The report Energy and Transport Subsidies in Australia: 2007 Update re fossil fuel subsidies, released in 2007 (how time flies) can be found here

And the latest proposed, ongoing network costs have been reported widely, try here.

As for money paid by industry towards CCS, see my post at 29 for some details. Coal21 isn’t the only industry funded project. Big business also pays some of the CO2CRC bills and presumably chucks money into CSIRO’s efforts. Then there are projects such as Gorgon Island. I’m not sure of the costs, but I would be surprised if it didn’t turn out to be in the hundreds of millions for this project alone. If CSS does turn out to be a competitive technology then industry will be in for a world of costs.

These companies make tens of billions in profit each year, so they should be underwriting the costs if they want to stay in business surely?

Given that renewable energy companies are also profitable (thanks to very generous contributions from the Australian taxpayers and consumers), I would be very careful of where this line of thought might take you.

I’d suggest you look at our website, rather than rely upon the commercial news. We spend most of our time working on solutions. Last year we released a very authorative and comprehensive report that modeled how we could move away from coal, towards renewables.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve learned from reading about the science of global warming, to pay very little attention to advocacy groups be they Greenpeace or The Australian and much more attention to peer reviewed scientific journals.

But onto the broader point, I am infinitely more comfortable with Greenpeace when they are putting forward suggestions for rolling out renewables than when they attacking competing solutions.

CCS however is a problem. It is diverting resources, and attention, away from many many solutions we could implement today. As a report released a few weeks ago quantified, there are many other costs related to coal mining and combustion. CCS will not address these other real problems.

If you read the report, not just the commercial media story, it becomes illustrates that externalities of CCS aren’t much higher than winds. Unfortunately, the report lacks error bars (presumably because of a scarcity of good data) which would allow a better comparison. Additionally, organisations such as the CO2CRC and CSIRO are trying to reduce these externalities (such as substitution of amine solvents with either carbonates or amino acid solutions).

You make reference to indirect costs of an MRET. I’d make two points. Firstly, the massive infrastucture that the coal generation industry enjoys was paid for by paxpayers, and ongoing costs are paid for by taxpayers too (i.e. recent $18billion for NSW). Secondly, we released a report last year that tallied subsidies/grants etc, and it found that the fossil fuel industry gets $28 for every $1 the RE industry receives. You can find it on our website.

Much of the existing support to fossil fuels has already been paid for. Short of a time machine their isn’t much that we can do about that. As for ongoing costs, I would be very interested in a good source for this. I couldn’t find the report which you referred too, however, I am very interested in it. Could you please post the link.

Certainly they cost less than a well funded PR campaign aimed at undermining support for global warming mitigation.

Ken, that’s exactly what any money the coal industry is throwing at CCS is for. It’s an extremely cheap way of making everyone think there’s no problem with continuing to use coal. (After all, secretly that’s what we all want to believe.)

As to the rest: Peak oil has already hit us, according to Deffeyes (who ought to know) – about 2 years ago from memory. So has peak phosphorous, and peak gas isn’t too far off.

Early gas and oil finds (and some more recent offshore fields) were located by surface leakage. While newer (harder to exploit) fields are better sealed under a salt dome, typically, but anyway capped with impervious rock, they already have at least one potential point of leakage (the oil well). Would you trust the lives of yourremote descendants to the well staying sealed forever? I wouldn’t. The long-term storage problems make nuclear waste storage look easy.

The “cheating on small problems” thing is a joke, btw. “Mathematicians only look at small problems, engineers cheat to make a solution work, and computer scientists cheat on small problems.” Computer scientist are not, of course, scientists at all: we’re more like a kind of mathematician.

I’m not buying it for a minute though

P.S. How about a battle of the lost causes? Merkel vs Miles, Nukes vs CCS?

Not exactly, the CO2 concentration in a flue gas is probably around 12-15 %. In other configurations such as oxy fuels or pre combustion it is much higher. The CO2 levels in natural gas needing processing are frequently much lower. So per unit CO2 removed we need to handle less not more gas.

Your also ignoring other projects. The Gorgon Project, for example, aims to sequester about 2.7 millions tonnes of CO2 per year. This is a significant effort.

However, if the preliminary studies into CCS and demonstration plants/sites bear fruit, then massive amounts will be needed to be spent, which will cost the fossil fuel industry billions – if we make them by putting a decent price on carbon dioxide.

When will they be able to scale this up to that required to cope with the 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 emitted from Hazelwood power station every month?

CO2 has been separated from natural gas and sequestered back down into the wells for many years. There is nothing new about this. It is expensive to do, but if they do it if they have good reason to (e.g. extracting more oil from a nearly depleted well).

The big difference with CCS for power stations is that the CO2 must be extracted from much larger volumes of the burnt gas released from the chimneys.

So there are two major challenges that CCS (for coal fired power) needs to address: 1. A very large volume of CO2. 2. Extracting it from chimneys post burning.

I don’t see any problem with the coal industry pursuing this option. I have a big problem with the Australian Government paying for it, and zero consultation on this with us (the public).

Renewable energy options are clean, green, and available right now. If we also reduce demand through strict efficiency measures we could dramatically reduce our carbon emissions. Now.

Aside from neither Malthus nor the COR being hippies, Malthus’ predictions certainly haven’t come to pass this far. So far, predictions of peak oil haven’t come to pass, nor depletion of most resource. As for the COR, AFAIK, they haven’t made enough verifiable predictions to assess their accuracy.

As to CCS, there are only a few working projects in the whole world, all of them toys. (As a computer scientist, I know all about cheating on small problems … ) The volume of gas produced, even if compressed, just can’t fit into the available salt domes, etc, even if you could easily pipe it there in the first place. What if it leaks out? (Just remember how a lot of oil and gas deposits are discovered. In case you don’t know, it’s leakage.)

Well, I’m a scientist (chemistry not computers), and I know that if you want to do something complex, you start small. If you want to bury huge quantities of CO2 each year, you start off burying a small amount and use the data gathered to assess your models. You then use the data and lessons learned to refine both your theory and the methods used to bury the CO2. Next step, do it again on a bigger scale.

Can you please provide your sources for lack a geological storage locations? And evidence for leakage from the types of strata and depths at which CCS proposes?

Our comments crossed. Sorry for the duplication of information, myriad.