Four Corners on clean coal
September 8th, 2009 by Robert Merkel | Published in Climate change, Economics, Energy, Environment, USA | 87 Comments
There’s not a lot new or surprising in the Four Corners report on “clean coal” last night. We’ve talked about FutureGen and the US House report into its demise before.
One thing that did strike me, however, is the rhetoric Barack Obama used in his campaign speech to convince his listeners that clean coal is possible. From the transcript:
LIZ JACKSON: But last year the political realities changed. The United States elected a president who campaigned on the need to address global warming. He combined this with a “yes we can” attitude to clean coal technology.
BARACK OBAMA: I believe in global warming, it is true that the planet is getting warmer and we have to deal with it, but this is America, we figured out to put on a man on the moon in 10 years, you can’t tell me we can’t figure out to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States and make it work. We can do that.
The Apollo Program often comes up in discussions about responses to climate change, particularly in the US context. Apollo remains an inspiring example of engineering achievement. But the analogy between putting somebody on the moon, and the task we face, are rather less strong than is commonly supposed.
Apollo, for all its complexity, was one single engineering program to invent and deploy a coordinated set of technologies for a single, well-defined goal, with (at least initially), virtually no restrictions on the budget available. Apollo, in its organization and task, is actually rather similar to the model pioneered in the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear weapons – which, whatever you think of its consequences, was a resoundingly successful example of project management. Given such a task, the US has indeed demonstrated the ability to make this kind of model of technological development work.
The task currently faced, however, is completely different. The problem is immensely more complex; there are many fundamentally different sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and they will be tackled in different ways. There won’t be a “launch moment”; while there will be milestone achievements along the way, there will be many, many of them. Nor is the basic architecture of the solutions at all clear; by 1960 it was obvious that multi-stage chemical rocketry would form the basis of space travel for at least the medium-term future. We don’t have anything like the same level of assurance when it comes to rearchitecting our energy systems.
The final, and perhaps the most significant, difference, is that neither the Manhattan nor the Apollo projects were required to deliver cost-effective solutions, and neither of them came close. Nor have subsequent examples of American government procurement programs, as is demonstrated by the habitual cost blowouts on defence procurement – and, for that matter, any number of post-Apollo NASA programs.
There is one very clear analogy between Apollo and the FutureGen program, however. After virtually all of the hard work was done, Apollo was scaled back and eventually killed for nickel and dime amounts; the promised replacement of the Space Shuttle has delivered bugger-all for huge outlays. FutureGen died for lack of a few hundred million dollars; in the context of the costs related to climate change, a few hundred million US dollars is essentially noise. But it would have told the USA, and the entire world, a great deal about whether the dream of coping with climate change without inflicting pain on coal mining communities, and coal company shareholders, has any basis in reality. And that’s a real shame.
Elsewhere: Opinion Dominion also watched, and thought the program was rather soft on clean coal.
Interesting that you should identify the status of Apollo in the American, and global imagination. I guess its level of state-sponsored techno-spectacle is without precedence. But it’s funny that Obama didn’t say, “You can get a computer from Best Buy for less than two thousand dollars that is as powerful as the most powerful computers in the world ten years ago, so we can do anything”, which is also an amazing achievement, probably more meaningful in terms of daily life, and yet doesn’t capture the imagination in the same way.
Robert Merkel says:
You missed the biggest difference: unity of political will.
Apollo was essentially a military project run by one state with a contained and unified chain of command. Green technologies are civilian projects run by several states with multiple and overlapping chains of command.
The world, at the moment, lacks a legitimate global agency to assert and execute a unified political will in this matter. Hopefully various national authorities will sacrifice some of their sovereignty to global authorities to solve this ecological threat. In much the same way as various provincial authorities gave up most of their sovereignty to national authorities to solve political threats eg the German states, Italian provinces etc.
Robert Merkel says:
The Manhattan Project was very cost-effective. It won the war against Nippon about a year earlier than mid-range conventional projections. Operation Downfall was planned to finish in Spring 1946, with astronomical casualties projected for both sides.
It also stopped the Red Army dead in its tracks in both Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Kind of expensive when you think of the cost of losing South Korea or Austria.
More generally, Eisenhower tended to favour nuclear armament and secret intelligence services as a lower-cost global security alternative. Which explains why he was so nervous about the more conventional military-industrial complex.
You are also not quite right that Apollo was immune from cost-benefit analysis. The aim of Apollo was to beat the Soviets to the Moon (for propaganda reasons) and to overtake the Soviet’s presumed superiority in missile technology (largely based on their earlier utilisation of captured Wermacht weapons designers and plans).
The Apollo project achieved these two aims. Soviets dropped out of the space race, and more generally moved away from a reliance on ICBM’s in the Arms Race.
The Arms Race then shifted to another front, IRBM’s. The USSR moved SS18′s into the Warsaw Pact which were also countered by Reagan moving Pershing missiles into NATO. The rest, as they say, is History.
Yes, I thought the same thing as Robert about Obama’s comments on the show last night. There is no comparison. (If, on the other hand, he had said something like “of course we can lead the world in urgently developing innovative nuclear power technology which will safely supply clean energy for centuries”, it might have been half comparable.)
But with what he did say, it displays the shallowness of much of his “hope” rhetoric.
As for the rest of the show: my impression was that it was softer on “clean coal” than it could have been, in that it did not detail adequately the practical difficulties. For example, there was no discussion of the number of geologically suitable sequestration sites in the States (or China or Australia), the transportation costs of getting it from a retro-fitted power station to the sequestration sites, etc.
Jack #2, my understanding is that the Pershing II missiles were deployed in NATO in response to the USSR’s deployment of SS20s rather than SS18s. Mikhail Gorbachev in his memoirs characterises the decision to deploy the SS20s as a textbook example of everything which was wrong with the CPSU’s decision-making in the later Brezhnev years.
I suspect it’s more Challenger than Apollo.
You have to be impressed that Jackson got Marn Ferguson, Minister for Resources on live and unusually blunt for a reputed climate sceptic. Still I’d love to know what negotiation took place for that interview to occur. I would have thought Marn would have insisted on talking about the Otway CCS demonstration site, tiny in the scheme of things but at least up and running, or should that be sequesting.
Agree with SfB that the transporting of liquefied CO2 didn’t get much of a run. For example the big Hunter Valley coal power generators are some 700 kms from the best and nearest burial sites in Queensland’s Darling Downs.
I suppose it is a bit of a relief that after last night’s 4 Corners more people will know clean coal technology is bull-shit. Though the politicians will, of course, keep lying to us about it.
They have to keep lying about clean coal Paul@7 becauase if they didn’t the next question would be how to ensure the alliance between enviros and miners could last. No clean coal means the ALP is against jobs in coal mining, and they aren’t about to wear that as political baggage.
This is why CCS is so popular with governments everywhere. Huge piece of cognitive dissonance and porkbarrel
Interestingly, coal itself as an energy source may not last all that long.
Here’s what Professor Mackay says
Fran @9: “If the growth rate is 3.4% per year (the growth rate over the last decade), the end of business-as-usual is coming before 2072. Not 250 years, but 60!”
Excellent point, Fran.
Unfortunately, the same story applies to oil reserves.
Consumption has been growing at about 2-3% pa (excluding the GFC). Estimates of years supply from global reserves have historically assumed BAU (i.e. OECD consumption data), NOT massive sustained growth in Asia (China, India, Indonesia and SE Asian tiger economies).
I was politely scorned for a question about this, at a conference in Melbourne in 1990, and would love to rub that CEO’s nose in the data today.
There are two problems with estimates of BAU in oil supplies. The first is the growth rates. The second is that while we may have some oil production for decades (often stated by oil company execs), it will be at much reduced rates (rarely stated by the execs).
Oil recovery from reservoirs rises to a peak, then plateaus for some years, then goes into decline. The “life” of the field is much longer than the period at peak/plateau rates. The collective data for multiple fields smears the peak out, but the overall effect is still the same.
We will be wringing out the last barrels, so to say, for much of the projected future decade/s of “oil production”. The price curve will be interesting, to say the least.
This has important implications for a transport industry dependent on petroleum-based fuels, which oil companies usually aren’t keen to discuss. I’m not sure that even Martin Ferguson is keen to discuss it.
Robert, you’ve put your finger rather solidly on a main problem (one of many, really) of Obama’s, um, habit of mind — if we can call it that. Not that I expect you to genuinely learn anything from your semi-random discovery of yet some more White House bullshit reasoning.
Hey, maybe Van Jones can solve these problems for the big O! He’s a techno-kind of guy, right? Law school, “human rights” activism, y’know, all the big engineering issues!
Sometimes I think you guys need to take and pass the JPZ Cultural Literacy Test before you post on American politics, just so you really know how many jokers are in the deck.
Don’t look for a crib-sheet in the NYT, sadly they’re distracted these days: too busy practicing their new signature as “Mrs. The New York Times-Obama” to be of any use. Oh well.
Who remembers Dr Karl at the last election saying something about there not being enough space to store it all underground???? He later had to correct himself but it seemed strange that he would get his figures so worng… Remind me: what happened in the end with that saga!
He later had to correct himself but it seemed strange that he would get his figures so worng… Remind me: what happened in the end with that saga!
He listened to Tim Flannery.
AFAIK, his correction was the end of the saga.
I thought that the program was pretty good. I do, however, have some small issues:
a) ignored a lot of Australian geosequestration research/projects.
b) paid too much attention to Joe Rohm and not enough to Howard Herzog.
c) mentioned that CCS won’t happen without a price on carbon, which is fair enough. But this applies to all low carbon technologies.
jayperz, you have a thesis implied somewhere in the middle of your snark. Would you like to elucidate it explicitly, perhaps?
KenM@14
Yes but the focus of the program was the viability/probability of CCS, not all other low carbon technologies. None of these is getting the research money CCS is getting proportionately from the Australian government and no other is as far into the never never as is CCS.
And while the others will require a price on carbon, they won’t have the same prospects of abject failure.
Yes but the focus of the program was the viability/probability of CCS, not all other low carbon technologies.
The viability of CCS is directly related to costs relative to other low emission technologies.
None of these is getting the research money CCS is getting proportionately from the Australian government and no other is as far into the never never as is CCS.
Renewables are hardly badly funded. Especially when you throw in other indirect aid such as MRET.
And while the others will require a price on carbon, they won’t have the same prospects of abject failure.
In my mind, it is difficult to think of a low emission future which doesn’t have a significant contribution from either nuclear or CCS. To arbitary rule out a potential solution is an incredibly poor choice to make.
Ken Miles@17
CCS cannot be part of a low-emissions future so the pairing with nuclear is misleading.
I also don’t agree with your implication that renewables are wellfunded compared with CCS, if that was indeed what you were implying. The MRET was and is modest.
Did anyone else notice that while the commenters on the Four Corners report all said CCS needed a price on carbon, NOT ONE OF THEM was game to say the price that would be needed to make CCS fly?
It should be perfectly obvious to anyone with some technical background that the various bits of CCS/geosequestration are established technology. We are not really looking at TECHNICAL feasibility in getting CO2 into the ground, as such.
There are still issues with the technical feasibility of keeping it there, indefinately, which were not adequately canvassed in the report, to my mind. The whole point is that it has to stay there indefinately, because if it gets out (regardless of how slowly), all the hard work sweeping-it-under-the-carpet is undone and our atmospheric CO2 levels will rise accordingly.
We do still have a major LOGISTICAL issue with the total volumes to be stored, and also the locations of suitable storage relative to power station locations, if coal-fired power were to continue for another 100 years or whatever. This was not adequately canvassed in the report either.
The killer question is really whether it makes ECONOMIC sense, compared with our other alternatives.
We need to know the price of CCS compared with other alternatives – CAPEX for building the plants, and OPEX (and breakeven carbon pricing) for running the plants at a profit. Yep, those guys will still be wanting to make a profit.
Why didn’t Four Corners press these economic issues, especially the breakeven carbon pricing, much harder?
Anyone like to bet that the coal companies have a good idea of the approximate pricing figures, and that is why they are hastening in the reverse direction from committing their own hard-earned on a fool’s errand?
Price of CCS:
I found this in an article from The Economist: “Last year, the IEA suggested that the price for the first big plants would be $40-90. McKinsey, a consultancy, has arrived at an estimate of €60-90, or $75-115.
Either way, that is more than the price of emissions in the European Union: about €10 a tonne. America does not have a carbon price at all yet. A bill defeated last year in the Senate would have yielded a carbon price as low as $30 in 2020, according to an official analysis. So CCS might not be financially worthwhile for years to come.”
Link is here: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=13226661
If those estimates are true, then a carbon price of $30/tonne to $40/tonne will not make CCS viable.
How much were Rudd/Wong proposing for our carbon price?
Wow Fran, you are everywhere on this issue… I see you popping up all over the place. You should start a blog of your own! :)
On the program, so what? Old news, old story. Burning coal is probably the easiest and cheapest way of generating lots of electricity because the cost of dumping CO2 into the environment is zero. Until that changes then nothing changes and which government is prepared to do that? Carbon capture and sequestration is a (pun coming) pipe dream and the arguments about alternatives to coal unfortunately also suffer if carbon pollution continues unpriced.
What is amazingly stupid about the whole blatantly shitty self serving politics is that the longer we fixate on crap like ccs the less time and money we have to bring genuine alternatives online, which of course is exactly what big coal wants. Protests from coal and electricity utilities that they are looking after our needs for electricity is complete bullshit. They are looking after their profitability first. We come second and the planet doesn’t appear on the balance sheet.
A program called ‘The Coal Nightmare’ can’t be all that soft on clean coal. I thought, however, it was badly promoted in a way that suggested that clean coal was failing for lack of investment. The program makes pretty clear, however, that that lack of investment falls at the feet of the industry itself. That’s an important point because, although I don’t think CCS is viable in a timeframe that will see it contribute to a climate solution, I have no objection to the polluters paying to research how their product could be made safer – if they can’t come up with the goods quickly, coal must be abandoned, and power stations like Hazelwood switched off. I do object, however, to governments pouring billions into CCS when they should be getting behind a broad mix of renewables that are either ready to go or much closer to successful development than CCS. That’s a point made in Climate Action, the new book from Mark Diesendorf, who was interviewed for the program. I would have have liked to see more of him and more of this kind of point made.
“Yes but the focus of the program was the viability/probability of CCS, not all other low carbon technologies. None of these is getting the research money CCS is getting proportionately from the Australian government and no other is as far into the never never as is CCS.”
What about the 20% MRET Fran? Given that renewables wouldn’t get close to a 20% share by 2020 without a very large subsidy, your statement is in the very least misleading. Other renewables are getting a smaller proportion of the research pie, but a much large proportion of the deployment subsidy pie. Given that CCS does not fall within the MRET, the only way for the government to support it is through large amounts of direct RD&D subsidies. Talking about CCS being unviable at current carbon prices would be like abolishing the MRET and then saying renewables aren’t competitive at current carbon prices. Well yes, but so what?
There is a very good reason why Australian governments are seeking to invest so much in CCS, and in particular determine whether it is viable. Australia has very large, relatively cheap to exploit coal reserves that make the largest contribution of any single good or service to Australia’s trade balance. If CCS turns out not to be viable in Australia or elsewhere, and high carbon prices become a reality in both the west and China and India, the economic implications for Australia will be very significant. It would be short-sighted of the government not to be ploughing money into CCS research, development, demonstration and deployment.
Elise, it is a bit strange to quote the IEA range for CCS and not mention that the IEA is a big advocate for CCS and sees it as a technology that could make a large contribution to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
The discussion of carbon prices is also highly misleading. It is not the spot price that matters for investment, but the expected carbon price over the economic lifetime of the investment. The current EUA spot price is 15.46 euro. The December 14 futures contract prices is just under 20 euro. EUA prices have been depressed by the global recession, but will rise over time. The important question is not whether CCS is viable at current carbon prices but at future prices. It is widely acknowledged that CCS would not be able to make a meaningful contribution to emission reductions until after 2020 and most likely 2025. Beyond those dates it is much more likely that CCS will be cost-competitive at the carbon prices likely to prevail then. It isn’t really a problem that CCS is still in its infancy, because the deepest cuts in global emissions won’t take place until beyond 2020 anyway.
Of course, CCS could prove to be even more expensive than the above estimates suggest, or too unsafe to proceed with. But do you really think it is unreasonable for governments to devote resources to finding out whether it is the case?
Just like with the nuclear debate, I get the feeling that many commenters here care disportionately about the means of reducing emissions rather than the ends.
LO, it’s certainly possible to make a good economic case for carbon capture – you’ve done well. Unfortunately, like too many economists, you’ve ignored the constraints imposed by the real world. One of these is that CCS will not work, so it doesn’t really matter how much economic sense it makes.
One of these is that CCS will not work, so it doesn’t really matter how much economic sense it makes.
Now would be a great time to supply some support evidence for that statement.
David, you already know it won’t work do you? I didn’t realise that you were omniscient. So the IEA is full of idiots that can’t see the future as clearly as you? Perhaps you could qualify your statement by saying “may not work” instead? If you read my post, I didn’t say it will work. I said it was worth governemnts investing money to find out whether it will work.
And btw, I’d say that it somewhat ironic for you to be having a go at economists for ignoring real world constraints. Much of the commentary on this blog goes on as though budget constraints don’t exist! Look a little deeper, I think you will find that economists are a pretty hetergenous bunch….
LO , pearls before swine…
CCS cannot be part of a low-emissions future so the pairing with nuclear is misleading.
The tendency by some people within the environmental movement to rule out some technological options arbitrarily risks crippling an effective response to global warming
I also don’t agree with your implication that renewables are wellfunded compared with CCS, if that was indeed what you were implying. The MRET was and is modest.
The MRET is actually provides a large benefit to renewables. And renewable research is well funded by various government sources – I’m not sure how much it compares with CCS, but it certainly isn’t poorly funded.
As for the economics of CCS, they are incredibly site specific.
A project where CO2 is removed from natural gas and sequestered in a nearby geological formation (such as the Gorgon Project) will be relatively cheap as the capture cost is essentially free, the transport minimal and the storage costs low.
A power station distance from suitable formation will be orders of magnitude more expensive.
One advantage that CCS has, is that it can start with the low hanging fruit and use the knowledge gained from these projects to lower the costs of next stage of projects.
And immensely larger. We are talking about replacing the very foundation of our civilisation — fossil fuels — the thing that feeds us, moves us, houses us and keeps us warm at night.
But hey, its all gonna cost less than 1% of GDP according to some, so why the hell aren’t we doing it?
Labor Outsider @ 24 wrote:
Well, of the options (nukes, renewables, and CCS) I’m as certain as I can be that its the least likely to work. Nukes will work, but face huge political hurdles. Renewables probably won’t work (at least on their own) but could make a reasonably large contribution. CCS is the least developed technology, and all indications are that it will be the most expensive, but the big problem with CCS is scalability. If you add up all the emissions from coal-fired power stations around the world you get 16 cubic kilometers of CO2 per day. Its not gonna happen.
Of course, what we should be doing is whacking a hefty price on carbon, and letting the market sort out the best way to reduce emissions. But that ain’t gonna happen either. We live in a world where Joe Public would take to the streets in protest if the price of petrol went up 5c/L, and the politicians know this.
Er, Hunter Valley?
What carbonsink said. I’ll elaborate, and draw together some other comments above. While it’s true that toy CCS projects look like they might work, there aren’t enough empty oil and gas reservoirs in the world to hold all the CO2 we’ll be producing between now and when the coal runs out (and nothing else will do for storing the stuff). Also, the amount of extra energy (and thus extra CO2 to be disposed of) likely to be produced with any carbon capture technology makes it pretty uncompetitive.
Additionally, as others have pointed out, the fact that the coal industry isn’t putting any of their own money into CCS is a pretty strong indication that they don’t think it’ll work.
s/produced/required
Labor Outsider @24: “Elise, it is a bit strange to quote the IEA range for CCS and not mention that the IEA is a big advocate for CCS and sees it as a technology that could make a large contribution to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Yes, I realise that the IEA tends to support big oil and big coal, so their estimates for longevity of oil and coal supplies are generally too high, and their price estimates too low.
That is in fact a very good reason for using their estimates. If an argument for CCS won’t fly on their coal-friendly assumptions, then it hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell.
I don’t agree with you that CCS is “in its infancy”. It is still-born. And there are no midwives, only propaganda merchants.
Ken Miles @30: “One advantage that CCS has, is that it can start with the low hanging fruit…”
Umm, so why aren’t those coal boys plucking that low-hanging fruit, then?
Could it be something to do with US$1.8 billion or so for each CCS facility, then something possibly well over US$40/tonne of CO2 processed? And the profits from all this investment are…?
Low-hanging fruit my fat foot. CCS is not what a normal company would term a “profit centre”.
The coal companies are working on clean coal the same way that tobacco companies are working on non-carcinogenic tobacco. And similar to the way that Exxon worked on the Exxon Valdez spill cleanup. Consider also our own example with asbestos…
Lots of earnest public talk about “caring for HSE”, heavy lobbying of governments and small showcase demos for the media cameras; not too much genuine effort behind the scenes. Why? It would be a nett cost to their bottom line to take action. Talk is cheap.
LO@24 …
I note also that of the $4.5bn ‘Clean energy initiative”, only about 50% is going to things described by the government as ‘renewables’ and given that there are rebates for home insulation and solar hot water heaters out of that, the money is even less. Presumably the other 50% is for non-renewable ‘clean energy’.
And no, I’m not in favour of the government spending one red cent funding R&D into CCS. The coal industry has had since the early 1990s to come up with the funds to make CCS work and instead, they, along with the AAC and the Minerals Council have fought to stymie action on CO2 mitigation. It is clear, that it will not be commercially feasible to sequester CO2 at a price much this side of $100 per tonne. So why should the government be funding something at a price that the coal industry would fight tooth and nail against?
And do we really want to be trying to lock up CO2 under pressure for all eternity? I don’t think so.
Nor is it, as you imply, that coal sales will suffer in the foreseeable future if Australia doesn’t fund CCS. The Chinese are buying coal as fast as Australia can sell it. Short of banning sales, we can’t stop it. If Australia itself stops burning coal for energy, the supplies will last longer. As it stands, the estimates are that coal might last until about 2100, and then we have to find something else.
While we will need to keep burning coking coal for some time, in my case, I want to see a complete cessation of burning coal for energy ASAP. This is not merely as a consequence of CO2 but a response to all the other hazmat (mercury, SO2, radon, PM etc) coming from those power plants and of course all the premature deaths along the chain. It is estimated that coal causes the premature death of about 150,000 people each year and a huge toll in lost working days. In the footprint of coal plants people are getting mercury poisoning duirectly and through dish in the seas and local streams. Filthy stuff. The sooner we stop burning it, the better.
Fran @37, agree with you wholeheatedly.
“The Chinese are buying coal as fast as Australia can sell it. Short of banning sales, we can’t stop it.”
The Chinese will not be in a tearing hurry to weigh down their economy or their power stations with the cost of implementing CCS. Certainly not while their carbon footprint per capita is so far below that of the OECD countries.
As Martin Ferguson says, the Chinese are building Australia’s coal-fired power capacity many times over, every year.
Put this together, and we have a recipe for global crisis.
Fuel consumption for transport WILL be economised and substituted in the near future, but not because of international understanding and cooperation. Mother nature and scarcity pricing will force the change on all of us.
The amazing thing is that last year, even with the GFC, massive increases in oil prices and a lot of talk about an oil crunch, Aussies still bought 50% gas-guzzlers (SUV’s, 4WD’s, medium, large and extra-large cars); a total of about 400,000 gas-guzzlers in about 800,000 passenger vehicles.
How bone-headed can people be? You even see some turks driving around in brand-new Hummers. Presumably they are so wealthy that they are happy to write-down the full purchase cost over a few years? Trade-in value of scrap metal perhaps?
By constrast, coal-fired power won’t be constrained by supply limitation any time soon. It is hard to see a high-enough carbon price being enforced globally which would make CCS attractive, especially with all the international and local lobbying for subsidies.
Any bets that coal-fired power could become our nemesis? It would certainly be a litmus test of maturity as a species.
That’s because Australia peddles in death, black death, or the enemy of the human race as Hansen calls it. Not only that, our heroic mining companies are routinely cheered on by our media as saviours of the Australian economy.
I know this is emotive language (and probably considered a nutty far left, deep green view by the painfully pragmatic Labor Outsider) but its true dammit, and WTF is more pragmatic that saving the planet?
carbonsink, I don’t actually think that Labor Outsider is all that pragmatic. After all, he seems not to have absorbed the lessons of Malthus and Limits of Growth.
Carbonsink @39, the “nutty far left, deep green view” is looking less and less nutty as time goes by…
The real difficulty is aligning the short-term profit motive with expected conditions a couple of decades into the future.
In the case of legislative change, the short-term re-election motive also doesn’t align with expected conditions a couple of decades into the future.
I have heard, Carbonsink, that the the Chinese are dumping the coal in the bottom of harbours. ie stockpiling.
David Irving: I think you’ll find that in the circles Labor Outsider mixes, “Malthusian” would be a derogatory term. Remember, the world is infinite, and so is human ingenuity :)
BilB: Dunno about coal. AFAIK, the Chinese still don’t buy much of our coal, but they’re certainly piling up the iron ore and other metals. Its primarily due to Chinese traders using (absurdly) easy credit to speculate on commodities, rather than some deliberate strategy by the Chinese authorities.
Either way, China buying our commodities has to be a good thing eh? Growth is good. There is no other way.
Carbonsink @43: “…rather than some deliberate strategy by the Chinese authorities”
I think you underestimate them, carbonsink.
They certainly had a deliberate strategy for iron ore, by getting a controlling stake in Rio.
They had a subsequent deliberate strategy of locking up Rio’s negotiating team and accusing Aussies of cheating &/or acting like a monopoly.
They had a deliberate strategy of putting the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA) in charge of pricing negotiations. Unlike the Aussies, CISA was not monopolistic; it was just looking after honorable national objectives…
Knee-capping the front-line of the opposition worked real well. Scared the hell out of everyone.
The pricing negotiation part has however been a debacle – mucho egg on face for CISA. Spot price is wayyy over the original price they were offered, and which they rejected. Oh bother…someone will pay for this…
In terms of overall strategy, it is not wholely successful so far.
However, they now have a controlling interest in Twiggy’s company Fortescue Mining. He’s up to his neck in debt, has only one product, and only one customer, and they have a stake in the company. Twiggy’s wiggle-room to negotiate iron ore pricing = ???
The game ain’t over yet…
Sorry, should read “trying to get a controlling stake in Rio”
WTF?
If you actually read the Limits of Growth you’d actually understand just how many things Malthus got wrong because he massively underestimated the potential of technological improvements to cope with Malthusian pressures.
And besides, where on earth have I ever said that resources were infinite? Or that there are no environmental externalities to be concerned about? I’m a strong advocate of pricing carbon appropriately. Just because I don’t genuflect to your renewable obsessions doesn’t make me an idiot.
And Carbonsink – aren’t you the person that was predicting an near-term economic catastrophe in Australia just a few months ago? That Australia’s household debt to income ratio was about to collapse to back where it was 50 years ago? That seemed to think that Steve Keen was the font of all economic wisdom?
How is that prediction going?
I’ll elaborate, and draw together some other comments above. While it’s true that toy CCS projects look like they might work, there aren’t enough empty oil and gas reservoirs in the world to hold all the CO2 we’ll be producing between now and when the coal runs out (and nothing else will do for storing the stuff).
This would be a really good time to start supplying some evidence for your assertions. Peer reviewed scientific evidence would be even better.
Also, the amount of extra energy (and thus extra CO2 to be disposed of) likely to be produced with any carbon capture technology makes it pretty uncompetitive.
This is one of the things that the research into CCS is trying to determine. Just how much will CCS cost, and how can we reduce this. Luckily, we have scientists and engineers, who are trying to quantify the costs and risks of CCS. A much better approach than simply asserting that it can’t work.
Additionally, as others have pointed out, the fact that the coal industry isn’t putting any of their own money into CCS is a pretty strong indication that they don’t think it’ll work.
Wrong. The Coal21 Fund (which is funded by the coal industry) has already committed over $500 million to various projects related to CCS
Elise, you have misunderstood my point. That CCS has low hanging fruit, doesn’t mean that it makes economic sense to pluck them now. Just like every other source of low emission power, they aren’t as cheap as doing nothing. That being said, the fossil fuel industry is plucking some of them (and taking the consequent economic hit) with projects such as the Gorgon Island project off the coast of WA.
That’s because Australia peddles in death, black death, or the enemy of the human race as Hansen calls it. Not only that, our heroic mining companies are routinely cheered on by our media as saviours of the Australian economy.
Like the IEA and the IPCC, James Hansen is a supporter of coal with CCS.
Ken, no-one would be happier than I if CCS could work. However, to store a gas in a hole in the ground forever (well, for a couple of billion years), you need a reservoir composed of porous rock (sandstone, eg) with an impervious cap. Something a bit like an exhausted oil or gas reservoir. Those things don’t grow on trees, and the ones we’ve already emptied are a hell of a way from where we’re making the CO2. The requisite pipelines will only make the whole thing even less attractive than it already is. I doubt if the reservoirs would last long enough, anyway. (I’m not going to piss about looking for peer-reviewed papers on this, btw.)
As for your statement about the Coal21 fund, $500M! (whistles.) How much of that is from the coal industry, and how much is actually from the govt? It’s a pittance, anyway.
CCS makes storing nuclear wastes look trivial.
Yes it is emotive language. I know it makes you feel good to say it. And virtuous.
But how about, instead of getting on your high horse and winning the plaudits of Fran Barlow and the Village Idiot (an important demographic there), you do a bit of work and find out why the Chinese don’t agree with your view then think about, and propose, solutions that would make them change their views.
LO, Malthus was only wrong in his timing because, as you’ve pointed out, he underestimated how much extra time we’d get from technological advances.
I’m sorry if you you feel I’ve misrepresented you, but a lot of what you say isn’t too different from the cornucopians, except you’ve substituted technical gains for infinite resources. It’s still essentially the same error.
See, no limits to human ingenuity. Admit it, you’re a paid up member of the Julian Simon fan club, and a closet libertarian. Are you Peter Walsh?
Not well. China inflated a credit bubble, and they bought a lot more Aussie dirt at higher prices than I believed possible. Is it sustainable? We’ll see. It ain’t over yet.
I’m surprised to hear that, and I’m having a hard time finding any evidence that is his position. Certainly, Hansen doesn’t believe Big Coal is taking CCS seriously, and according to this he advocates closing coal-fired power stations.
Actually, I was just trying to wind up LO :)
As for the Chinese, they would like a western standard of living for all their citizens (perfectly understandably). Anything that threatens that goal (like the GFC, or constraints on carbon emissions) will be resisted because it threatens social cohesion. Like I said, growth is only way for China. As for solutions, the only thing that’s going to power China’s growth in the near term, and not emit catastrophic amounts of CO2, is lots and lots of nukes.
David, apparently I’m not explaining myself very well. You can’t just say that there aren’t enough suitable locations and expect others to accept it as any sort of argument. If assertions without evidence was the standard, then the global warming skeptics would have won the argument a long time ago.
However, you’re also wrong about potential storage locations. Not only can you use empty gas wells; saline aquifers and coal deposits are also capable of storing gases on geological timescales.
Also, the Coal21 fund is entirely funded by contributions from the coal industry. It aims to raise a billion for research and demonstration plants, and has currently committed about half of it’s funds. It doesn’t include large scale deployments of CCS such as Gorgon Island.
Carbonsink,
In a public letter to a coal CEO, Hansen writes:
“One implication for electricity generation is crystal clear from basic fossil fuel facts (enclosure). Coal is the source of 50 percent of fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, and, because of vast coal reserves, coal is the dominant issue for the long run. It is not rocket science. To maintain a safe planet, coal can be used in coming decades only if CO2 is captured and sequestered. Coal-fired power plants built now without CO2 sequestration will soon have to be shut down. They are a terrible, foreseeable waste of money. It would be a tragic mistake for Duke to proceed with plans for new coal-fired power plants in Cliffside, North Carolina, and Edwardsport, Indiana.
Your public statements recognize the climate problem and indicate a desire to do what is right for the environment, the young generation, and your rate-payers. However, your suggestion that new, more efficient coal-fired power plants, which do not capture CO2, can be part of a solution ignores the basic facts and urgency of terminating coal emissions. Dirty, inefficient coal plants must be replaced to avoid climate disasters, but only by choosing options from energy efficiency, renewable energies, nuclear power, and coal plants that capture all emissions, including CO2. “
You got me Carbon, I head up the Lavoisier Group in my spare time…
Actually David, is not the same error because the technological improvements will not be forthcoming unless carbon externalities are internalised on a global scale…think about it, it is a very big difference…
We’re number one!
STR!
AYA!
—– STRAYA!!
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/the-worlds-worst-polluters-20090910-fjdt.html
Ken Miles @54: “You can’t just say that there aren’t enough suitable locations and expect others to accept it as any sort of argument.”
I would offer this, in partial answer to your challenge to David @50.
According to Wikipedia the total global production of CO2 is 28 trillion tonnes (metric tons). The total and the breakdown by countries is given here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
A favourite example of CO2 storage given by the coal lobby is the Sleipner field. The Norwegian government pushed for CO2 storage since the 1990′s, as they have a very green outlook on life (not hypothesising – I was living there at the time). They wanted a test case. Statoil and Hydro who operate the fields doing CO2 injection are partially state-controlled enterprises (Statoil translates as State Oil).
Some decisions are not purely financial – or more strictly the financial driver is there but buried within wider issues. That would include Sleipner, and our own Gorgon I suspect. The owners of Gorgon had a case to prove that they were good environmental citizens, to get the nod from our federal and state authorities.
Anyway, returning to the logistics question, we have 28 trillion tonnes per year to store, for the next 100 years say. Since 1996, Sleipner has stored about one million tonnes CO2 a year. A second project in the Snøhvit gas field in the Barents Sea stores 700,000 tonnes per year.
To point out the bleeding obvious, we are talking many serious orders of magnitude difference in scale here.
If we are talking about using old or current oilfields to stuff with CO2, then roughly speaking the global ultimate recoverable reserves is about 2 trillion barrels. One tonne is about 7 barrels, so we are talking about 0.3 trillion tonnes (ignoring volume differences due to density differences for different oils).
The density of liquid CO2 is 1032 kg/m3. The density of crude oil ranges 750 to 1050 kg/m3. Call the densities the same, for the sake of a rough approximation.
As such we can say that we have 0.3 trillion tonnes of potential void space in present and future oilfields, IFF every single one was available and suitable for CO2 storage.
The CCS guys are wanting to stuff 28 trillion tonnes/year of CO2 someplace.
I see a several orders-of-magnitude problem with the “just stuff it in old oilfields” argument. By all means correct me if I am wrong.
Oilfields are not the only potential storage solution.
As a backstop, mix the CO2 with olivine rocks, make carbonate rock. Safe, abundant, but expensive.
Robert @59, Yep we can stuff it under the lounge carpet, the dining carpet, the bedroom carpet, the hall runner, and umm…
I wish people would step back from it a few paces, and see the absurdity.
I was perusing a list of countries that were ranked above Australia in per capita oil consumption. Unsurprisingly, Australia is about 14th, and most of the usual suspects are ahead of us. Iceland, The Netherlands, and Norway are surprising on that list though.
Who is behind us is also interesting … We use nearly twice as much as Iran and Venzuela, and more than twice as much as Mexico and Russia each of which are oil exporters. Iraq isn’t on this list but I’ve read elsewhere that they use about a quarter of what we do per capita. We use 16 times what Indonesia uses per capita and they are modest exporters. Oh … and we use 71 times what your average Bangladeshi does …
I wonder where sensible resource use fits in all that.
Yeah, like covering an area the size of Spain with solar panels in the next 20 years – or just a few thousand square km here in Aus.
Peter @62, how about a few thousand km2 of trees?
Thanks for putting some hard number to my back-of-the-envelope gut feeling, Elise.
LO @ 56, it is the same error, because you’re just substituting infinite human ingenuity for infinite resources.
“Who is behind us is also interesting … We use nearly twice as much as Iran and Venzuela, and more than twice as much as Mexico and Russia each of which are oil exporters. Iraq isn’t on this list but I’ve read elsewhere that they use about a quarter of what we do per capita. We use 16 times what Indonesia uses per capita and they are modest exporters. Oh … and we use 71 times what your average Bangladeshi does”
I can’t get over sometimes how daft the things said on this blog are.
What do you think the reason for that is Fran? Could it be that oil consumption is a normal good and hence rises with per capita incomes? Do you think the Bangladeshi’s or the Indonesians consume less oil per capita because they want to, or because their much lower incomes mean they can’t afford to consume more?
Sheesh….poor people consume less – what a shock!!
Why on earth would you think that domestic oil production was the main determinant of domestic oil consumption per capita? What you will find is that oil producers often tax oil consumption at lower rates than non oil exporters and hence have HIGHER oil consumption than one would expect given their levels of GDP. Indeed, a large number of developing countries use considerably more oil per unit of GDP than Australia does. Across developed countries, oil consumption per capita is also strongly influenced by the taxation regimes in place.
So, actually, your factoids aren’t interesting at all – they are more or less exactly what you would expect.
Elise, your numbers aren’t nearly so clever as you think they are. Not only have you ignored the other storage options mentioned by Ken above, but you seem to be assuming we need to stuff all the current CO2 production undergound. That is absurd. CCS is but one technology that could make a contribution to reducing emissions – nobody is claiming that it can or should be used to solve the entire problem. Your line seems to be – because CCS can’t solve the problem on its own, it can’t make a contribution. Nice logic.
David, you say some daft things at times.
Please stick to the merits of the issue, not the commenter.
Thank you all.
LO intoned:
Yes, but you see even countries that have comparable standards of living have lower oil usage than do we — Sweden and Denmark for example — and Denmark is an oil exporter.
My point was that they were exporting oil and still consuming less.
And yet even so they use less than do we. It might just be that more of them ride bikes. It does seem to show that we use a lot more oil than we need to to live well, and if we did cut our consumption, we’d also be net exporters.
I see a several orders-of-magnitude problem with the “just stuff it in old oilfields” argument. By all means correct me if I am wrong.
Sorry Elise, but you’re wrong.
You’ve made the same mistake as David in missing a lot of other geological formations, and ignored my point about CCS having an incredible range of costs (and thus an incredible spread of usefullness – hence nobody expects it do account for all of our emissions.
For a better estimate of the storage potential, try the IPCC:
Available evidence suggests that, worldwide, it is likely19
that there is a technical potential20 of at least about
2,000 GtCO2
(545 GtC) of storage capacity in geological
formations21.
There could be a much larger potential for geological storage
in saline formations, but the upper limit estimates are uncertain
due to lack of information and an agreed methodology. The
capacity of oil and gas reservoirs is better known. Technical
storage capacity in coal beds is much smaller and less well
known.
Fran, you really can’t be that silly can you?
Among developed countries higher taxing (on petrol) countries consume less per capita. Comparing developed countries to non-developed countries the differences are largely explained by the fact that they are POOR – not that they prefer to ride bikes! If the Bangladeshis had much higher per capita incomes they would consumer a LOT MORE OIL!
Whether they export or not is of second order importance compared to income per capita (first) and tax rates (second)…
Sheesh
Okay, I apologise for playing the person rather than the ball….but really, I don’t think there is a clear understanding of what the determinants of fossil fuel consumption are across countries. Given the outlook for domestic oil production in Australia, to become a net-exporter of oil would require either the highest fuel-excise rates in the world, or a complete transformation of our urban infrastructure. In a world where most goods can be freely traded there need not be much connection at all between production of a good and consumption of a good. Relative wealth, relative tax rates and preferences all play a role in determining consumption patterns but there is nothing in the least surprising about Australia’s consumption patterns.
OK LO@70 … I did toy with the idea of a counter-flame but in the spirit of playing the ball …
Can I make the point that while I am well aware that the drivers of lower per capita crude oil consumption are indeed limited disposable income — I wasn’t suggesting people ride bikes in developing countries as a lifestyle choice — higher crude oil consumption is not a driver of wealth, but, as in countries where the standard of living is lower, simply a marker of it.
The Bangladeshis are poor even though they don’t use anything like the amount of crude we do and we are wealthy even though we use 71 times as much. If we Aussies found a way <i<ceteris paribus of using only 35 times as much Australia’s balance of trade figures would be stronger. Australians could choose some combination of saving more, working less or buying more stuff and our standard of living would be higher. And in an economy which had put a serious price on CO2 emission, Austalia would stand relatively better.
or finding more low cost-to-recover oil, converting coal to oil (both of which I hope don’t happen)
I doubt your claim. In Norway, they charge a lot more than here, so there’s a lot of scope for Australia to lift its excise rates without being at the top. As to the ‘complete transformation of our urban infrastructure’ I’m all for that, and not just on the grounds of better liquid fuel usage.
Vietnam is a net oil exporter. They export their oil rather than consume it in order to get foreign currency with which to buy things which they consider important but which they cannot produce themselves. More of them ride bikes than we do because that is all they can afford. As soon as they can afford to upgrade to a motorbike they do so.
Do they live well? They live better than they did thirty years ago when they lived under a communist economic model and there was widespread starvation but I don’t think that many of us would want to exchange our lives for theirs. While there isn’t widespread starvation, plenty of Vietnamese go to bed hungry every night and daily life is a constant struggle to make a few resources go a long way.
Some things they just can’t afford to attend to and so slip by the wayside. Teeth is one. The first and most obvious thing one notices, living among the Vietnamese, is rampant dental caries, even among people in their early twenties. For many of them toothbrushes and toothpaste are luxury items so just don’t make it onto the shopping list. Living with contant toothache may be some peoples idea of living well butit is not to any sensible person.
Beyond that there is tuberculosis, endemic in their country as it was in ours until the 1960s when, because we were a rich country and could afford to do so, we got rid of it. They have an admirable public health system and they are trying to get rid of it but getting rid of tuberculosis is expensive, involving as it does expensive drugs that they have to import and X-Ray machines they also have to import, so there goes some of their revenue from oil exports just for that.
Fran raises the point that if we cut our oil consumption we could become an oil exporter.
And?????
What purpose would there be in that? We are already a massive energy and carbon exporter in the forms of coal and natural gas. I fear that Fran is proposing that we add to our wickedness as environmental vandals by throwing oil into the mix as well.
Classic misdirection. If the top 20 per capita crude oil users amongst the top 20 per capita GDP crown all cut their crude oil consumption by 20%, then the likely consequence of the measures required in each jurisdiction would be a drop in GHGs, and a reduction in the burden of debt service in states that are the target of Millennium Development Goals programs as the price of oil fell. Also, there would be a decline in GHGs since OPEC, in a vain attempt to maintain price, would cut production. The day when cheap easy to get oil would run out would be deferred. The world would be a less inequitable place.
If GregM thinks this amounts to wickedness I’ll leave him to account for that.
Fran, some of the reasons we produce more CO2 per capita from burning fossil fuels (which was what the table you referred to listed) is (a) we produce more minerals than we need for ourselves, (b) we produce more food than we need for ourselves, (c) we spread ourselves over a lot of country in order to do both, and (d) we have settlements spread out with a lot of space in between even along the coast. Not much of this is susceptible of improvement with better public transport.
Some centres in Queensland have significant additional permanent/temporary populations in the form of tourists, which is probably significant in Queensland, being the highest per capita emitting state, but more for the reasons listed above.
Generally I’m in favour of research into CCS firstly because we are going to have to burn some coal for specialised purposes for the foreseeable future. Secondly, gas could be handy not only as an interim technology to replace thermal coal, but may also have a longer term role as a complement to intermittent renewable power, such as wind and solar, to provide backup in some parts of the world.
What I’m not in favour of was diverting $2.5 billion from the education revolution into the clean energy initiative, which is what I understand happened.
Just on Malthus and Limits to Growth, one of those long threads at RealClimate recently was devoted largely to the topic, with the consensus emerging that LTG in particular had an unnecessarily bad reputation (sorry no link).
The figures I have seen all seem to be saying that CCS is not going to save Australian coal fired power generation both in terms of cost and effectiveness (Only 80% reduction) However, i support CCS research for a number of reasons:
1. It has the potential to be the most effective way of reducing emissions from industries such as steel making and cement manufacture. (Important for someone like me who thinks we need to end up going close to zero-gen.)
2. It may be the most practical option for countries that don’t have acces to solar, wind etc within their borders. (But will struggle to compete with nuclear.)
3. If you assume CCS 80% effective the combination of two stage gas plus CCS will emit only 8% of coal fired power.
4. Given the profits and taxes we make from coal, th emoney we are putting into CCS is petty cash. However, I have a real problem if CCS research is used to slow down the clean-up of electricity – we should push ahead with the clean-up and use CCS if and when it becomes competitive.
GregM
You’re not playing fair: citing a concrete example and illustrating it with pertinent points. That’s not the way to play. (You need more theory and idle speculation…..).
Fran: no argument from posters here that many countries need to reduce their emissions of GHG’s. Several of us however were bemused by your comments about oil use and oil exports.
cheerio
Ambi@76 …
What were you ‘bemused’ about, specifically?
Nothing GregM proposed undermined any of it. He merely repeated the implicit error made above that consuming crude oil causes wealth.
Do you dispute that if Australia and other countries used less crude oil per capita that they would, ceteris paribus be better off?
JohnD@75
Unless one blieves that there is some prospect of CCS being commercially viable within a realistic time frame, spending any money on R&D is a waste. Let the coal industry do so if they think it’s viable. So far they haven’t.
I agree with you Fran about R&D. It will be decades before we have finished doing the easy things and are ready to consider CCS as part of the plan for steel and cement or the possibility of using CCS as a means of actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere by using it on biofuel fired power stations.
If the fossil fuel industry really sees CCS as an industry saver they should be paying for it. They are far better equiped than governments to make hard headed decisions about its potential viability.
In the meantime we should be pushing on with the alternatives to provide an incentive for the fossil fuel industry to get on with it.
Labor Outsider @65: “Elise, your numbers aren’t nearly so clever as you think they are.”
That was a very aggressive spray LO. If you bothered to read more carefully, you would see that I started by saying “I would offer this, in partial answer”. To accuse me of trying to be “clever” because I give a reasoned argument says something about you.
What I was trying to show, was that the cavalier assertions, by the coal lobby and the various pollies, about “clean coal” and CCS/geosequestration being the way forward were grossly overstated.
“Your line seems to be – because CCS can’t solve the problem on its own, it can’t make a contribution. Nice logic.”
I was showing that pumping CO2 into old oilfields would probably not even meet 1% of total future CO2 emissions. The discussion was offered in direct response to a challenge to David, about exactly that point.
Of course you can argue that not all emissions would be “cleaned up” by CCS, and that there are other means. That was NOT the point. I wasn’t being “clever”, I was presenting some data which others may not have examined in enough detail to have a clear idea.
The point is that CCS is being OVERSOLD as a solution. People need to consider some real data, as a counterpoint to the coal propaganda story.
I would suggest that you realise this perfectly well LO, and have resorted to playing the person and not the issue. Very clever of you.
Ken Miles @68: “For a better estimate of the storage potential, try the IPCC”
I trust the judgement of IPCC scientists on climatology.
I wouldn’t be hanging my hat on their ability with reservoir engineering topics, which is essentially the discipline needed for studying pumping CO2 underground.
Elise:
I trust the judgement of IPCC scientists on climatology.
I wouldn’t be hanging my hat on their ability with reservoir engineering topics, which is essentially the discipline needed for studying pumping CO2 underground.
The IPCC CCS report is written by different people with different areas of expertise than the IPCC Scientific Basis report. And far more importantly, it is simply a review of the scientific literature.
Fran:
Let the coal industry do so if they think it’s viable. So far they haven’t.
As I’ve pointed out a number of times on this thread, they are. The fossil fuel industry has contributed billions towards CCS with projects such as Coal21 and the Gorgon project.
No problem then …. let the government withdraw the subsidy if this is all that is needed.
Ken Miles @82: “And far more importantly, it is simply a review of the scientific literature.”
Excuse me, but what bloody scientific literature on CCS which “proves” all this huge volume of permanent storage capacity? Please point us to a series of detailed studies somewhere, not just the vague posturings of the coal industry?
Remember, we are talking of a proposed extra 100 years at around 23 trillion tonnes/year, i.e. 2,300 tonnes of storage.
We have a bunch of geologists (usually in the pay of the coal lobby) saying that there are skads of assorted porous strata around the place.
That is NOT a proof positive that these strata are suitable, and permanently sealable, in the quantity required.
Perhaps I should explain further for people who have not worked in this area, why there will be no proof in the literature of sealed volumes in the quantity required?
The problem is finding a porous medium which is sealed on all sides, so that it doesn’t leak. You need a good sealing “cap rock” over the entire upper surface, and seals on the outer perimeter – due to an anticlinal structure or sealing faults or some other mechanism. A good sealed structure is a relatively rare phenomenon. Petroleum geophysicists and geologists often find promising structures which when drilled are empty (no oil or gas) because of an “incompetant seal”, so the hydrocarbons leaked out over time.
Finding a structure which has stood the test of time is relatively rare. In all the petroleum exploration to date, people have found a total of about 0.3 trillion tonnes of available voidage which has been competantly sealed to keep the oil in place over a long period of time.
The only way of knowing whether a porous volume is competantly sealed, would be to pump fluid in and test pressures over a long period of time (to test for pressure decline due to leakage), or pump in fluids with tracers (e.g. radioactive tracers) and then drill extra holes to monitor its movement through the porous medium over time (e.g. movement towards areas of leakage).
This is a very expensive and lengthy process (e.g. monitoring wells cost $millions and tracer studies take many years to yield useful results). You can bet your last rouble that hasn’t been done for the ENORMOUS volumes the CCS are blandly talking about, namely in the order of 2300 trillion tonnes.
So far we have a PROVEN storage volume of 0.3 trillion tonnes or so, from ALL known oilfields.
You can even bet that the CCS lobby hasn’t proven up double that volume, i.e. 0.6 trillion tonnes. What about the rest???
Quite right Elise. You not only have to prove the collection process works for CCS but also spend serious money finding disposal sites. The only ones we could be really sure about are old oil/gas fields. In Australia this suggests that there may be logical sites for at least some of the emissions from the Vic power industry (how much?) and it may make sense to set up gas fired generators near the fields they are taking their fuel from. (The volume of CO2 generated will be about the same as the volume of gas consumed.)
Any other options are going to require long CO2 pipelines – may be justified for steel, cement etc manufacture but certainly not coal fired power.
Of course, another problem with depleted oil or gas wells is that we probably won’t be able to seal the holes we made to get the oil out, and the CO2 in, anywhere near as effectively as the original rock did. There may be a technical solution for this, but I won’t hold my breath (unless, of course, I stry too near one of these CO2 repositories).