leapfrog that technology in the timeframe. It is no surprise that the United States and China are working heavily on the renewables and the efficiencies, and allowing Australia to pour its money into carbon capture and storage.
To me, this is another case of corporate welfare – more subsidies to the coal industry, more attempts to keep coal central to Australia’s economic future, instead of recognising we need transformative policies that get us to a low carbon, zero carbon economy as quickly as possible.
James Hansen says we should phase out coal in developed countries by 2020 and in developing countries by 2030.
He said in his slides for the Bjerknes Lecture to the American Geophysical Union (look for his slides under the December 20, 2008 entry at his Columbia University Communications) that :
In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale (a. k. a. shale oil), I think it is a dead certainty.
By “runaway greenhouse effect” he means boiling the oceans and an atmosphere like Venus, a topic Hansen knows a bit about. A point of no return. He says there may have been times when CO2 was as high as 4,000 ppm but solar irradiance was less at that time.
This is how he sees the phaseout going:
That, he says involves some danger. It seems that it may no longer be possible to avoid danger. As I understand him that program still allows us to burn all the oil and gas. If we want less danger that requires “additional actions”.
I said in my Senate submission that we need to:
Persuade developing countries that they too should be heading for zero and to render them assistance. Just because we got rich by robbing future generations of their future doesn’t mean that they should try that too, because it simply won’t work, we’ll all go down the tube together.
It’s just that if Australia is to persuade developing countries to commit seriously, we’ll first have to become serious ourselves. We are a long way from that.
Rudd in indulging in corporate welfare, a pipe dream and is dangerously deluded.
There is no way public (our) money should be gifted to polluting industries for attempts to develop technologies that will be very expensive and ineffective in addressing climate change.
We need to reduce emissions by at least 5% every year. Starting right now.
Nobody seems to notice that temps. have been flat and cooled over the past decade and sunspots are a rarity. According to a U. of Wisconsin study, we are in for 30+ years of cooling. Russian scientists also confirm this. The whole global warming show is a massive transfer of wealth and capturing CO2 is insane. Agriculturists say a doubling of CO2 would increase crop production by a third. CO2 is a trace gas and certainly not a major greenhouse gas. Even Al Gore admits animal methane is a greater problem than CO2, but you can’t extort a lot of money out of ranchers.
gofer, there is some dead wrong stuff in what you said and the rest that I hadn’t heard is probably wrong too.
Predictions are always hazardous, but Hansen points out that we are at a solar minimum right now. He thinks we will have decisively new highs within the life of the Obama administration. The Hadley Centre I believe were making similar forecasts.
Ken Caldeira pointed out a while ago, and I’ve repeated here numerous times, that the aerosol effect of new coal-fired power stations produces net cooling in the first 7 years. Aerosols are short-term, whereas a significant proportion of CO2 is long-term, very long-term. Think about that in relation to the incredible burst of building such power stations in China and India this century.
Look at the flat-lining of temperature from about 1950-1975 as CO2 output increased after the War and smog, acid rain etc was gradually brought under control.
And look at the way CO2 and temperature have tracked each other over the last half a million years according to ice cores. Look at what happened during the PETM 55mya. You’ll have to do better, I’m afraid, to make a decent case.
If methane is crook, which it is, that doesn’t make CO2 benign in its impact on climate.
I think the government needs to look at the massive potential for emissions reductions from the technique known as Uninterrupted Carbon Storage. This technique entails letting the carbon currently stored underground in the form of coal remain underground in this form. No expenditure is required on research and development, nor on construction of expensive plant and equipment, and it has the effect of reducing carbon emissions to zero.
Brilliant, Jeremiah!
It took me a while, but I finally found a list of the members of the ‘Institute’. On the ALP web site, rather than on a Government site. We’ll have to wait and see if this information is distributed more widely, but in the interim: anyone want to take a guess at how many Australian universities are involved? Lots of private sector partners, lots of foreign governments, CSIRO, of course – but how many universities?
What a waste of money. Clean coal technology is RWDB bullshit. The money should be spent on developing and improving already proven renewable technologies that can be put into place quickly. But I guess this is what you get when you’re the world’s quarry. Carbon capture, indeed – by big business polluters.I’m disgusted.Rudd should start writing science fantasy as a sideline.
Guise .. zero? You’d be mad to strap yourself to that anchor.
Speaking of zero emissions tech. I heard Daniel Nocera speak recently. He has made a potentially very exciting breakthrough by creating a cheap, efficient, self-assembling ctalyst for splitting water and creating oxygen and hydrogen. His “electrolyzer” will even work in salt water, so could potentially create hydrogen, which when run through a fuel cell will produce electricity and as a by-product clean desalinated water. It will also work in dirty, or contaminated water. It runs at ambient temperature and pressure and neutral pH.
He sees this as the crucial missing step in solar renewables. Storage. He gave a compelling case that chemical bonds (hydrogen gas) is far more energy dense than batteries (they have fundamental limits) or pumped hydro (or any other storage medium), and so is pretty much the best candidate for storage of solar generated energy.
Another nice thing about this catalyst is that it is sort of “plug-n-play”. There are many ways you could supply the energy necessary to drive the catalytic reaction, including intimately mixing the catalyst with the semi-conductor. So there is alot of potential for clever materials engineering and perhaps using low-cost PV materials.
Thinking about the Institute on the ride in (it’s a long ride):
If CCS turns out to be cost-effective after 2030 (roughly how long it would take to sequester significant amounts of CO2), then that’s fine and CCS can compete with other technologies. I’m agnostic on this tech and don’t believe it can’t be done. I do wonder whether it can compete economically.
However, can Australia afford to wait and see on this? Absolutely not – the rest of the world would have to give us special dispensation, while the technology is tested, assessed for tech and commercial risk, and scaled up to production. If the world takes the same wait and see approach to new tech, we’re screwed – DAI >> 50:50 and that’s even without being able to pinpoint dangerous climate change with any precision.
So we need immediate investment in demand, renewables and everything else, while the economy is transformed on the scale of the industrial revolution. Therefore, this tech is not a necessary solution to climate change – it is a way to ensure that Australia’s ancient endowments retain some commercial advantage in the long term. The timing of commercial CCS would favour coal-based energy in developing countries if it can work to 90% of emissions and the remaining 10% can be sequestered in other ways.
Personally, I like Jeremiah’s approach, working in favour of Australia’s other natural endowments that are facing terminal risk.
Yes, I think the killer with CCS is time. Our appreciation that we’ve truly run out of it is fairly new, but the pollies in the major parties are stuck in a time warp.
Australia needs to decisively deal with coal and move to establish renewables as the mainstream if we are going to have any leadership and leverage in international affairs. Otherwise our position is going to be increasingly anomalous and embarrassing.
I’m curious to know how much of the coal industry’s own money is going into CPRS research, as opposed to the rather large taxpayer subsidies. Does anyone have a link?
Aidan, the problem with hydrogen is that it’s an absolute headache to store. It leaks quite rapidly from containment, involves significant energy losses in compression and/or liquefaction, and can be quite dangerous. It might have a future as a fuel in some sectors (aviation?) but I doubt it will see much use as a renewable energy storage system.
I’d agree with Roger and Brian’s comments.
However, as I’ve said squillions of times in the past, renewable tech is rather less “ready” than we’d like as well.
How much better off would we have been if we’d been throwing serious money at both over the past decade?
Yes, my chums, there are no Australian universities involved. One British uni, but no locals. And yes, you’d be mad to throw in at this early stage (possibly the universities are holding off, until they see how may strings are attached to the funding they might be able to access) but it’s still a strange omission. I wonder of it’s that the universities are waiting for the detail on the inevitably limited and prescriptive funding – or that no one in PM&C who worked on this grand plan thought it was worth talking to them …
For the record, the ‘no baseload’/intermittent meme is being dealt heavy blows at the moment.
Exhibit A: Smart Agents
Exhibit B: And peak demand management of small a/c
Viewing energy usage through ‘social facts’ like ‘baseload’ must also account for the ways in which these facts are continually made and remade by engineers and energy users, hence the impossibility of talking authoritatively about ‘business as usual.’
The really sad thing about CCS is that it is not required; answer?
Inject a shitload of fertiliser and stuff into the coal seams and wait for the bacteria that are already present to convert the coal into methane then burn the methane in a combined cycle gas turbine. Result? Vastly reduced CO2 emissions. In the meantime you can use the methane that the bugs have already made. I call it the Huggy Enhanced Methane Program (HEMP) – good for cookies too.
Huggy
One thing no-one has mentioned yet is that we need CCS or its equivalent *as well* as everything else if we are going to get CO2 back down to safe levels. Leaving it at 450ppm is going to slow the temperature rise compared to Business As Usual, but it will still happen.
Brian,
Ironic that you should be referencing Hansen in an anti-CCS post. Hansen is a big CCS supporter. He advocates a phase out of coal plants except where the CO2 is captured and sequestered (see his open letter to Rudd for example).
To me the objections to CCS don’t make a lot of sense. The fact that it might not work, and that it might be more expensive than renewables, are not valid reasons to reject it. It simply must work. We have no choice. Like it or not (and I certainly don’t), coal generated power will continue to be the dominant stationary energy source the world over in the short and medium term. That horse has bolted.
The other main objection – that it involves giving money and support to the wrong people, just sounds like sour grapes. We have to be pragmatic about this. In an ideal world, we would phase out coal immediately. But we are a long, long way from living in an ideal world. Rejecting potential solutions because they are not ideal is a recipe for disaster.
For the skeptical segment of the public to take the climate change agenda seriously, I think we need some consistency. If we are truly in such a diabolical situation as the science is telling, we should be throwing the scientific and engineering kitchen sink at the problem; not cherry picking only the nice, clean solutions that fit best into the green ideology. An emergency is an emergency.
saw this bumper sticker on google images:
CLEAN COAL IS A DIRTY LIE
says it all
I don’t reject CCS outright. Go for it coal industry – full bore. If you can make it work in a timely and cost effective manner that would be excellent.
But I do reject government and industry claims that it is an appropriate measure for addressing climate change. That’s the Dirty Lie.
So Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong, please don’t spend my/our money on corporate welfare.
I’d be more than comfortable with $100 million being thrown at CCS if the same amount was thrown at renewables development. If renewables were more developed to the point of being able to share more of the base load, the need for CCS would surely be less, would it not? Or is it simply the case that people think that renewables technology isn’t mature enough to take on a greater share of the base load today and assume that would also be the case 10, 20 or 30 years down the track? That’s the shortsightedness that the coal lobby hopes remains as the status quo for as long as possible.
I’m a bit confused about this post. If there is a significant risk of a run away greenhouse effect, then surely the only rational response is too throw everything into every possible option, not arguing against one particular option.
However, that being said, Hansen is certainly going out on a limb wrt to Venus comparisons. There are strong theoretical reasons as too why the Earth will not end up like Venus (distance from sun (however, Venus’ albedo compensates for this), lots of water (required for the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere) and atmospheric density (the absorption bands of GHG widen significantly when the pressure is increased)).
As Rasmus from Real Climate has stated:
The runaway greenhouse that presumably led to the present Venus is an extreme form of the water vapor feedback that amplifies the effect of CO2 increases on Earth. Is there a risk that anthropogenic global warming could kick the Earth into a runaway greenhouse state? Almost certainly not. For an atmosphere saturated with water vapor, but with no CO2 in it, the threshold absorbed solar radiation for triggering a runaway greenhouse is about 350 Watts/m2 (see Kasting Icarus 74 (1988)). The addition of up to 8 times present CO2 might bring this threshold down to around 325 Watts/m2 , but the fact that the Earth’s atmosphere is substantially undersaturated with respect to water vapor probably brings the threshold back up to the neighborhood of 375 Watts/m2. Allowing for a 20% albedo (considerably less than the actual albedo of Earth), our present absorbed solar radiation is only about 275 Watts/m2, comfortably below the threshold. The Earth may well succumb to a runaway greenhouse as the Sun continues to brighten over the next billion years or so, but the amount of CO2 we could add to the atmosphere by burning all available fossil fuel reserves would not move us significantly closer to the runaway greenhouse threshold. There are plenty of nightmares lurking in anthropogenic global warming, but the runaway greenhouse is not among them.
I’m a big lover of James Hansen’s scientific papers, but he does have a habit of going far beyond them when talking in the public sphere. I would be much happier if he presented his Venus comparison in a scientific journal (and a lecture at a scientific conference doesn’t count) before going to the general public.
There is an element to the CCS debate that none of you are taking into account. Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter. We exported just over $50b of the stuff over the past 12 months alone!!! If, say, coal exports were forced to end tomorrow Australia would face a balance of payments crisis, which would in turn necessitate a significant drop in imports, the exchange rate, and hence living standards. Australia simply has a large national interest in seeing CCS technology working and being used globally. As for the argument that similar amounts of money aren’t being set aside for renewables research and development, that is certainly true. But we shouldn’t forget that renewables will benefit from the 20% MRET over the next decade or so, which works out to be an implicit subsidy of well over $100 million. Note, I’m not saying that public investment in renewables R&D is at an optimal level, just that things are a little more complex than some posters are making out.
Personally, LO, I’d like to see versions of the Climate Futures Bill passed in Australian and in other jursidictions around the world. The debates around that bill were instructive to anyone wondering about what denialism truly looks like.
I think you will be waiting a long time DK!!
LO and Brett Roberson,
I was implicitly agreeing in my post that research on CCS should go ahead, so fundamentally don’t have a problem with the $100 million being spent on CCS. The principle reason, as LO said, is that it secures exports to developing countries (subject to tech, commercial and risk assessments).
The point I wanted to make most clear is that it won’t reduce Australia’s CO2 emissions at the rate needed. We need much more investment across the board (I think very little of this R&D will be wasted in the long run). dk@14 with the smart agents / demand management argument is also spot on. This has been run to discount renewables, when it is growing clearer that smart application of renewables and co-gen can be used to build a better power generation and distribution system.
(20) “I’d be more than comfortable with $100 million being thrown at CCS if the same amount was thrown at renewables development.” & LO “the 20% MRET over the next decade or so, which works out to be an implicit subsidy of well over $100 million.”
Actcherly Mar’n Fer’s'n and his chronies will be just now deciding who to lash out $435 million on via the Renewable Energy Demonstration Program which applications closed for the day before yesterday. Unless it’s been a done good ole boys deal from the word go, and they just need some time for seemliness. $435 million to spend in one year, “subject to the availability of suitable demonstration projects”, that’s quite a splash in search of political capital.
“REDP aims to stimulate over $1 billion worth of investment in renewable energy technology, with the private sector contributing at least $2 for every $1 provided by the Program. The objective of the REDP is to accelerate the commercialisation and deployment of new renewable energy technologies for power generation in Australia by assisting the demonstration of these technologies on a commercial scale”
It was one for the big boys, the word was unless you were good for coughing 20 million at least, don’t bother. Yet another way the taxpayer can fill Origin, Nacquarie, etc’s coffers? It will be just plain wrong if Old King Coal manages yet another fiddle, and plunders the fund at the expense of the Ausra, Carnegie (wave-power), and any number of boring old wind, etc, players, who could do with funds to get to scale, quite ready to get on with the job.
Speaking of green capital formation: Carnegie’s share price has more than doubled this year, they went into a trading halt last week, prolly a good sign. As would be the fact that Mar’n picked their plant to announce the green-spend being on. And just after they scored 12 mill from the WA government, which they could presumably leverage into the Feds funding. Get onto Carnegie now, they will spike when their Fed grant is announced.
Ausra was a victim of the Howard years, driven offshore by by the lack of venture capital here. Rann and Bligh have visited their US operations, hopefully they didn’t waste their time, and some sensible play got set up. They kept an office and a governemnt relations type here, so they probably will score from the REDP, it would be too stupid and embarassing otherwise: it’s good enough for Arnie and Pacific Gas and electric, but not here? It’s a private company at the moment, so you can’t put your money in there, directly anyway, shame really.
Brett @ 17 and Ken Miles @ 21, sorry I couldn’t be here this afternoon. I’m seldom here in the afternoons. It’s a bit late tonight, so I’ll have to come back tomorrow night.
I did highlight Christine Milne’s comment to set up the post and because I thought she was taking an interesting line. For my part I was anti-coal rather than anti-CCS, but if you don’t have coal you don’t need CCS.
So an interesting question is whether we can do without coal entirely, or will it be needed in some niche applications, such as making steel? I don’t have the technical knowledge to answer that one. If we need coal at all we need CCS.
My own worries about CCS are several. The mass of CO2, being about 3.2 times the mass of coal, is huge and getting the stuff to a suitable disposal site would seem a problem.
Secondly liquifying it uses quite a bit of power, I understand, and without liquification the volume is huge. I understand the liquid is nasty stuff so you’d want to be careful where you put it.
I did know that Hansen favoured CCS. He always used to put in that proviso. But in his Bjerknes Lecture and at Copenhagen he didn’t mention it. I wondered whether his position had changed, as it does from time to time.
Your other comments about Hansen’s views are interesting, Ken, but I really have to hit the sack tonight.
Truescientist (comment deleted), your comments are a waste of cyberspace. Please go way.
Hi Brian,
I’m pretty sure that you won’t be able to find a substitute for carbon in steel making. However, that being said, CCS is more applicable for use in steel production than it is for power stations because of the higher CO2 concentration in the waste gas stream.
For me, it isn’t a question of whether or not CCS is a viable technology. It is. The capture of CO2, the compression, the transport and the storage are all done in different technologies today. The real question is, can it compete with alternatives on the basis of costs. At the moment, no – but perhaps the research can change this. If so, that’s great. If not….
I’m pretty sure that the compression and transport costs aren’t the issue. We have been compressing and transporting gases for a long time now and have an excellent idea for the costs. The big bugbear is the cost of capturing the carbon dioxide from the waste gases. This is the biggest component cost that will have to come down significantly if CCS is too prosper.
I would like to see the government do two things a) increase research funding for all low emissions technologies significantly and b) implement legislation that puts a price on carbon dioxide emissions. And after that, let the best technology win on the market place.
I seem to post this calculation about once a year:
In other words, 16 cubic kilometres per day.
Its not gonna happen.
Labor Outsider @ 22 once again demonstrates how thoroughly sensible and rational he is.
If Australia stopped exporting coal tomorrow it would crash the economy. It would be the GFC times ten. The economic damage would be intolerable.
But, given that CCS just isn’t practical on a global scale (see post 30) its also true that if Australia doesn’t stop exporting coal by (say) 2020, catastrophic climate change is inevitable.
Therefore its insane for Australia to keep exporting coal and its insane for Australia to stop exporting coal.
There’s really no way out of this. Labor Outsider is both 100% right and 100% wrong at the same time.
The planet is gonna burn.
Well, you’re probably right, carbonsink, at least I can’t fault your logic. The bottom line, though, is that we are going to need to find another way of earning our keep.
The update MRET is interesting. I think there is legislation in the pipeline, is there not?
On Hansen and runaway warming, he seems to have overreached. There is plenty scary stuff in prospect without it, as Rasmus said. The Copenhagen talk (large pdf) seems to be an update of the Bjerknes Lecture. But there are 9 joint authors listed in all. Perhaps someone sorted him out because the Venus bit doesn’t appear.
But on p8 (chart 14) he says, “But let’s say we phase out coal…” On p9 (chart 15) he talks about phasing out coal mining, saying that it is a big source of methane. On p17 (chart 27) he talks of phasing out coal emissions linearly from 2010 to 2030. On p16:
No mention of CCS anywhere, so I’ll be watching with interest.
Wikipedia has an article on Carbon capture and storage which says, inter alia:
My worry is that the cheap solution promised will remain promised and that the coal polluters will use it to carry on regardless.
Carbonsink, your calculations assume that the CO2 goes into the ground at atmospheric pressure. Every single CCS plan involves pressuring the CO2. This means that your calculations are literally orders of magnitude out.
Brian at #32, I would agree that cheap CCS isn’t going to happy. I strongly suspect that the Coal Utilisation Research Council is absolutely dreaming when they state:
“by 2025, with sufficient and focused RD&D identified in the Roadmap, combustion and gasification-based power generation options can be available commercially – with the ability to capture and sequester CO2 – at a cost of electricity equal to the cost of new power generation (without CO2 capture) today.”
But…. what you’ve got to keep in mind is that coal power is extraordinary cheap (if you ignore the externalities). Whacking on a significant percentage doesn’t stop the coal from being unaffordable (unless you allow the power generators to ignore the environmental damage).
Ken Miles is right. Carbon sequestration is an attack on the nation of Australia, since its a powerful waste of our hydro-carbons. Quite apart from the wider scandal being motivated by a rebellion from science and the scientific method, the whole idea of carbon sequestration flies in the face of authentic sustainability. and all notions of hazard-reduction. It ought not be considered under any circumstances. And its a flat outright evil proposal. Carbon sequestration ought to be off the table for discussion. It just means going round and round in circles over what is after all a non-starter.
Pan, you’ve misinterpreted what I’m saying. I’m a supporter of CCS.
I didn’t misinterpret your tribal commitments Mr Miles. Irrationality is not relevant here. I was just confirming what you were saying about the costs involved. The rest of what you had to say was neither here not there. And its not as if you are going to justify it. I don’t know how you manage to insert your whims as being deeply and powerfully front and center concerns here.
He’s got you there Ken. Maybe its about time you justified this scare story from the ground up? It couldn’t hurt to get back to basics. The argument usually seems to start mid-range. The immaculate conception of a non-problem. If it cannot be justified from the ground up it cannot be judged at all.
Pan and Theban, this is weird. I thought Pan had mistaken Ken for Labor Outsider.
If you want to talk about an attack on Australia you have to think long-term as well as short. Have a look at the graphic of Australia at the end of this post. That, according to David Spratt, is the ultimate direction of our policies. Certainly if we do nothing about coal we are looking at temperatures by the end of the century that imply an unacceptable risk of that sort of outcome over the centuries to come.
But seeing how that link is just lies, ridiculous and the wrong direction, how can it possibly be relevant? Thats not the same as justifying anything from the ground up Brian. All that is doing, is throwing some idiotic make-believe into the picture. We are cooling. And you show me a picture of Australia covered with water? Ought you not have showed me a picture of Canada with the ice sheets on the move? You’ve just shown me a picture of Australia as if the ice in Antarctica has melted. Since that cannot happen what relevancy does that picture have?
Theban, you disappoint me. Just a garden variety delusionist.
You might like to have a look at the temperature anomalies for 2008 relative to 1951-1980. It has been coolish in parts of Canada, indeed also in parts of the Americas and the Eastern Pacific. But I haven’t heard of any actual advancing ice sheets. Just a lot on very inconvenient snow piled as high as the first story of my sister’s place in Toronto.
But look at Siberia, where the permafrost is going soft and the methane bubbling away.
The Central Pacific, actually. White means neutral on the map.
Obviously. But you still need to capture 16 cubic kilometres per day, and compress 16 cubic kilometres per day (requiring vast amounts of energy), then pipe still very large volumes (say 100x smaller? Anyone know?) of compressed CO2 hundreds of kilometres away to suitable sequestration sites.
The infrastructure requirements are monumental. It would be far, far cheaper to build nukes. The nuclear waste produced by an equivalent number of nuclear power stations would be orders of magnitude easier and cheaper than CCS, and we know how problematic storing nuclear waste as become.
All of this has to be paid for when there is no economic incentive to do so, unless by some miracle the politicians put a very high price on carbon emissions.
Its simply not going to happen.
Humanity is not very good at punishing itself for consuming stuff it likes. e.g. energy. We are, however, extremely good at creating investment bubbles. So lets create the mother of all cleantech bubbles and feed it until it bursts. Hopefully it will leave us with something useful.
Its the only way forward.
Ewww. Looks like this thread has become infected with
denialistsdelusionists.Brian @ 32:
Its delusional to think otherwise. People cope with the reality of our situation in different ways. Some deny the existence of the problem, most ignore it completely, some believe in a miraculous techno-fix, and some believe we’ll geo-engineer the problem away after we (finally) realise that we’ve stuffed the planet.
All these views are pretty naive in my opinion.
We being Australia? How about we throw $42 billion at a cleantech bubble instead of handing it to consumers so they can splurge on a plasma telly? Imagine if the average Mum and Dad investor was enthused about investing in cleantech as they are in investing in real estate?
Looks like it’s time for a couple of quotes from the Comments Policy.
Heh, someone hasn’t worked out how filters identify a unique poster with a different nym. Time to buy a clue, sockpuppet.
I don’t have a problem with public funding of RD&D in CCS, but Australian CCS policy seems to be based on “picking winners” – a bad idea.
I don’t believe that carbon capture and storage will ever be economically viable. I think renewables will leapfrog that technology in the timeframe.
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Shut up you hippie!!!
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Coal is for the good of ‘Straya. I’ve got mates in the coal industry. What? Of course they don’t actually mine coal. That’s for dirtbags. They’re my mates in the union and my mates in the boardroom. We’re workin’ for the good of ‘Straya.
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It’s for ‘Straya’s good that we keep our mates rich at the expense of great progress in energy creation. It’s for ‘Straya’s good that our business and politicial leaders haven’t the imagination to see a great wad of desert in the middle of nowhere as a potential source of the cheapest, cleanest energy we’ve ever had. Imagination is for pouftas. ‘Straya’s about mateship.
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So I said to me mate at the Find Ways For Big Coal Ta Make Even More Dosh Institute – Maaaatte! Have a 100 mill maatte.
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It’s for the good of ‘Straya.
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Give us a $100 mill and we’ll give Richmond a better side next year.
How does one avoid ‘picking winners’ when picking benchmarks (eg. choosing what counts and what doesn’t count as an externality) are themselves value-laden activities?
Pan / Theban sounds like Graeme Bird.
Onya dk.au! Peter, I think (unfashionable though it might be) that values are unavoidable and it is no bad thing to strive to remake the world in a fashion that we envisage in our imagination. There is always a utopian dimension to public policy IMHO.
CCS isn’t going to happen. It is a pathetic attempt to spin a dirty polluting climate and planet wrecking industry into something else.
Why should the Australian (or any other) taxpayer pay for this nonsense?
When were the Australian people asked to spend $billions on CCS nonsense rather than renewable energy and clean tech (where the real jobs are)?
CCS is a government/industry joke on all of us that is not very funny. It is also a fundamental failure of our democracy that is gouged out of our pockets by politicians abetted by the Greenhouse Mafia.
carbonsink @ 44, not infected by a plurality but by one appearing as many as it turned out.
I ggoled and came up short. I did find out that liquid natural gas is 615 times smaller by volume than the gas.
I also came up with this:
Maybe you can work it out from that.
It seems that Victoria leads the way with carbon storage.
They already have a nice report for you to download.
It does appear that CO2 is injected “as a high pressure, relatively dense fluid.”
That’s nice for Victoria. They have some suitable sequestration sites that are relatively close (<100km?) to existing coal deposits and power stations. In NSW, and most other locations in the world, they have no such luck. Last I heard, they would have to pipe the CO2 over the Great Divide in NSW.
Of course it does, but it doesn’t come out of the smokestack in a convenient liquid form.
carbonsink, as I understand it there is a similar problem in Queensland with the initial sequestration site inland in Central Queensland.
Brian,
CO2 will be injected as a supercritical fluid not a liquid. So it will be at least 74 bar.
The CO2 phase diagram can be seen here.
Carbonsink,
Your way of presenting the CCS hurdles is flawed. Any calculation for any low emission technology which assumes a global response will come up with a massive jaw dropping number. The world is a big place.
A much better way of looking at it, is to examine the costs of not emitting or removing one unit of CO2. For example, in lots of the CCS economics scientific literature they use cost per ton of CO2 avoided – this allows a rational comparison of competing technologies.
I understand it there is a similar problem in Queensland with the initial sequestration site inland in Central Queensland.
One of the themes in CCS economics work is site specificity.
The costs of CCS vary enormously depending on the site and source of the emissions.
This is one reason why a market place approach should work best. Let hoards of independent engineers work out what low emission technology works best in a given area.
Ken, on site specificity, I heard some time ago that certain sites in India were being investigated because of the proximity of suitable basalt, I think it was.
If you’ve got time, can you wrap a few words around what the difference between “supercritical fluids” and “liquids” is and why it matters? It would save a lot of googling for the non-technical among us.
Present it any way you like. The volume of CO2 emitted per unit of energy produced is always going to be jaw-dropping compared to the volume of (say) nuclear waste generated for the same amount of energy.
Not that I’m advocating nukes, but its certainly a better option for Australia than CCS: We have a lot of uranium, and we have a lot of sparsely populated, geologically stable land to store the relatively tiny amounts of waste.
As others have pointed out, we also have a lot of sun, a lot of wind, and a lot of geothermal potential, none of which is being exploited at the moment because we have a coal industry to protect.
Ideally, our government would put a high price on carbon and the market would determine which is the cheapest way to reduce our emissions. If they were to do that my guess is CCS funding would evaporate and you’d see a lot investment in natural gas and wind. But clearly our government is not prepared to put a (reasonable) price on carbon. Instead, they are picking winners, and picking coal + CCS.
As I’ve stated above, my view is we need to engineer a cleantech investment bubble, and funnel all this cheap money sloshing around at the moment away from consumption and into clean technologies.
Brian, when a material is elevated above a certain temperature and pressure (about 300K and 73 atmospheres for CO2) it transforms into a state of matter where the barriers between a liquid and a gas breakdown. For example, it is extremely difficult to compact a liquid, whereas, a supercritical fluid can easily be compressed like a gas. Unlike a gas, supercritical fluid can act as an excellent solvent.
If you drink decaff then you’ve probably had some indirect exposure to supercritical CO2. Here the supercritical fluid is used to dissolve the caffeine out of the coffee. The CO2 can then be easily removed by reducing the pressure which causes the supercritical CO2 to convert to a gas.
If we stop burning coal we don’t have to worry about (or pay for) sequestion from gas form of the CO2 produced by burning it.
We leave it safely sequestered in stable form – right where it is.
If we stop burning coal we don’t have to worry about (or pay for) sequestion from gas form of the CO2 produced by burning it.
We leave it safely sequestered in stable form – right where it is.
But if the costs of sequestering it are less than the alternatives, then everybody wins.
How do find out which is cheaper when the government won’t put a price on carbon, but throws money at CCS research?
There’s also the niggling little problem of whether the CO2 will stay sequestered. No doubt Ken has all the confidence of a Chernobyl engineer that everything is 100% guaranteed for eternity.
Carbonsink, the planned emission trading scheme will effectively put a price on carbon dioxide emissions. Sure it isn’t high enough, but considering past governments attitudes, it is a massive step in the right direction.
Personally I can’t believe all of the complaints about research funding.
As far as I’m concerned, CO2 emissions are the problem and new technologies are the solution. My hope is that the best technology (or more likely suite of technologies) wins. I don’t really care if it is CCS, nuclear, hot rocks, wind or whatever else. If you don’t think that renewables get enough funding, then lobby the government for more money for renewables, maybe try to find employment within a renewable firm, or perhaps start up your own renewable company. Don’t think that carbon will be priced at a high enough rate, then lobby for the rate to be increased. But attacking another competing technology because you don’t like it is simply counter productive.
As for the safety factor, isn’t this why we do research?
Ergo, its not effective at achieving its goal, namely, reducing carbon emissions to a point that the climate can be stabilised.
Because the coal industry is already heavily subsidised, and to the best of my knowledge, Australia is not spending $100M on a global renewables institute.
Its obvious that the reason the big money is being spent on CCS is not because its the most promising technology, its because Australia has the most to lose if coal cannot be burned cleanly.
Ergo, its not effective at achieving its goal, namely, reducing carbon emissions to a point that the climate can be stabilised.
When was its declared goal to stabilise the climate?
Rather it, like Kyoto, is one of many steps in the right the direction
Because the coal industry is already heavily subsidised, and to the best of my knowledge, Australia is not spending $100M on a global renewables institute.
The Renewable Energy Fund aims to spend $100 million this year and another $400 million the year after.
And that’s just part of the Federal government funding. The states chuck in more as well. For example Victoria is throwing in another $100 million for a solar power plant.
And all of this ignores the massive indirect subsidises to renewables in the form of the Mandatory Energy targets.
No it won’t. The price it is projected to put on carbon emissions will be below the threshold for making wind and large scale solar competitive with coal.
It will be way too low. It needs to be $50 per tonne minimum, $80 per tonne would be better.
It is not a “massive step in the right direction”. It is a cunning subterfuge that in reality does nothing, for considerable cost.
This is a policy failure that could cost us the planet. Politics really cannot deliver an adequate solution or approach for tackling climate change. The Liberals are still locked in various stages of denial, while Labor is clearly hostage to fossil fuel and union interests.
Peterc, even if the cost of emissions isn’t enough to make renewables competitive it doesn’t make the scheme a wash. Energy saving conservation measures will become more competitive. Hence the scheme will reduce emissions.
Perhaps just as importantly, the scheme will introduce a regulatory framework from which the price on carbon can be later increased as global warming skepticism dies an ugly death.
Additionally, people who feel that the price of permits is too low can simply buy the cheap permits and not use them.
Ken, they are giving away large amounts of permits to the worst polluters for free. This provides no incentives for efficiency or conservation where they are really needed – such as switching from coal to gas or wind for example.
Indidividuals buying permits will be a drop in the ocean compared to what the big end of town is being gifted. Contrary to Garnaut’s recommendations. Remember him? Labor seems to have forgotten that during the 2007 election they said 2020 targets and emissions trading would be based on his comprehensive study.
Well, they have ignored his prime recommendations. Hence the corrupted and futile CPRS.
Energy conservation measures are not encouraged in any form. The reverse is the case as the high cap is also a high floor – so emissions are not reduced, they are reallocated.
Peterc @ 68, I think Guy Pearse would agree with you.
Ken Miles @ 61, thanks for the information on supercritical fluids. I’d guess that the CO2 would be piped in gas form to the injection point and then compressed etc for storage. But what happens to the temperature and pressure once it’s in the ground? I guess that is what the research is for, but it sounds as though you’d need very special conditions.
Ken @ 67:
How about this?
It comes from the Leaders Debate before the election via Macintosh and Woldring. It’s just that the basis of Rudd’s policy doesn’t stand up as I pointed out in my Senate submission.
It would be smarter to clean up fossil fuel fired power stations by using solar thermal augmentation. Can start small, build up to provide most of the daytime heat and then evolve to provide 100% of the heat by using molten salt heat storage.
The real case for CO2 sequestration is in industries such as cement and steel. These industries are significant sources of CO2 but, unlike power generation there is no equivalent of wind and solar power to avoid the problem.
There is also the problem of countries who don’t have the option of wind etc power. CO2 sequestration may be the best option for them.
Ken @ 67 – woot.
No-one is taking this seriously, least of all our various governments.
Found a defacto GCCSI homepage!
The ‘meetings’ link especially has a lot of information.
gold!!
GLOBAL CARBON CAPTURE and STORAGE INSTITUTE Legal structure and governance – Discussion Paper Confidential and Not For Distribution [pdf]
duly Scrapbooked…