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Sep 25, 2009 06:00 AM | 25
The U.S. Secretary of Energy—channeling former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev perhaps?—has one thing to say in this week's Science to the greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired power plants: We will bury you. Nobel laureate Steven Chu's department has funneled $3.4 billion in stimulus dollars to research and develop the technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS).
But to give you a sense of the challenge, here are his estimates of the scale of the challenge: six billion metric tons of coal burned every year, producing 18 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and requiring an underground storage volume of 30,000 cubic kilometers per year with untold consequences on subsurface pressure, mineral composition and the like. And we are nowhere near that scale: "We now sequester a few million metric tons of CO2 per year," he wrote, largely from cleaning natural gas or so-called "enhanced oil recovery" efforts, in which CO2 is pumped down to flush out more of the valuable petroleum (and therefore not as useful, from a climate perspective, as sequestration for its own sake).
But there is hope. This week the world's first carbon capture and storage at an actual power plant burning coal fired up near New Haven, W. Va. China is following suit, according to a news story in the same issue of Science, launching the Erdos coal-to-liquid plant in Inner Mongolia that will capture some of its 3.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions and use it to flush out oil from nearby fields.
That's good because such carbon capture and storage "may be the single most effective and direct climate action available," geoscientist R. Stuart Haszeldine wrote in the same issue of Science. Technologies, like amine scrubbers and chilled ammonia or oxyfuel, continue to be improved in the lab and at demonstration projects. And new storage options may be opening up, ranging from offshore sediments to basalt, briny aquifers to porous sandstone. Even capturing carbon dioxide from the air—it makes up 0.04 percent of the air we breathe—might prove possible, according to would-be geoengineer David Keith of the University of Calgary.
Haszeldine and his colleagues therefore call for a quick infusion of massive funds on a global scale, something Steven Chu appears to have at least started in the U.S. And the energy secretary hopes to see major results within a decade.
But is carbon capture and storage really necessary? After all, some studies have shown that major emitters like China or the U.S. could get all their energy from renewables, such as wind or solar.
Chu, for one, doesn't buy it. "It is highly unlikely that any of these countries will turn their back on coal any time soon, and for this reason, the capture and storage of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power plants must be aggressively pursued," he wrote. "There are many hurdles to making CCS a reality, but none appear insurmountable…. The climate problem compels us to act with fierce urgency."
Image: Courtesy of University of Edinburgh. The largest natural CO2 seep in Italy, at Mefite in Campania, has a CO2 flux exceeding 100,000 tons per year. This has been a site of ritual offerings to the underworld for over 2,000 years, since pre-Roman times. Studies at such sites assist understanding the impacts of unplanned leakage from engineered CO2 storage sites.
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25 Comments
Add CommentI fully recognize Dr. Chu's considerable abilities in the realm of physics and it appears he is using them in regards to solutions. While I don't believe that co2 is the single biggest problem, I also don't think we can ignore it, nor that we should hobble industry in order to somehow controll the climate. This approach is a technological one and will disappoint many who have seen efforts to curb climate change as equating to an end in the ugly aspects of developement and industry. Rest assured, coal industries will continue to prosper for some time to come, though if visionaries such as I wish were in controll had their way, we'd be building space based solar energy platforms, cleaning up pollution, the real stuff as well as the relatively benign co2, and creating wealth out of the asteroids thereby making the illustrative pie we will be cutting into segments not just bigger but better for for all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"But is carbon capture and storage really necessary? After all, some studies have shown that major emitters like China or the U.S. could get all their energy from renewables, such as wind or solar."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, we (the US, China, India) need to do both, since coal isn't going away. The best strategy is build and deploy massive amounts of renewable energy coupled with massive energy storage, in order to create renewable baseload power. One there is enough renewable baseload, then we can put a permanent moratorium on new coal plants. While we are building the renewable baseload, we need to develop and deploy CCS for the existing fleet of coal plants. The final state should be to have the exisiting coal plants sequestered, don't build any more, and build renewable baseload for future needs.
Dear Mr. Davis,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'll respond to one of your points - the others are not sufficiently coherent to merit a response.
"The Dep. of Energy should provide funding to build geothermal plants and shut down the coal burning plants."
Where are we living, communist China? In this country (at least up until now) private investors decide what to build and when to build in hopes of earning a return on their investment. This allows for a natural and logical means to assure that limited investment capital is best utilized. When the government invests, there is no such constraint and money ends up being squandered.
Your proposal makes perfect sense for some third world basket case country with a tin horn dictator (think Venezuala or Iran). Not here.
This will probably turn out like Yucca Mountain, we will spend untold billions of dollars, maybe even trillions, and then it will all be squashed by some politician trying to score points with his constituents.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObama obviously has had to trade $4 billion in utterly wasted, discredited, super expensive and extremely dangerous CCS to get his health care legislation through Max Baucus's Senate committee. Montana Baucus is Big Coal's biggest booster. Keep talking CCS and those lucrative Big Oil/Coal campaign donations keep a coming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/09/23/carbon-capture-study.html
Our peak oil and climate difficulties will be be over, if the US increases its green electric capacity sixfold with two thousand new gigawatts of baseload 24/7 green power. That's two nuclear plants taking up a couple of acres, 3000 giant windmills in farms occupying 1000 sq miles of land, or 100 sq miles of desert destroyed with solar panels every week for 10 years.
Mass produced nuclear power is by far the least expensive green energy available, at less than $1000 a kilowatt when mass produced. Google Westinghouse China nuclear for the latest $1200 a kilowatt sale. For baseload power, wind and solar with 20% average capacity factors and required pumped hydro storage come in at over $10000 a kilowatt similar to CCS.
Wind power alone requires 60 times the steel and green house producing concrete of a nuke without considering the enormous amounts of concrete and steel required for hydro storage. Nuclear powered geothermal for home heating/cooling is a great option but large scale geothermal electric power has so many problems like causing earthquakes, that cheap nuclear fusion will beat it to production by many years.
We are a little as ten years away from both a peak oil and climate tipping point with permafrost methane emissions and ocean acidification forming the leading edge of a very steep slope. Wind, solar, ccs, geothermal and conservation while nice touchy feely warm fuzzy solutions have ZERO chance of saving our asses over the critical next ten years. A massive public utility build of mass produced nuclear power is our only way out.
Doug, you're dreaming. Your dreams are lacking one thing, a quantitative imagination. You need to do a quantitiative evaluation on the costs and quantitites involved in your barely feasible technological suggestions which do not evaluate either the cost or the required or possible output of the schemes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissethdayal: geothermal electric power has so many problems like causing earthquakes... that is a republican myth (lie) to promote nuclear. If geothermal causes earthquakes, then drilling for oil and coal causes earthquakes. You cannot back up that statement with any proof. Where do you think you are going to store those tons of nuclear waste? Will you build nuclear sludge ponds like the coal companies do and put it in peoples back yards like the coal companies and oil companies do?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGeothermal can produce the cleanest and most powerful electrical output of any other form of power producers out there and it is the cheapest to produce of all the others put together.
Genius does not create wisdom. CO2 is a natural respiration gas and needed for green plants to grow and survive. Greenhouses produce plant life, vital for our earth to be a place for life. The warming of earth is cyclical, and necessary, just like forest fires. Messing with the cycle will be fruitless at best and destructive at worst. Learning to live in your local environment is a far greater persuit and a 'science' we have overlooked. We must learn that our life span is short compared to the earth's and learn to enjoy our short time here on earth by living on earth instead of trying to make earth livable. Major outbreaks of disease, natural events, and plate shifts can drastically reduce the human population in a blink of the eye. knowing how to survive and live in your region is what needs to be explored, not putting CO2 in barrels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHi all
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNuclear -10 years to build, thirty years of uranium, no where to store waste. ( of course there will never be an accident)
Let private industry decide-hey that got you into the biggest financial crash of all time, just chasing dollars does not make good policy for humanity. We live in a semi socialist state in oz ,the government has grater control of the banks and were doing just fine here. They also have more input into things like electricity production and hopefully make decisions based on a range of factors, not just the bottom line it"s not communism, everyone is pretty happy here.
Carbon capture and storage billions spent, no real plants, YEARS to build and yet unproven. Will the gas stay underground, will it produce earthquakes or God only knows what, we are rushing it a bit after all. Its hardly a long term well thought out position, more like grasping at straws and an attempt to keep the coal industry appeased. No serious money on alternatives. If we were serious 10 years ago we would be well advanced down the alternative renewable line. There is basically unlimited amounts of energy available from solar, wind, geo, tidal, current and interesting processes that struggle for money and recognition. As usual the vested interests with the money to lobby and 'buy' influence scoop the funding pool. So predictable. While ever individuals can possibly own or control the resource big business will oppose introduction. In the end we have no choice, we either tap something like zero point energy (not likely) or go for a range of alternatives. Do we know what he tipping point will look like climatically? Look at the Monsoon in India now, look at the 'drought' in Oz and huge water shortages in China? No one will be a winner and its probably too late already to address the tipping point. Here we are still trying to burn more coal or uranium. It would be funny if it was not so serious. "o"
James my friend have you heard of G O O G L E. Ask for help from your town librarian and together you can search for geothermal and earthquakes. Over a million references. To get mass produced geothermal electric to work you need high pressure pumps that can operate remotely at 1000 degrees, thousands of feet underground. Nuclear fusion will come to your corner gas station first.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have thousands of years worth of fission fuel with reprocessing, gen 4 plant and thorium. No worries there.
Modern nukes are designed to be failsafe. Global warming is not. So tell the residents of New York with their city starting to go underwater maybe in ten years that that is better than taking a million to one chance on a someday maybe some sort of nuclear accident.
The Nuclear waste problem is blown well out of proportion by propaganda from Big Oil/Coal. All of it can be reused as reprocessed fuel in Gen 3.5 nukes,or as fuel in generation four nukes like Sandia's new product. The tiny bit of Gen 4 nuclear waste is no more dangerous than the original uranium. Mid Ocean clay deposit storage has also been proved in as more effective than ground storage except for the reuse factor. All of France's nuclear waste after producing 80% of its power for the last 50 years with nuclear, would cover a soccer stadium one foot deep and all of it is reusable as fast reactor fuel.
Of course, we could just take all the waste to the nearest coal plant and meter it slowly into the smoke stack. The nuclear waste would increase the coal plants already radioactive emissions by only a tiny percentage and wouldn't add any more lead, arsenic or mercury to the air.
There are 14 states in the US, that includes Alaska, that have geothermal power plants producing power and none of them have high pressure pumps thousands of feet under ground that can withstand thousands of degrees of heat. The only pump they have is the pump sitting on top of the ground, within their building or beside their water supply, pumping water down in the hole to the hot rocks and the steam that runs the turbines comes up from the hole on its own. You have been so blinded by the Bush administration about nuclear power that you refuse to accept the fact that there are safer, more powerful, cheaper, and cleaner means of producing electricity than nuclear, oil, natural gas, or coal. Get your head out of the nuclear waste long enough to look closer at the other sources.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsn't sending the CO2 down into the aquifers, just a temporary
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfix? Why not Deal with the problem by enacting sustainable
green policies NOW. Screwing around with MOTHER is going
to come around an bite us sooner rather than later.
James, my friend, I see you are still having trouble with the Google search on earthquakes and geothermal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you finally get Google working for you, you will find that while there are examples here or there, they are the low hanging fruit like Geysers in Ca. that have been working for years or remote locations where a hot spring exists and diesel is the only alternative.
Mass large scale gigawatt level geothermal energy requires drilling deep into the earth injecting water and pumping supercritical steam to the surface driving generators. Injecting water into superheated rock causes fracturing which seems to cause earthquakes. The cost to date is enormous many times that of nuclear, hydro, solar, or wind. In fact BCHydro (google again) has a list of only only 8 sites that may eventually produce some geothermal power, this in an area with lots of volcanoes. They tried one them and the costs were enormous.
I've given you lot of info on nuclear to keep you and your librarian going so you can actually find facts to try to justify your ill informed no nukes position.
A lot of the folks pushing geothermal along with wind, solar, and CCS get their funding from Big Coal/Oil who have a lot more money than the tiny US nuclear industry. They know that as long as governments and industry are pursuing these dead end technologies, they will be able to keep the riches rolling in.
Pulling it out of the air? Nuts? What if we get efficient at that? Where do we stop? What if we remove too much? Too much gone and the plants grow less and the ice age (predicted in1970, Time Magazine) may return.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fact is we are looking at a very small sliver of history and have yet to figure out how to interpret it. Producing less CO2 is laudible and worth pursuing, but setting up CO2 removal stations with out first KNOWING the optimal amount of CO2 for the air (and again, optimal for convenient weather, optimal for plants, or optimal for the reigning party of the day?) lets be REAL SLOW to make permanent changes to the environment. I can just see the irony of accidentally removing too much CO2 and having to start up 1000 coal plants to put it back! HA! We would look real smart then, huh?
All you supporters of coal out there are you aware of the subsidence problems that affect the land after the coal has been mined? Experienced it first hand while working in England. We have the problem in the Appin region of South Sydney too, BHP has walked away from it, the supporting limestone was not supposed to fracture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurther CO2 reacts with water, it gives us carbonic acid, dissolves rocks like limestone and causes fractures when it can no longer support the weight it was bearing. More earthquakes?
Coal is a great cleansing agent, its used in air and water purifiers. It adsorbs (not absorbs) other materials on its surface all released when you burn it. Uranium is one of the materials it concentrates. The People of Punjab are now suffering the consequences of burning coal.
Here's a link to The Guardian's report:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/30/india-punjab-children-uranium-pollution
The last paragraph of the report:
A previous report in the magazine Scientific American, citing various sources, claimed that fly ash emitted by power plants "carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy", adding: "When coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels."
When you review the scientific papers out there you find that nothing has done more to "GREEN" the planet over the past few decades than elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 together with moderate sun-driven warming of the planet. If you should doubt this assertion, simply Google "Biological Effects of Carbon Dioxide Enrichment" and "solar inertial Motion model of global warming". Then review the basic documents and a sampling of the scientific bibliographic references. One has to ask the question, "Why have environmental groups and our government turned this obvious gift of nature on its head and buried us in propaganda designed to convince us of just the opposite reality?" As a consequence, I have stopped all donations to environmental organizations and to their favored political party. I highly encourage you to do the same. All my financial donations stay within 25 miles of my home, where I can keep an eye on their use.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear Soccerdad
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are well past first-best economic theory here. The point being made (as I understood) is that a greater benefit would come from investment (direct or via subsidy) in renewable energy generation technologies compared to investment in carbon capture technologies. I would also point out that despite your general impression, the US government is guilty of many manipulations of markets, has long-since abandoned free market ideals and does behave quite often like a "basket case with a tin horn dictator". You should also realise that while the US bails out banks, Iran and Venezuela advance their own concerns so I would not throw too many stones if I lived in your particular glass house
You couldn't be more wrong than wrong itself. Big coal and oil only gives you the impression that they support clean energy. Do some research on this magazine, Scientific American, that you pretend to read. Type in geothermal power plants and read the numerious articles they have written. In the 14 plus states that have geothermal power plants, they have not caused not one earthquake. If your nuclear power plants have a melt down or leak and cause a nuclear winter, you would be glad we have geothermal power plants to keep you warm and give you light. The ignorance of you Bush supporters amaze me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thissave the world from runaway stupidity! bury steven chu.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJjauregui wrote,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Why have environmental groups and our government turned this obvious gift of nature on its head and buried us in propaganda designed to convince us of just the opposite reality?"
It is not the environmental groups, nor governments that turned this into propaganda as you put it. When the scientific literature points towards CO2 being the cause of the warming trend over the past couple centuries, governments heed the advice of their scientific institutions and advisors. You can falsely claim the peer reviewed literature points to something else, but the truth remains that the literature and indeed every major scientific institution and government the world over concede that CO2 is the cause of the current trend and the consequences of which could be very detrimental to many forms of life on this planet (including us). To claim that a rapid increase in CO2 is good for plants while ignoring its effects on temperature, climate, local weather patterns etc, is selectively picking the effect that fits your preconceived notion.
Steven Chu is currently evaluating biomass pyrolysis as a viable way of sequestering CO2 transformed into biochar and/or biofuels. Prototype pyrolysis retorts have been developed over some ten years and are now ready to go onto the market. See www.eprida.com for full research information. All that is needed now is for private investors to inject capital into this economically proven technology, as it will require some five million retorts throughout the world to get to grips with climate change. This goal is perfectly within reach.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe can stop burning 40% of fossil fuel and the consequent emission of green gases, by adopting the augmentation of energy with gravity power as described at www dot atrilab dot com .Prof Chu, , I wish takes a note and examines and adopt if he finds merit, else reject the same , instead of remaining ambivalent to my communications.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreenhouse gases is now a major problem for world and it is necessary to aware about it..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPennyinvest.com
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree that talk of hugely expensive "someday" CCS plans are simply industry appeasement by the Obama-ites. It's true they are a big lobby and will have to be dealt with as part of any energy solution. So I understand the politics opf it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut it doesn't help the environment, not even one single bit. Because 1. the kinds of far-off "someday" plans will be put forth by the current democratic administration. The very next GOP administration will simply ignore them, or reverse the policy, OR the coal industry will neuter any effective action at the level of back room deals wherein critical details of the policy are altered. We have seen this all before.
The only energy that is realistic for the long-term thriving of the species is solar. But we have not developed solar to where it is ready for the task. Until we can emulate photosynthesis easily, collect and store ambient sunlight, and get the collection devices down to where they are very small and inexpensive to manufacture and deploy, solar will not "arrive" as a solution to our energy dilemma.
But it is the final solution, for a number of obvious reasons: 1. the supply won't run out until the sun dies, meaning that the idea that civilization will collapse due to exhaustion of a local resources will no longer be an issue for our society 2. it will end all "energy wars" and struggles to control the world's energy resources
3. it ends all problem of dealing with waste or pollution from our energy source.
But until the technological hurdles are met, it won't fulfill those promises for us.
In between, we are left with nuclear, wind, and the continuation of coal. Oil will likely run out or become prohibitively expensive over the next generation or so, but not coal.
Sequestering it is not really going to happen for the reasons mentioned above.
So the outlook is, I am afraid, rather bleak for the next few - critical - decades.
So these baby-step solutions are, in fact, necessary for now. But we should continue to aggressively pursue solar because, eventually, that is where the answer will lie.